Pre-Fab Home Bucks Living Wage Goal

Downward Pressure on Local Construction Wages:

Emeryville Embraces 

Pre-Fab Home Idea

Opinion
The Planning Department was out in force on Beaudry Street, in support of and witnessing the erection of Emeryville's first prefabricated single family residence last Saturday. A small crowd gathered to watch the spectacle: a crane lowering pre-constructed rooms onto the rapidly growing house.  With this scene in the background, Charlie Bryant, head of the Planning Department, told cameras that Emeryville is supportive of this style of home construction.  Left unsaid by Mr Bryant though is how this style of building is a subversion of living wage policy: This comes at the expense of local Bay Area builders in the custom home building trade.

Middle Class Wealth Transfer
Some have previously argued that this style of building will help keep housing affordable but at $275 per square foot, there's no cost saving, at least not for the owner of the new house.  The contractor on site says the Beaudry Street house will be cheaper than a custom home but the price of $275 per square foot is the same as a comparable custom built house in the Bay Area (regardless of his claims to the contrary).  This style of building is a way to cut out more expensive Bay Area construction laborers since low cost factory workers actually build the houses, the parts being shipped in by truck.  This is just a shift in profit from workers to corporate fat cats and is another point of downward pressure on local tradesman's wages.

Emeryville needs more family friendly housing to be sure but not at the expense of fostering a climate where blue collar people could afford to live here.  This whole idea is counter to oft made claims emanating from City Hall about livability for all.  Our public policy shouldn't be encouraging this sort of wealth transfer especially since Emeryville is already losing working class people.  We should be making a REAL town.

Below is a San Francisco Chronicle article about the new home:

Prefabricated homes go upscale Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, July 16, 2011 IMAGES Paul Chinn / The Chronicle A module of Simpatico Homes' prefabricated house is lowered into position at the construction site in Emeryville.  View All Images (8) EMERYVILLE -- Prefab houses aren't just for trailer parks anymore. Two Bay Area startups are crafting factory-built homes and rooms for the high-end market, the kind of people who want an architect-designed custom house with all the latest green features. Simpatico Homes in Emeryville and hybridCore Homes in Santa Rosa both have partnered with architects. Each has a proof-of-concept model home and both are now on the verge of building for clients. They say their approaches cut costs and reduce construction time while incorporating high-quality finishes and designs. "Within the past few years, we've seen a number of very talented architects become interested in the possibilities of prefabrication to bring architect-level design to people who don't have time or resources to develop a unique design for a custom home," said S. Claire Conroy, editorial director of Residential Architect magazine in Washington. The two companies take different approaches. Simpatico builds the entire home in a factory as several giant modules that are assembled at the home site. HybridCore factory-builds the house's most complex portion - kitchen, bathrooms and laundry room - then places them on the site and "stick builds" the rest of the home around them. Market void "I really love quality architecture and saw a real void in the market for people who want it" but have more limited budgets, said Simpatico founder Seth Krubiner, who grew up in an Eichler home. Early last Saturday a convoy of flatbed trucks carried five modules from a factory in San Jose to a pre-built home foundation in Emeryville, where Simpatico is erecting its first structure. It will serve as a model house for potential clients and builders to tour, as well as a residence for Krubiner. A crew of 25 worked from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. as about a hundred curious neighbors watched giant cranes lift the modules into place as if they were building blocks. By evening, a 2,400-square-foot modern dwelling was in place, the modules bolted to the foundation. It will take another six weeks to "button up" the home, finishing such tasks as tying in the utilities and seaming the modules together with a "marriage line." All told, construction should take about 18 weeks - 12 in the factory and six on the site. (The foundation was built concurrently with the factory prefabrication.) Green features The house incorporates such sustainable features as a solar array to provide all its power, hydronic radiant floor heating, a living green roof and a rainwater catchment system. "My partners (Swatt Miers Architects) are very established, high-end modern architects who build multimillion-dollar designs," Krubiner said. "We want to take that level and quality of architecture and put it into a system for people who have more modest means. Through prefabrication, we can standardize and make it faster and more affordable." Chrissy Schwinn and her husband, David Cherry, both self-described fans of prefabrication and of modern architecture, have hired Simpatico to build a four-bedroom house for them and their two young children in Orinda starting this fall. "It fit our aesthetic and level of customization and our budget," she said. "The house will have a lot of green features, which we wanted. We don't have the final cost, but our hope is that it's about 20 percent less than a custom-built house." The shorter construction time is another plus, both in having fewer carrying costs on their current house and having less impact on their new neighbors. For Simpatico's first house in Emeryville, construction costs, excluding land and permits, pencil out at $275 per square foot, Krubiner said, versus about $375 per square foot for a comparable house built from the ground up. That's still not cheap. But Krubiner said the company can get costs as low as $225 per square foot. "It takes a lot of scale - multiples of prefab houses - to deliver the economies that are promised by manufacturing houses instead of site-building them," Conroy said. Economies of scale Santa Rosa's hybridCore Homes hopes to achieve those economies of scale by working with giant home builder Champion Home Builders of Troy, Mich., which has 27 factories nationwide and will both build and market the modular cores. He said the cost savings over complete ground-up construction are about 20 to 30 percent. The company offers 100 floor plans with nine variations and styles of each, such as Mediterranean or Craftsman. It built a 1,600-square-foot demonstration home in Santa Rosa last fall, with construction costs of $147,000, or $92 per square foot, he said. The home is open for visits by interested clients and developers. Faber's architecture firm, Farrell Faber, was approached about designing a manufactured home a couple of years ago. "Typically our firm does high-end stuff, so we weren't interested," he said. "But then we two partners, along with two developers, started playing with the idea, and after numerous studies developed this concept of manufacturing the core of the home." Now hybridCore is gearing up to build proof-of-concept homes in North Dakota and Maryland that are being considered for large developments. A 213-home project in Santa Rosa is on tap for next spring. Harold Robinson, who develops homes in Los Altos in the $1 million to $2 million range, hopes to use hybridCore's modules. "There is a lot of design flexibility, and the final product will look just like a traditional, high-quality custom home," he said. "At the same time you end up getting higher-quality construction and it's a really green way to do construction; there's a lot less waste by building offsite in factories that are controlled environments. Being able to build faster is a big benefit in high-end neighborhoods because the whole construction process has a lower impact." E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com. This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/15/BUUK1KA3RS.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1SJINkdBf

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/15/BUUK1KA3RS.DTL#ixzz1SJHuCzwf