"For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

Often attributed to the legendary writer Ernest Hemingway as one of the shortest stories ever written, those six words, in a specific order with specific punctuation, give you all the feels. The narratives and stories we create for our multifamily projects also need to be short and elicit emotion, but as a result of experiencing a built environment. Get it right, and the people you are trying to attract will get all those feels about moving in, approving, or investing in your project.

But we all know the realities of “VE,” value engineering—the task of cutting or modifying our end product due to budget issues. So, let’s do a few quick VE exercises for Mr. Hemingway.

First, let’s just cut it back by 50% across the board, it should be fine, right?
“For Sale: Baby”
Hmmm. That’s a completely different story and probably not something we would be proud to put our names on. Alright, let’s just keep what we think is most important.
“Baby shoes.”
Now the compelling story is watered down to nothing but a tiny pair of cute shoes. And if we don’t VE details like punctuation correctly, we could end up with,
“Baby, shoes.”
Is that a request for my significant other to fetch my shoes? Who knows, but it doesn’t make much sense or elicit any emotion.

What if the author were around to help? He created the compelling narrative, and that means he probably has more ideas to solve the problem AND preserve the core idea of loss. The goal is to find a compromise that retains the core emotional impact of the story while reducing costs.

“First kiss, final goodbye.” Compelling, emotional, and slightly less painful to lose a potential relationship than a child, but painful nonetheless, message received.

VE is difficult and even more so without a strong narrative to guide you in making the right decisions to preserve your core concept. It isn’t just a “nice to have”, it’s a workhorse that serves you in a variety of ways. Design teams of all disciplines will get there faster, more accurately, and do better work than you expected. VE decisions happen more quickly because you know what you can cut and where. And creative people get much more creative about saving money when they are saving a narrative they helped create and are therefore committed to and proud to work on.

How do I know this is true? Because I’m lucky enough to work with people like Andres Rubio, Rebecca Ferrara, Daniel Schlossberg, Travis N. Hampton, Jennifer Crosby, Shannon Stewart, Starr Ashcraft, Tammy Lippman, Emily Rickman, Josh Bethea, Colin McCann and their teams.

The key is to always do it holistically. Look at everything together, site, structure, systems, skin, and finally, interior fit out and finishes. Don’t silo your decisions into budget categories or timeframes and always, always include your authors.

If you don’t, you risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.