Crowds of guests and media gathered on the rooftop of 3031 Santa Monica Blvd to watch as more units were added to a prefabricated apartment building known as Berkeley Station on Thursday morning. A total of 13 units will be available for low-income families, at-risk youth and marks the City’s first-ever modular affordable housing development.
“Berkeley Station is an innovative and exciting breakthrough for affordable housing in Santa Monica,” said Tara Barauskas, Executive Director of Community Corporation. “This is Community Corp’s first modular development and our first building focused on at-risk youth. This development is a critical step in providing at-risk youth and low-income families with dignified housing and a path to a better future.”
Developed in partnership with Plant Prefab, the building is set to be completed in October, six months ahead of the traditional site construction timeline. This bold claim is made possible as a result of Plant Prefab’s advanced building system, pioneered at its factory in Tejon Ranch.
The Community Corporation of Santa Monica is a nonprofit organization that restores, builds, and manages affordable housing for people of modest means. Founded in 1982, it has built or restored more than 95 properties throughout Santa Monica and Los Angeles, creating over 2,000 affordable homes and transforming the lives of more than 4,000 people.
Berkeley Station’s prefabricated living units, which were built in Plant Prefab’s factory in Tejon Ranch, were installed on a narrow infill lot over three days, with the final touches of the installation celebrated during Thursday’s event.
“Solving the housing crisis will require innovation, ingenuity, and flexibility, and Berkeley Station is an example of all three,” Mayor Lana Negrete said. “It's forward thinking and a good space to look at. How can we actually afford to build affordable housing? And this particular project is for young people, right? So we talk about the ‘misty middle’ from an income perspective, but what about our young people who can no longer move out at 18 or 24 for instance, and I think this solves that problem.”
Berkeley Station’s design incorporates what’s called a “Nest Toolkit,” a prefabricated kit of parts system designed by architect firm Brooks + Scarpa to help address the region’s housing shortage by reducing design and construction timing. The scalable infill solution, which was developed in collaboration with Plant Prefab, won a $1 million grant from the Los Angeles County Housing Innovation Challenge.
“We’re extremely honored to be working with Community Corporation of Santa Monica, one of the region’s leading developers of affordable housing, as well as the all-star project team: Brooks and Scarpa, the architect, and Howard CDM, the General Contractor,” said Steve Glenn, founder and CEO of Plant Prefab. “We proved that, compared to a traditional site-based approach, prefabrication can be a quicker and more reliable and cost-efficient method to build affordable housing.”
According to Glenn, once this project is finished, Plant Prefab is moving right along to a 60 unit affordable housing project in Koreatown.
The Berkeley Station accommodations are made up of two modules per unit and two units per floor. “One one side is the kitchen, bathroom and utilities, the other is the living room and bedroom and each has one bedroom,” Glenn said.
The project also includes a community garden, a rooftop deck, laundry facilities, a central courtyard, and a community room. The all-electric building is designed to meet LEED Gold standards and will include solar panels and Energy Star appliances.
Once the modules are in place, the weather proofing will be added, together with dry walls and the utility hookups. “The mill work is installed, the appliances are installed, the tiles, sink sprinklers all installed and all the plumbing and electrical systems are tested,” Glenn said.
