Affordable Housing / February 5, 2020

Coming Soon! California’s First BLOKABLE Project

By: Ron Nestor

On December 17, 2019, the Napa City Council unanimously and very enthusiastically approved the 20-unit Caritas Village on a 0.75 acre site on Old Sonoma Road, near downtown Napa. The project is remarkable on several fronts – it provides nineteen units of Below-Market-Rate (BMR) housing (and one manager’s unit) without government subsidy, in an area that lacks affordable workforce housing. It is a unique partnership of Pacific Hospitality Group’s hotel developments; Caritas Corporation, a non-profit dedicated to increasing the amount of affordable housing; and BLOKABLE, an innovative modular builder and tech company. Caritas Village will be the first BLOKABLE all-steel construction project in California.

At the City Council evening session, the Caritas Village was preceded by a report on an Inclusionary Housing study, as the City looks for ways to provide needed housing and attempts to meet the new Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) numbers to be mandated by the State. The consultant, in the end, concluded that mandating inclusionary BMR units into new developments will likely reduce the total number of new units built due to increased costs of development. In fact, she noted that the lack of labor and high materials costs in the region, much of which is attributed to the recent fires and the rebuild efforts, will become a lasting issue for years to come.

The Caritas Village was next on the agenda, demonstrating a way to develop affordable housing in a new paradigm. With the financial backing of Pacific Hospitality Group, who were required to build twelve BMR units as a condition for their upcoming projects, and partnering with Caritas as a skilled operator of numerous affordable projects throughout California, BLOKABLE was selected to deliver state-of-the-art modular housing to lower the cost of construction and time of delivery. Where normally a project might require 4-5 years from initiation to completion, including entitlement, the Caritas Village is expected to take about 2 years.

WHA was selected as architect, with KPFF Engineering as the structural engineer, to refine BLOKABLE’s early concepts into smart, efficient modules that can be stacked up to 3-stories high. The BLOKs will be completed in the BLOKABLE factory in Vancouver, Washington (near Portland) and delivered to the site at about 95% completion. While the BLOKs are fabricated, the foundations and site infrastructure will be prepared so that final erection on-site proceeds rapidly. The BLOKs have already received approval from the California Department of Housing and Community Development’s NTA consultant (in a remarkable three weeks) and the project has been submitted to the City of Napa for final plan check. Fabrication is anticipated to begin in a few months with on-site erection later in 2020.

The fire-resistant steel BLOKs are designed in California and made in America, unlike some other modular projects composed of Chinese-made container modules or of wood construction. Caritas Village will be highly energy efficient, constructed of durable materials designed to last, and clad in high-quality Swiss Pearl fiber cement rain screen siding. As one Napa Councilwoman stated, “they don’t look like stacked containers”.