A Village Inspires a New Modular Emergency Housing Concept
Nathan Young is the CEO and Principle Builder at Oregon-based MODS. MODS works with homebuyers, architects, developers and nonprofit organizations to create high-quality, sustainable buildings. In this article, he discusses his company's new idea for emergency and transitional housing.
Transitional housing is temporary accommodation for people transitioning from homelessness into permanent supportive housing. Typically, the goal is for residents to move into permanent housing in less than two years — but to have a stable roof over their heads and support services on site in the meantime. St. John’s Village is a transitional housing community that opened in early 2021 in Portland, Oregon. It consists of 19 individual sleeping pods in the style of tiny homes, each with a twin bed, electric heating and lighting, storage space, and its own locking front door. On the same site, there are also communal buildings that include showers, laundry facilities, a kitchen, a dining room, and offices for support staff.
St. John’s Village is a transitional housing community that opened in early 2021 in Portland, Oregon. It consists of 19 individual sleeping pods in the style of tiny homes.
The buildings were constructed by Portland-based modular manufacturing company, MODS PDX. Nathan Young, CEO and Principal Builder at MODS, says that he and his team learned a lot from this project. “It’s not cost-effective to build individual pods,” says Young. “These ones ended up in the range of $30,000 each, which is generally not affordable for non-profits and municipalities who want to build this kind of housing.”
As well as not being cost-effective, Young says it’s also not efficient to build individual pods. “For example, you have to install electrical infrastructure on each individual pod instead of installing one electrical panel that can serve three to six sleeping pods. My guys basically said they’d never build another one of those again,” Young says with a laugh.
Towards More Efficient and Cost-Effective Villages
So Young teamed up with design partner, Kegan Flanderka, Principal at Base Design + Architecture to brainstorm what worked well, and what could be improved upon for future emergency and transitional housing projects.
“We talked with service providers who run these types of communities and they really like the village concept, with pods that can be placed in different configurations depending on the site,” Flanderka says.
The partners also received feedback that the village concept is important to the residents themselves — who typically want to move away from apartment block structures that can feel institutional. “It’s hugely important for the residents to have their own front door, and to have easy access to the outdoors,” Flanderka says. He also suspects that small village-type communities are likely to meet with less neighborhood resistance than larger apartment buildings.
“So, we wanted to keep the flexibility of the village concept,” Flanderka says. “But along with that flexibility, we also wanted something that was more efficient to build than individual pods.”
In the St. Johns Village, office, bathroom, and kitchen modules all match the same platform as the sleeping pods. The modules can range in length from 24 feet to 48 feet.
Having modules that contain more than one pod means fewer exterior walls, fewer roofs, fewer electrical panels, and so on, thus reducing the amount of materials needed for the same square footage. “It’s also more efficient to transport and install one module that contains three sleeping pods than three individual sleeping pods,” Young adds. Three individual sleeping pods also take up more lot space than three pods of the same size inside one module — a more efficient use of the available land.
The Emergency Housing Concept
Based on the experience with St. John’s Village and the information they subsequently gathered, Flanderka and Young developed their Emergency Housing concept, which has a variety of different modules that can be built on the same platform. So a single module can consist of three, four, five, or six sleeping pods. Office, bathroom, and kitchen modules all match the same platform. The modules can range in length from 24 feet to 48 feet.
“So, the same basic module can contain sleeping pods, or bathrooms, or we can take out the walls and turn it into a communal kitchen or a community room. Or we can leave in the walls and make offices,” says Flanderka. “By combining different configurations of the modules, you essentially get that same village idea.”
The Oregon Home Builders Foundation (HBF) was one of the partners working on the St. John’s Village project. It’s a non-profit
organization that facilitates renovating and building housing for the homeless, and Young says the organization is enthusiastic about the Emergency Housing concept. “We’ve now built a prototype module containing three sleeping units and have showcased it at various events organized by the Portland Home Builders’ Association,” Young says. Despite the sometimes slowly turning bureaucratic cogs at municipalities and non-profits, interest has been increasing.
“In addition to the City of Portland reaching back out to us, we’ve had some interest from Clackamas County, Hood River, and some outlying areas that are looking into it for housing the homeless and also for wildfires and other emergencies,” Flanderka says.
The west coast of the United States has a large homeless population, and the partners envision their Emergency Housing being placed anywhere in the area they’re able to service — from Seattle to Los Angeles. And, because they’re built to standard building codes, permitting depends just on occupancy and how the jurisdiction wants to treat them, based on zoning and density. “They could be permitted as congregate living or as apartments. If they’re on trailers, they’re temporary structures and
don’t need to go through the typical permitting process. We can work with the needs of each jurisdiction to permit them and make them legal structures,” Flanderka says.
A Virtuous Circle
The Emergency Housing modules have been designed so they don’t require highly skilled labor to build them — which opens up employment opportunities for the future residents of the buildings.
“We learned from talking with service providers that 10% to 20% of homeless people would be capable of starting work fairly quickly if only they had a roof over their heads and an opportunity,” Young says. So he and Flanderka have been working with HBF on a workforce training program to try to integrate the Emergency Housing into that program.
Young says, “If the people who live in them can help build them for the next group of residents, that’s a really good virtuous circle.”
Computer renderings and finished prototypes of MODS’ emergency housing units.
About the Author: Zena Ryder is a freelance writer, specializing in writing about construction and for construction companies. You can find her at Zena, Freelance Writer or on LinkedIn.
More from Modular Advantage
Inside the Construction of 355 Sango Court
This year’s winner for Best of Show for Permanent Structures is 355 Sango Court, a 105,818 square foot affordable housing development manufactured by Nampa, Idaho based Autovol. The project team also included Prefab Logic for module design, Nibbi Brothers as the general contractor, Acc U Set Construction as the modular installer, and the overall project design was by David Baker Architects and DCI and Fard.
Aster Place by ROC Modular
Aster Place, a supportive housing building in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, won the Best of Show Award and Honorable Mention for relocatable structures in the social and supportive housing category at this year’s World of Modular conference.
Looking Back at the 2024 World of Modular
On March 18-21, the Modular Building Institute presented its 41st annual
convention and tradeshow, hosted again at the luxurious the Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, FL. Nearly 1,500 attendees from around the world gathered to learn, network, and find ways to expand both their businesses and the industry at-large.
Touring Japan’s Offsite Construction Industry: An Interview with James Haas, Offsite Construction Sales Manager for Nichiha
Nichiha USA, a premier provider of building envelope solutions and member of the Modular Building Institute (MBI), recently partnered with MBI for a trip to Japan to visit the Nichiha home office in Nagoya as well as several other offsite manufacturers around the country. Besides learning about different offsite building methodologies and systems, the trip was an excellent chance for both MBI and Nichiha to create closer ties with potential industry partners in Japan.
Modular Multi-family Construction: A Field Study of Energy Code Compliance and Performance through Offsite Prefabrication
Prefabrication in a factory setting may improve the performance of modular buildings compared to traditional site-built buildings. To validate this premise, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded a 3-year study from 2020-2023 comparing the energy performance of more than 50 modular and site-built multifamily buildings under construction in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Seattle.
Inflation Comes in Hot to Begin ’24
Last year was a shockingly good one for the U.S. economy, at least relative to expectations. Coming into 2023, the conventional wisdom was that near-term recession was inevitable in America. In the face of belligerent excess inflation (above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent mandate), monetary policymakers began ratcheting interest rates higher in March 2022. That process continued throughout the balance of the year and into 2023.
A Huge Win for the Modular Construction Industry in Massachusetts
In early February, 2024, the Massachusetts Board of Building Regulations and Standards (BBRS) released its proposed 10th Edition building codes. This draft included several amendments targeting modular construction that would have created an extremely difficult environment for the entire modular industry and could have eliminated the industry entirely in the state.
FEMA Announces Hawaii Housing Plan Using Modular Construction
Utah becomes the second state in the country, following Virginia, to fully adopt ICC/MBI standards 1200 and 1205. MBI will continue to work with leadership in Utah to implement the new program.
Supply and Demand: Solving Canada’s Housing Crisis One Relocatable Housing Unit at a Time
Not only do Moda Modular’s repurposed employee housing solutions cut the emissions related to construction down to nearly zero, but they also keep building materials that are often not biodegradable from slowly decaying in storage facilities.
It’s the classic environmental mantra of reduce, reuse, and recycle, scaled up and applied to building after building.
ICC/MBI Standards 1200 & 1205 Provide Foundation for Utah’s First-Ever State Modular Program
Utah becomes the second state in the country, following Virginia, to fully adopt ICC/MBI standards 1200 and 1205. MBI will continue to work with leadership in Utah to implement the new program.