The Incremental Pathway: Rediscovering Human Ingenuity for Housing, Wealth, Temperament, and Thriving in America
By Neil O. Campbell | Living Ecosystem Design
Begin sustainably. Build progressively. Thrive deliberately.
The Path People Actually Take
There is a quiet lesson written into the ground of almost every campus, park, and public space. A designer lays out a sidewalk. People use it for a while. If the route does not match where they are actually trying to go, a second path begins to appear across the grass.
I first noticed this as a student at Florida A&M University in 1996. Students cut across the lawns between buildings even though paved walkways already existed. Over time the grass wore away and the shortcut became visible, worn into the earth by nothing but repetition. What looked like a small act of convenience was really a form of feedback. The official design said, “Go this way.” Human behavior said, “This way works better.”
Urban designers call these informal routes desire paths. I have come to see them as more than a landscape phenomenon. They are a way of reading society itself.
When a formal system does not provide a realistic route to a legitimate human need, people build one of their own. That happens in transportation, in finance, in immigration, and in the way families share resources under pressure. It happens most urgently in housing.
The lesson is not that every informal path is safe or lawful. Some are not. The lesson is that behavior carries information, and before we condemn the path, we should ask what it reveals about the system people were expected to use.
That question matters most in housing because shelter is not optional. A person can postpone a vacation, a car, a piece of furniture. A person cannot indefinitely postpone protection from weather, privacy, sleep, sanitation, and a place from which to organize a life. Shelter existed as a human necessity long before housing became a real estate product, a zoning category, a mortgage instrument, or a government program.
If the legitimate path to housing narrows until large numbers of people cannot realistically enter it, the need does not disappear. It simply moves.
Rediscovering Incremental Housing
Years ago I became fascinated by the work of Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena and his firm ELEMENTAL. Aravena received the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize, and his practice became internationally known for a socially engaged form of incremental housing. ELEMENTAL’s Quinta Monroy project in Iquique, Chile, housed 93 families and became the widely cited example of the firm’s “half of a good house” strategy: use scarce public resources to build the parts a family would struggle to build on its own, then design the dwelling to expand as household resources improve.[1][2]
The brilliance was not only architectural. It was economic sequencing.
Instead of pretending that limited resources could purchase a finished middle-class house on day one, the design created a durable beginning and a legitimate path to a better ending. The household did not have to wait until it could afford the final form, and it was not permanently trapped in the first one.
I recognized something familiar in that idea because I had already seen a vernacular version of it, growing up in Jamaica.
In many rural Jamaican communities, a family historically did not begin with a fully financed, fully finished house. The building grew as money became available. One room came first. Cooking might happen outside. A pit latrine might serve the household until resources allowed an indoor bathroom. Later came a passage, another bedroom, a proper kitchen, a living room, a veranda, a carport, perhaps a second story. The finished house could end up larger and more refined than the one the family started with.
The point is not to romanticize the hardship in that pattern. No one should have to endure unsafe sanitation or exposure to the weather to prove resilience. The point is to study the logic underneath the practice: the household, its income, and its dwelling were allowed to grow together.
That principle is worth rediscovering in the United States.
Put the Increment Inside the Architecture
Copying incremental housing directly from one country to another would be poor design thinking. The American built environment operates inside a different ecosystem of zoning ordinances, building codes, certificates of occupancy, mortgages, appraisals, insurance, utilities, neighborhood expectations, and consumer protections. A useful idea has to be translated, not transplanted.
Commercial real estate already offers a familiar precedent. A retail or office building can be completed as a shell while the interior tenant improvements happen later. The exterior is architecturally complete. The structure, roof, walls, windows, weather barrier, and utilities are in place. The interior is then built out to the occupant’s needs and resources.
Why couldn’t a carefully designed residential model borrow that logic?
Imagine a house whose exterior is complete from day one. The neighborhood never sees a half-built structure. The roof is finished. The windows and doors are installed. The weather envelope is secure. The structure is engineered for its final configuration, and the essential plumbing, electrical, mechanical, life safety, and accessibility provisions are planned from the start. A code-compliant, habitable core is completed for initial occupancy.
But some of the interior volume is deliberately reserved for future buildout.
A household might begin with a modest but dignified finished area: a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, a living space. As resources grow, another bedroom can be completed, then another bathroom, then an office, a nursery, an accessible suite, or a multigenerational living area. The final form was designed from the beginning. The cost was never imposed all at once.
The increment has moved from the outside of the house to the inside of the architecture. That distinction matters. It protects neighborhood appearance, protects the building envelope, improves quality control, and reduces the temptation toward unplanned exterior additions that can compromise structure, setbacks, drainage, or fire separation. It also preserves the central value of incremental housing: people can improve their dwelling as their capacity grows.
The house can be architecturally complete while remaining economically incremental.
This is not lowering aspiration. It is sequencing aspiration.
The Missing Half Is Incremental Finance
Architecture alone cannot make incremental housing work. A household also needs a way to accumulate capital incrementally, and here again there are desire paths hiding in plain sight.
Across immigrant and diaspora communities, people have long used rotating savings arrangements known by different names. Jamaicans commonly call one form a partner or a partner draw. Other communities use susu, sou-sou, tanda, committee, or ROSCA, a rotating savings and credit association. The rules vary, but the principle repeats: participants contribute a fixed amount at regular intervals, and the pooled sum is periodically paid out to one member. Small recurring contributions become a larger, usable amount.
This is not folklore. Research on African immigrants in the United States has found an association between ROSCA participation and higher rates of homeownership, business ownership, and vehicle ownership. Other scholarship describes susu as a form of bottom-up microfinance built on social capital and mutual trust.[3][4]
America does not need to copy informal savings circles exactly. Informal systems can fail. Trust can be abused. Participants can default. A household saving toward a housing improvement should not be exposed carelessly to volatility, and consumer protection matters.
The more interesting question is whether the discipline underneath these systems can be translated into a formal American pathway. Could a credit union, community development financial institution, cooperative, nonprofit, or employer-supported program administer a pooled or structured housing savings vehicle? Could near-term buildout funds sit in liquid, low-volatility instruments while longer-horizon savings are invested more aggressively? Could contributions be paired with financial coaching, milestone-based construction budgets, code-approved prototype buildouts, and contractor quality control?
Instead of asking only whether a household qualifies today for a large mortgage, the system could ask a second question: what financial capacity does this household have now, and how can that capacity be strengthened over time?
That produces a different cycle. Income becomes disciplined contribution. Contribution becomes accumulated capital. Capital becomes an improvement. Improvement becomes greater utility and, potentially, greater equity. The cycle repeats.
For people who are working but underserved by conventional credit, that could be more constructive than a system in which every shortfall becomes another expensive debt.
The Fifteen-Pound Life
A Jamaican artist known as Lecturer gave me another way to think about this.
In an interview, Lecturer talked about self-control. He described being in London when an accidental bump led another man to slap him deliberately. The instinct might have been retaliation. He walked away instead. His immigration status was not yet secure, and he understood that a confrontation could cost him far more than the insult of the moment. His larger point was that the greatest strength is the ability to control yourself, to weigh what a decision actually costs against what it earns, and to refuse to let one moment of provocation destroy a future you have not yet reached.[5]
That is a lesson about temperament. It is also a lesson about economics.
Later in the same interview, Lecturer made a deceptively simple observation: it is easier to live a fifteen-pound life with twenty pounds than to live a twenty-pound life with fifteen. In the first case there is margin. In the second there is a permanent shortfall.[5]
That is a housing lesson too.
Few people wake up in the AM and decide to become financially trapped. The condition usually arrives gradually. A little more house. A little more car. A little more debt. A lifestyle calibrated to the best month rather than the normal one. An emergency financed at an expensive rate. One more obligation added because everyone nearby seems to be carrying the same one. Each decision looks manageable on its own. Together they can produce a life whose required resources exceed the resources actually available.
The answer is not shame. Perspective is more useful than shame. The real question is: what can I sustain today without abandoning what I want tomorrow?
That is the heart of the Incremental Pathway. Begin with what is sustainable. Protect the future. Build the next increment when capacity allows. A smaller first stage is not necessarily a smaller life. It can be the foundation of a larger one.
What Immigrant Resilience Can Teach Without Romanticizing Hardship
Immigrant communities offer many examples of this kind of sequencing, but the lesson has to be handled carefully.
People do not leave home, face discrimination, work multiple jobs, live with uncertain status, share crowded housing, or accept difficult working conditions because hardship is noble. Hardship is hardship. Racism is harmful. Exclusion is harmful. Insecurity is harmful. Not everyone who migrates carries the same story, and no single narrative should stand in for all of them.
What is consistent is that human beings develop strategies inside constraint. Some families share housing to cut costs. Some rotate childcare. Some work opposite shifts. Some send money home. Some join a partner draw or a susu. Some buy land back home and build it in stages. Some avoid purchases that would force them beyond their means. Some open a small shop and grow it slowly. The strategy is often less about a high income than about coordinating modest resources over time.
Lecturer makes a related point when he talks about friendship. He rejects the idea that helping someone must mean handing that person money forever. He describes a stronger form of help: assist a person in establishing something productive, a shop, land, inventory, some foothold from which that person can build.[5]
That is the difference between relief and capacity.
There is a place for relief. People in crisis may need food, shelter, cash, healthcare, or immediate protection. But if the help never moves past relief, the person can remain dependent on the help itself. Capacity-building asks a different question: what can be placed in someone’s hands that lets them generate the next step on their own?
In housing, that “something” might be a lawful starter dwelling designed for expansion. It might be a structured savings vehicle, access to a shared-equity model, technical assistance, a preapproved buildout plan, a small-dollar construction loan, or an employer contribution. The mechanism can vary. The principle does not: help should not merely soften the present. When possible, it should enlarge the future.
Informality as Feedback
This brings us back to the desire path.
In Jamaica and many other places, informal settlements form where people occupy land they do not own or build outside formal approval systems. In American cities, unhoused people create encampments under bridges, in wooded lots, along transportation corridors, on unused parcels. These conditions raise legitimate concerns about property rights, sanitation, fire safety, health, and public order. Those concerns should not be dismissed. Neither should the human need underneath them.
A bulldozer can remove an illegal structure. It cannot bulldoze away the human need for shelter.
A city can clear an encampment. By nightfall, the people who occupied it still need somewhere to sleep.
None of this means every informal condition should be legalized. It means enforcement is not the same thing as resolution. There is a lesson here for zoning and public administration: rules are necessary, but a legitimate system also needs a usable path into it. When the lawful route is too expensive, too complicated, too distant, or too poorly understood for a significant share of people to enter, informal behavior becomes a form of system feedback.
A few days ago I was reminded of how universal shelter really is, in a very ordinary moment. Walking from a meeting to my car, I was caught in heavy rain and stepped under an Atlanta transit shelter. Some of the people already standing there were experiencing homelessness. I was not. Our lives were different in almost every respect. But for those few minutes, one thing was identical: we were human beings seeking protection from the rain.
That moment stripped away a lot of abstraction. Before we are homeowners, renters, students, workers, planners, administrators, taxpayers, applicants, inspectors, lenders, or unhoused people, we are human beings with bodies that need protection from the weather. Good governance has to remember the human being underneath the category.
The American Translation
The goal is not to import Chile or Jamaica into the United States. The goal is to study useful human strategies and translate the principle underneath them into American institutions. That translation is where the real work begins.
An American incremental housing model would have to respect zoning, building safety, property rights, fair housing law, insurance, lending law, appraisal standards, consumer protection, accessibility, taxation, and local community expectations. It would also have to avoid creating a second-tier housing system in which lower-income households are offered something intentionally inferior. The standard should be dignified from the beginning and improvable by design.
A pilot might start with a limited set of prototype homes engineered for phased interior completion. The initial occupied area would meet every required health and safety standard. Future buildout zones would already be structurally planned and coordinated with utilities. Municipalities could set clear inspection checkpoints for each phase. Lenders and CDFIs could test smaller construction tranches. Appraisers could develop methods for valuing completed and reserved interior capacity. Insurers could price the condition actually occupied rather than an imagined final one. Employers in high-cost regions could contribute to structured housing accumulation accounts. Cooperatives or community land structures might reduce land costs where appropriate.
None of these ideas should be assumed to work without testing. Some may fail. Others may require statutory or code changes. The purpose of an essay is not to pretend every implementation question has already been answered. The purpose is to put a better question on the table.
What if the next major housing innovation is not simply a cheaper finished house, but a lawful system that lets the household, its capital, and its dwelling grow together? What if a person could be economically responsible without being ready for the final form on day one? What if affordability were treated not as a binary condition, qualified or unqualified, but as a pathway of increasing capacity? What if we designed the path before people were forced to create one?
The Incremental Pathway
I call this broader idea the Incremental Pathway.
It is bigger than a house. It is a way of thinking about progress under constraint. It begins with an honest inventory of present capacity, not fantasy, not comparison, not the lifestyle someone else can afford. From there, the individual, household, institution, or community protects what already works, avoids unnecessary destruction, and adds the next layer deliberately. The mindset applies to a home, a savings plan, an education, a business, a career, a neighborhood.
It also requires temperament.
Lecturer’s decision to absorb an insult rather than sacrifice his future is an extreme version of a principle that shows up in quieter forms every day. We are constantly asked to trade tomorrow for the emotion of today: spend because we are frustrated, retaliate because we are embarrassed, quit because we are angry, borrow because we are impatient, compare because someone else’s life looks larger, abandon a sound plan because progress feels too slow. Temperament creates the space between stimulus and decision. That space is where stewardship lives.
Stewardship asks: What do I have? What must I protect? What can I improve? What can I postpone without giving up? What can I build upon instead of replacing? What decision today keeps tomorrow available?
This is why incrementalism should not be confused with thinking small. Incrementalism can be a strategy for thinking long. A family that adds one room at a time may eventually build a substantial house. A worker who contributes modestly and consistently may eventually accumulate meaningful capital. A person who walks away from one fight may preserve decades of freedom. A community that improves one connected system at a time may become more resilient than a community that keeps announcing grand plans it cannot sustain.
Begin sustainably. Build progressively. Thrive deliberately.
An Essay Can Be a Beginning
Public administration offers its own precedent for the value of an essay. Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 essay, “The Study of Administration,” became one of the foundational texts in the development of American public administration. Leonard D. White’s 1926 Introduction to the Study of Public Administration later gave the field its first unified textbook treatment.[6][7] Neither settled every debate. Both helped frame questions that generations of scholars and practitioners continued to refine.
That is what I hope an idea like this can do.
I am not presenting the Incremental Pathway as a finished federal program, a model zoning ordinance, a financial product ready for sale, or a universal answer to housing affordability. I am placing a pattern on the table, one that is already visible almost everywhere we look.
It is visible in the foot trail worn across the lawn. It is visible in the Jamaican house that grows one room at a time. It is visible in Aravena’s architecture, which gives residents a framework for expansion instead of a finished ceiling. It is visible in the partner draw that turns modest weekly contributions into usable capital. It is visible in the immigrant family that coordinates work, sacrifice, and time across generations. It is visible in the commercial shell that waits patiently for its interior buildout. It is visible in the person who refuses to let one bad moment destroy tomorrow. And it is visible every time a human being meets a system that does not fit and begins building another path.
Build the Path Where People Are Walking
There are people in America today who feel trapped.
Some are trapped by conditions they did not create: discrimination, health challenges, unstable work, family obligations, or a housing market beyond their control. Some are living inside circumstances that accumulated gradually through decisions they barely noticed: too much debt, too little savings, a lifestyle with no margin, isolation from supportive relationships, or a belief that progress only counts when it happens all at once.
For the person reading this from inside that place, the message is not that another culture has the answer and America does not. The message is that human beings have already demonstrated many ways of moving forward when resources are constrained. Look for the principle, not merely the form.
You may not build a Jamaican house one room at a time, but you can stop believing every part of your future has to be financed today. You may not join an informal partner draw, but you can seek out trustworthy structures that turn small, disciplined contributions into capital. You may not face Lecturer’s exact confrontation, but you can decide that one angry moment will not be allowed to purchase years of consequence. You may not be an architect or a public administrator, but you can examine the desire paths in your own life and ask what they are telling you about the system you are using.
For those of us who design systems, buildings, policies, financial products, communities, or institutions, the responsibility is greater. We should pay attention to where people are already walking. We should distinguish between behavior that must be prevented and behavior that is revealing an unmet need. We should preserve standards without making the legitimate path impossible to enter. We should build on strong existing foundations rather than assuming every solution must be invented from nothing. We should be willing to rediscover wisdom from communities that learned to survive under constraints many of us are only beginning to understand, and then translate that wisdom responsibly into the governance ecosystem in which we live.
The path may already be there. Our work is to see it, understand it, improve it, and where appropriate, make it lawful, safe, dignified, and accessible.
Because the objective is not merely to help people cope. It is to build a pathway from coping, to surviving, to stability, to ownership, and ultimately to thriving.
Author’s Note
The Incremental Pathway is offered as a framework for inquiry and experimentation, not as individualized financial, legal, construction, or investment advice. Any housing or pooled-capital model would require professional review for local law, building codes, lending regulation, consumer protection, insurance, taxation, and risk.
About the Author
Neil O. Campbell is the Governance Ecosystem Designer and Founder of Living Ecosystem Design (LED), an independent research and thought leadership platform that aligns physical design, governance, infrastructure, capital systems, and human systems to help cultivate resilient, thriving communities.
This article reflects the continuing development of the Living Ecosystem Design framework and its application to contemporary challenges in urban governance, the built environment, economic development, and community development.
Sources & Notes
[1] The Pritzker Architecture Prize. “Alejandro Aravena, 2016 Laureate.” The Hyatt Foundation. https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/ale-jan-dro-ara-ve-na
[2] ELEMENTAL. “Quinta Monroy Housing Plans.” Project information lists 93 units, 2003-2004, Iquique, Chile. https://www.elementalchile.cl/downloads/quinta-monroy-housing-plans
[3] Ibrahim, Habiba. “Structured Savings and Asset Ownership: The Role of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations among African Immigrants in the United States.” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 47, no. 2 (2020).
[4] Stoesz, David, Isabella Gitau, Richard Rodriguez, and Frank Thompson. “Susu: Capitalizing Development from the Bottom Up.” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 43, no. 3 (2016).
[5] Lecturer (Manley Edwards), interview on The Fix. User-provided transcript of YouTube video: https://youtu.be/W25g-hKANnQ. Relevant discussion includes self-control and the West Green Road incident at approximately 18:47-21:29; the “15-pound life” analogy at approximately 24:18-24:43; adaptation and saving at approximately 28:00-28:28; and friendship/capacity-building at approximately 30:46-35:29.
[6] Wilson, Woodrow. “The Study of Administration.” 1887. Teaching American History edition: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-administration-2/
[7] White, Leonard D. Introduction to the Study of Public Administration. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of Neil O. Campbell and Living Ecosystem Design (LED) and are presented for independent research, education, and thought leadership purposes. They do not represent the views, policies, or official positions of the City of Atlanta or any other employer or affiliated institution.
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