The Santa Monica project is a way to alleviate California’s housing shortage

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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A few days ago the city and civic figures of Santa Monica solemnly opened a residential complex of 13 apartments called Berkeley Station for low-income families and young adults—exactly the type of housing California needs most.

It is remarkable in two respects.

Its location in one of the wealthiest coastal cities of the state is one notable aspect. Other coastal cities are notoriously resistant to high-density projects for low- and moderate-income residents — Huntington Beach and Half Moon Bay are two examples.

“Berkeley Station is proof that Santa Monica can address the housing crisis with urgency and results,” said Santa Monica Mayor Carolyn Torosis.

The other notable feature of Berkeley Station is that it consists of modular units that were constructed in a factory an hour’s drive northeast of Santa Monica and assembled on site in just three days.

For years, housing experts have cited modular construction as a way for California to speed up development and tame chronically high construction costs.

A a recent study by UC-Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation declared that modular construction could reduce apartment costs, which “in California typically exceed $400,000-$500,000 per unit and are even higher in expensive metro areas where housing needs are most acute.”

Berkeley Station isn’t breaking new ground on the financial front. It cost $1 million per unit, most of which was a loan from the city. But its path, starting as an on-site project and later moving to modular, is at least partially responsible.

“We were able to build the elements on-site at the same time as the elements off-site, so we saved time. All in all, this process takes about nine months, whereas normally, if we were building everything on the land of the property, it would be about 20 months,” said Tara Barauskas, executive director of Community Corporation of Santa Monicaproject sponsor.

The key to making modular construction more cost-effective is its wider adoption, thereby achieving economies of scale. That would involve changing some state laws, persuading home lenders to be more accommodating and overcoming opposition from construction unions.

While construction using public funds, such as Santa Monica’s city loan, is required to pay workers state-determined “prevailing wages”—in effect, union wages—the use of actual union members is not required by law. However, unions are pressing local officials and state legislators to require projects to have union labor commitments.

Three years ago, when a modular apartment project was under construction in San Francisco, the head of the local construction trades council, Larry Mazzola, called it “nonsense,” and stated, “We will fight vigorously with the city not to do any more of these.”

Coincidentally, as Santa Monica opened Berkeley Station Week, one of the state legislature’s loudest advocates for modular housing demonstrated a package of three bills to make it less difficult.

Assemblywoman Buffy WeeksOakland Democrat, who chairs the Special Committee on Housing Innovation, spent much of the Legislature’s fall recess last year touring modular projects in other states and other nations and talking to various interest groups, including unions.

“As nerdy as it sounds, I’m now an expert on the subject of prefab housing—so much so that factories as far away as France come to my office to offer their insights,” Weeks said.

The three bills she and other lawmakers introduced would make building codes more modular-friendly (Assembly Bill 306), would prohibit local governments from using building codes to block modular homes (AB 1815) and would facilitate transportation of modular units on state highways (AB 2012).

The package is a test of whether California is serious about building more housing more efficiently, or is just paying lip service to solving the crisis.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.