He’s designing affordable housing with the actual needs of future residents in mind. It’s rarer than it sounds

FastCompany: When a neighborhood gets redeveloped, the focus is seldom on the people who lived there previously. But the Barry Farm project in Washington, D.C. , is a rare kind of affordable housing development, with an uncommon focus on its residents. Set in the historically Black Barry Farm neighborhood, the project has been specifically designed to counter the spatial and social deterioration the community has faced for decades. That’s due to the insistence of Jimmie Drummond, the 35-year-old architect and founder of Drummond Projects , who led the interior architecture and design for much of the Barry Farm project.

The Barry Farm redevelopment project is now finishing construction on the second of five buildings for a neighborhood that will be complete by 2030. The first two buildings include more than 150 units for families displaced by the project—a group of longtime neighborhood residents Drummond, a 2026 Fast Company Visionary of the Year, treated like the effort’s true clients.

Restoring with community in mind Initially established in 1867 for formerly enslaved Black Americans, since the 1940s, Barry Farm has comprised a public housing complex that was initially slated for redevelopment in 2006 after decades of disinvestment and displacement by highway infrastructure.

In 2013, national nonprofit developer Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH) worked with residents to outline a plan for the redevelopment, which included the goal of creating a neighborhood with housing and economic opportunities and the requirement that the 197 families displaced by the planned development be given the right to return when construction was complete. Given that focus, Drummond engaged directly with them to learn how his firm could design homes that would truly meet their needs.

The feedback he got helped him zoom in on the details of the project—which Drummond got involved with in 2022—finding ways to work within the constraints of the affordable housing development process to design around the specific circumstances of the community, from the single mother coming home after a 10-hour work shift to the family struggling to afford transportation to get the kids to school. Compared to the typical affordable housing project, it’s an unusual and refreshing approach for a designer to think through these conditions and design around them.

“The problem that we are aiming to solve,” Drummond says, “is spatial and cultural disenfranchisement.” Before launching his firm in 2020, Drummond previously worked for SHoP Architects, a large firm where he worked on skyscrapers, and Bernheimer Architects, where he handled smaller housing projects. He also draws on his own background as one of a small number of Black architects—they comprise just 2% of the members registered with the American Institute of Architects. His experience as part of an underrepresented group fueled Drummond Projects’ focus on marginalized communities.

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The article discusses a significant shift in affordable housing design that prioritizes community needs, which is impactful for brand strategy in the design industry, while also introducing a relatively novel approach that is highly relevant to professionals focused on sustainable and inclusive design.