Berkeley grads win big with proposal to bring affordable housing to Sacramento Armory

A group of University of California Berkeley students claimed the top prize in a competition with a proposal that could bring a boon of affordable housing to Sacramento.

Jaime Yin Ching Chan, Phoebe Johannensen, Cali Slepin, Yasmina Mekouar and Beatriz Stambuk-Torres made up an interdisciplinary team that nabbed the top prize at the James R. Boyce Housing Studio Challenge in early May. The contest focuses on a different aspect of affordable housing each year, with students combining backgrounds in architecture, city and regional planning, landscape architecture, environmental planning, real estate development and more.

The team’s proposal, which was dubbed The Woodlake Park Family Homes, focused on a 1.23-acre lot that formerly housed the armory in North Sacramento, as this year’s competition centered on bringing affordable housing to state-owned land.

The project follows California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing of an executive order on Jan. 15, 2019, which called for the utilization of state-owned parcels in pursuing affordable, sustainable and cost-effective housing.

In February, the site was one of 286 statewide sites Newsom made available to local officials for homeless shelters or services.

“We identified the sites with the highest residential development potential. We were given about 12 at the beginning of the year, and we whittled it down to three before deciding as a team to work on the Sacramento site,” Mekouar said. “In a way, The Sacramento Bee gave us a bit of inspiration. We stumbled on an article about a single mother in Sacramento, who was struggling with paying for housing and childcare, even though she was working two jobs. As we did our research, we felt that this lady was quite representative of a big share of the population in Sacramento.”

According to data from Zillow, the average price of a home in Sacramento increased by more than 70 percent from 2000 to 2019.

The design includes 85 housing units, which target families with household incomes falling between 40 to 80 percent of the state’s average monthly income. The proposal, which will be reviewed by the state before being issued to developers, would take five years and require roughly $44 million to complete.

“One thing that made us want to work on this site was its location to transit. It’s a really unique amenity for families if they do end up building housing there. Also, its location near a park. It’s a cool opportunity for affordable housing, which is not typical of amenity-rich areas,” Stambuk-Torres said.

The proposal would also introduce new features to the area in the form of a ground-floor community activity room and a 60-child daycare center. According to Yin Ching Chan, the group hoped to bridge the surrounding areas of varying demographics, while adhering to existing architectural motifs.

The group cited collaboration while adhering to stay-at-home orders across various states and time zones as their biggest obstacle.

“It’s easy to do an individual project when it comes to design, but for this one, it’s not just a group project between two architectural students, so we needed to work together on the design despite time zone differences. We also needed to communicate with Cali, Bea and Yasmina, because we wanted this project to be something that all of us liked and felt comfortable with. It’s not just us focusing on design, while everybody else does research. It’s also communicating throughout the entire semester, so that we could serve a larger audience,” Yin Ching Chan said.

“You can probably hear my dad grunting in the background,” Slepin added.

The semester-long project resulted in a small cash prize and a stipend for each member, which the group say they are planning to donate to a Sacramento-area charity, but they say that the realization of their project, whether whole or piecemeal, would be the ultimate prize.

“One of the most exciting things about working on the Sacramento site is how possible it is for this to happen in comparison to the other sites our classmates worked on. This site is really ready to be developed. The city is also excited about bringing affordable housing to this site. We met with some city planners and they were so happy that we were looking at this site. It’s in DHCD’s backyard, so they have a special interest in making something happen,” Slepin said.

This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 10:49 AM.