Last year’s disastrous Tubbs Fire left Santa Rosa, California, short thousands of units of housing. This year’s catastrophic fire season has only added to the statewide losses. The Sonoma County affiliate of Habitat for Humanity, the well-known housing non-profit, is picking up the challenge with a push to sharply increase its output of workforce housing, focusing on housing for families displaced by the fires. To make the transition, the group is considering a number of alternatives to traditional stick-frame construction.
In a November interview, Mike Johnson, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Sonoma County, told JLC: “After the wildfires last year, we have set a big, audacious goal to build 600 homes in five to eight years. And the idea was that we were going to be testing new technologies, new building techniques, to discover how we can build quickly and efficiently and solve some of the housing crisis for wildfire victims in Sonoma County.”
The Habitat chapter has help from medical technology firm Medtronic, which has donated land at the company’s Santa Rosa campus for 10 cottage-style units, and from Cypress Community Development Corp., led by Marianne Cusato, of Katrina Cottage fame (www.mariannecusato.com), which is managing the program for Habitat. Mike Johnson explained: “The permanent site won’t be at Medtronic. But Medtronic had land that it could allow us to use for the pilot project, so we will build these 10 cottages on their property, and we will install the infrastructure and so forth, and then we will rent them to fire victims for two to three years. During that time we will be securing land elsewhere that we can move them to permanently, and then the families that are renting them now will have the option to purchase them and live in them permanently, once they are moved to a permanent site.”
The pilot project will allow Habitat to test out different methods and decide on an approach that can boost the group’s output. Said Johnson: “It’s meant to test those technologies in a real-world setting, and then choose one or two of them that we could then replicate broadly across Sonoma County.”
Disaster response isn’t a new area for Habitat, Johnson noted. “Habitat International has, as part of its mission around the world, Disaster Response. There are countries all over the world that are experiencing disasters, and housing problems because of those disasters — hurricanes, tsunamis, et cetera — and so we are really called upon as an organization to respond globally, because those natural disasters are a huge contributor to the housing problems around the world. So it is very much a part of our mission to respond to disasters.”
“So when the wildfire struck up here,” Johnson went on, “it was time to mobilize around a disaster recovery plan, as opposed to building single units of housing for families. But the shift for us really was in considering alternative building technologies that are a little outside of what we have done in the last 30 years or so. We have never explored these sorts of alternative technologies.”
“The wildfire response gave us sort of a framework for looking at this problem differently,” said Johnson, “and also the motivation to accelerate our building goals. Prior to the wildfires occurring, this particular affiliate had built somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 homes over 27 years. So it wasn’t even a home a year. And now we are looking at building 60 homes a year. And the only way to get there really is to be using alternative sources of construction technology.”
