One Way to Help the Housing Problems in Napa Valley with Manufactured Homes

I wanted to share this article with you that was in the Napa Valley Register on January 26th. It discusses one possible solution to the lack of affordable housing and construction costs/backlog (due to fires).

“A massive factory that churned out submarines to help win World War II has been retooled to tackle a new crisis: the shortage of low-cost housing.

Based on Mare Island’s Building 680, Factory OS manufactures housing units that can be hoisted by cranes and stacked like Lego blocks, similar to the units manufactured by a different company for Turley Flats on Pope Street.

Last September, Factory OS pre-assembled 110 units for a West Oakland project. A stick-built project of that size would take about a year to build. Factory OS installed the entire five-story complex in 10 days.

“We can build something as good as if not better than anything you can do on site,” Factory OS co-founder Peter Palmisano told a group of St. Helena city officials and housing advocates who toured the 250,000-square-foot factory on Jan. 10.

The start-up requires a minimum order of 50 units, but Palmisano said he’s willing to make an exception for St. Helena, the town where he’s lived since 1979.

The nonprofit Our Town St. Helena has been in talks with a local family about building affordable units on a St. Helena property. The site might be suitable for 25-35 units.

Factory OS is offering to team up with Our Town on the project. Palmisano said he hopes the city offers relief from various permitting fees, cuts some red tape during the entitlement process, and demonstrates the political will to get some units on the ground.

“There’s a can-do spirit in this community,” he said. “There’s money, there’s intelligence. We just need the will.”

Palmisano is even offering to install a Factory OS unit on his own west-side residential property as a test case so people can see it for themselves.

The units have a maximum size of 16 feet wide by 72 feet long. Palmisano said he can build them for about $155 per square foot. That includes washers, dryers, lights, water fixtures and kitchen appliances. Even with the additional cost of land preparation and installation, Factory OS’s process is still vastly cheaper than typical Upvalley residential projects.

Since they are built off site, Factory OS units can be installed in a matter of days, minimizing financing costs and the impact on the surrounding neighborhood, Palmisano said.

Mary Stephenson of Our Town St. Helena said units built off-site could provide infill housing all over St. Helena.

“If the community could see this, they would say ‘Oh, this isn’t bad. We could do this,’” Stephenson said.

In addition to managing the development of Meadowood Resort and other major projects, Palmisano served on the board of Bridge Housing Corporation, which developed Hunt’s Grove Apartments, and was a founding board member Our Town St. Helena, which is developing Brenkle Court and recently acquired a property on Pope Street.

Palmisano said he’s worried about a lack of housing for workers and professionals.

“These are the people who are vital to our community,” Palmisano said. “If we’re going to sustain the feeling of our small town … then affordable housing is key.”

Mayor Geoff Ellsworth, City Manager Mark Prestwich, Planning Commissioner Daniel Hale, Senior Planner Aaron Hecock, and Chief Building Official Philip Henry attended the tour, along with representatives of Our Town and Napa Valley Community Housing.

Ellsworth said that with the current council and staff, “this is the perfect opportunity” to try an innovative approach to affordable housing.

Ellsworth said he likes the idea of showing the community a tangible test case to demonstrate that units like Factory OS’s “fit the character of our town.”

“Let’s have the discussion and see what we can do,” he said.

To join an upcoming tour of Factory OS, email mary@ourtownsthelena.org.”

JESSE DUARTE jduarte@sthelenastar.com Jan 26, 2020 Updated Jan 26, 2020

Our Town St. Helena nears construction start on affordable housing project

DAVID STONEBERG editor@sthelenastar.com

Eight Upvalley families started a journey of home construction Saturday that will end in 18-20 months when all of the townhomes on Brenkle Court in St. Helena are finished.

The Brenkle Court subdivision at 684 McCorkle Ave. is sponsored by Our Town St. Helena, a local nonprofit affordable housing advocacy group.

The families spent Saturday clearing weeds, cutting down shrubs and getting the land ready for a concrete subcontractor to form and pour the two slabs needed for the single-family common-wall townhomes. Each of the homes will be two-story with three bedrooms and 1 1/2 baths. On Monday, there was a large pile of brush behind the chain-link fence, on which hung several colorful and whimsical paintings.

The hard work begins in six weeks, as each family has pledged to build 65 percent of all of the homes, spending 35 hours a week on construction. That’s in addition to their regular jobs, which means working nights and weekends for the next 18 to 20 months.

Site supervisor Adam DeLeon will be on the job five days a week, directing the families. Retired contractor Larry Vermeulen is OTSH construction supervisor. “We thought we were going to start in December or January,” Vermeulen said, noting that the site development work, including curbs, gutters, street, grading and underground utilities were all done in October or November.

Longer than expected

Vermeulen said it took longer than expected to work with the USDA Rural Development, which is providing a technical grant to OTSH and low-income mortgages to each of the families. Three years ago, OTSH started out with 43 families who were interested in building and owning one of the townhomes. That list got narrowed down to 12 or 15 families who could qualify.

OTSH board member John Sales said qualifications are difficult, since families have to make the payments, estimated at $1,800 a month, although they can’t make too much or they won’t qualify for the USDA mortgages, which are 35 or 38 years. “We ended up with eight families and when we got to the point of signing purchase agreements, two of the families dropped out, so we had to go back, pull some more applications and go through the qualification process again,” Sales said.

Six of the families are qualified as low income, which is $66,375 for a family of four and two are very low income, which is 50%, or $44,250, of the HUD median income. “They can’t make more than that, but they have to make enough to manage these mortgage payments,” Vermeulen said.

The units are protected to be affordable housing for 55 years. “It’s affordable housing in this county by any definition,” he added, since a median home sales price last year was $1 million and the lowest sold was $600,000 and that was a condominium. The value of each of the eight townhomes will be $412,000 when finished.

It has taken a tremendous amount of work to get to this point. After the City of St. Helena bought the property and sold it to OTSH for $1, with the express purpose of building affordable housing, OTSH hired consultant Howard Siegel, who had been with Napa County for a number of years. The Gasser Foundation help pay for Siegel.

“We have to give Howard a lot of credit, because he walked us through some of the deepest ditches we could have walked through, subdividing the property, coming up with subdivision maps and satisfying the state,” Sales said. The process of going back and forth with the state for eight or nine months was “horrible,” Sales said.

The families

An additional challenge was that OTSH had to get all the families’ mortgages done at the same time, since the eight units are common-wall townhouses, that is single-family homes with common walls and a courtyard.

The families are cellar workers, vineyard workers, and hotel and restaurant employees. “They are the service people who keep our little town going, that keep our wine industry going,” Vermeulen said. “Some of them have been at the wineries for many years, they are the assistant cellar masters, for example, but they don’t earn enough money to buy a home in St. Helena.”

Erica Roetman Sklar, who serves on OTSH’s advisory council, added, “I think this is an important point, these families will have the benefit of home ownership in St. Helena,” and when the homes are finished, they will be moving out of their subsidized rental housing, whether it’s at Hunt’s Grove or Stonebridge. “That opens up a new opportunity for another family,” she said.

Building a team

In the past few months, Vermeulen worked with the families, training them on basic construction: how to measure, mark, cut and assemble, how to read a tape measure, for example. Also there have been videos, lectures and tool safety talks, especially with power tools. “To practice our skills we built sawhorses in the parking lot at Grace Episcopal Church in December,” Vermeulen said.

“We got all the families together, so I’ve got 20 odd sawhorses waiting to get over to the job site. It’s been about team building, too, it isn’t just about the skills, it’s about working together,” he added.

Families will have to put in 35 hours a week, which is difficult for a family of two on just the weekends, “so we’ve impressed on them that they need to twist the arms of their relatives and friends,” Vermeulen said. “They can bring volunteers that count against that 35 hours. We’ll keep track of it, to keep it equitable.”

After the group starts building and learns to work together, Vermeulen said he will be looking for volunteers from the community at large. “We haven’t pushed that very hard, because we’re not ready for it. I want to see how the families work first, I need to get them working as a unit, then we’ll add another 50 people. If we start day one with 100 people, it will be chaos.”

The construction is expected to take between 18 and 20 months. OTSH will hire subcontractors for concrete, electrical, plumbing, roofing and drywall, although that could change. “We may end up doing more labor to meet our budget,” he said, since the budget was established before the wildfires of 2018 hit, driving up the cost of materials.

In the end, they may need to do the roofing and the drywall. “It’s a lot more efficient to have a professional crew come in and bust out the drywall. We’ll know in a year, whether we have to do it and we’ll get a better picture in a few months,” Vermeulen said.

Additional financial support was received from the City of St. Helena, who donated the land and waived development fees and the county of Napa. Rural Community Assistance Corporation is providing technical support and financing.