RECENTLY, an old friend and a colleague of his took me through several neighborhoods of Providence to view the latest in affordable housing. It was a somewhat uplifting experience. The city's poor neighborhoods still look like poor neighborhoods -- but less so. For one thing, these days, affordable housing looks less like affordable housing, and that's a big step in the right direction.

My primary intent in touring these neighborhoods with Providence Housing Authority Director Stephen O'Rourke and Barbara Fields, who directs the state arm of LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation), was to assess the look of new affordable housing. Here a revolution has occurred.

For example, upper South Providence has been transformed. Once a neighborhood of dilapidated houses and empty lots, it is becoming a neighborhood of affordable housing and dilapidated houses -- the officially and the unofficially affordable. Both benefit as empty lots vanish. Like old downtowns where new buildings arise on parking lots, poor communities grow prettier, and more livable, with the regeneration of architectural fabric.

To be sure, most new affordable housing would still look out of place on College Hill's Prospect Street. And yet, while it varies in appeal, it all looks better than new affordable housing used to look.

Beginning in the late '80s in Providence, under O'Rourke, public-housing high-rises ("the projects") were demolished and replaced by units distributed around the city (scattered-site housing). But the latter, mostly townhouses, were still stigmatized by a "public-housing" look. Their more or less contemporary designs -- often snazzy yet tacky and unornamented versions of traditional styles -- stick out like sore thumbs on blocks lined with capes, triple-deckers, bungalows or Victorians. There was little hope that subsidized tenants living in such housing might blend into a community, in part because their housing did not blend into its architecture. Often unfairly, their houses cried out, "We don't belong here!"

As private subsidized housing came increasingly to the assistance of public housing in the 1990s, its quasi-modernist design was equally problematic.

In the last decade, both public and subsidized housing design has changed, here and around the country. It finally occurred to leaders in the affordable-housing arena (public, quasi-public and private) that blending affordable housing into the fabric of its neighborhoods makes the range of problems associated with affordability easier to manage.

In Providence, this shift is reflected in the efforts of private nonprofit organizations that work with the city and state to build affordable housing. At Rhode Island Housing, which administers guidelines for state and local affordable-housing programs, design that fits in has become gospel.

Organizations such as Stop Wasting Abandoned Property (SWAP), Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services (GENS), the Elmwood Foundation, OMNI Development, the Olneyville Housing Corporation, the West End Development Corporation and other nonprofits, assisted by RIH, LISC, the Housing Network and the Revolving Fund of the Providence Preservation Society, among others, have transformed affordability in Providence. Firms such as Armory Revival, Durkee Brown Viveiros & Werenfels, and Donald Powers Architects are pushing this transformation from the design side of the equation.

In fact, the RIH standards might even be too rigorous. To get state housing money, a nonprofit developer of affordable housing must build units whose bedrooms, for example, are no less than 9'6" square. That may sound small, but it's larger than necessary. When combined with building and fire codes stricter than safety requires -- especially after the Station fire -- the standards mandate units that are affordable only to the middle class. Affordability is literally unaffordable. More realistic standards would permit more units, higher aesthetic standards, or both.

Gentrification and the broader housing market signal that aesthetic standards are more, not less, important among the many factors affecting affordability. The New Urbanist and the Smart Growth movements understand the connection. Fitting in is the basis of the Federal Housing Administration's highly successful Hope VI public housing. Moreover, after Hurricane Katrina, architect Marianne Cusato designed a low-cost "Katrina Cottage" so attractive that even the rich want them as vacation getaways. Meanwhile, the modernist trailers of the Federal Emergency Management Agency symbolize its failure.

Andres Duany, guru of the New Urbanism, points out that the most valuable housing in America is in neighborhoods called "historic districts" merely because they were built before the onset of modern planning and design standards. Build more places that people can love and housing prices will adjust from scarcity to abundance. In Rhode Island, too, affordability lies down a road that looks like one we once knew well. The sooner we accept this truth, the sooner the affordability crisis will be solved.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board. His e-mail is: dbrussat@projo.com.