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TEJON RANCH, California – April 26, 2024: Community Corporation of Santa Monica, a non-profit organization that restores, builds, and manages affordable housing for people of modest means, broke ground today on Santa Monica’s newest affordable housing development, Berkeley Station. The project is the first of its kind in the city, designed by Brooks + Scarpa to combine traditional, on-site construction with efficient factory production at Plant Prefab for optimal time, labor, and material efficiency. Built in partnership with the City of Santa Monica, Berkeley Station will offer 13 units of 100% affordable housing for low-income families and transition-aged youth.

“Berkeley Station will provide high-quality, affordable homes for some of Santa Monica’s most vulnerable residents,” said Tara Barauskas, Community Corporation’s Executive Director. “We are committed to growing our ground-up development program to help alleviate Santa Monica’s affordable housing crisis.”

“We are extremely excited to work with Community Corporation of Santa Monica on their first prefabricated development,” said Steve Glenn, founder and CEO of Plant Prefab. “Berkeley Station units will be built with the Plant Building System® at our new $40M factory in Tejon Ranch, which utilizes automated production of timber-framed panels in combination with skilled labor to assemble and finish modules to the client’s specification. This unique combination of machine automation and skilled craftsmanship offers a significantly more time- and cost-efficient way to deliver spec-built housing with much less waste.”

Berkeley Station living units will be prefabricated at Plant Prefab’s new 270,000-square-foot factory in Tejon Ranch, California using state-of-the-art automated manufacturing.

The Berkeley Station development will transform a narrow infill lot to create 13 housing units, a community room, laundry facilities, a community garden, and a rooftop deck. The project is based on a kit of parts design that Brooks + Scarpa developed in collaboration with Plant Prefab to address the region’s shortage of housing for people experiencing homelessness. The scalable infill solution provides flexibility to meet the needs of a particular site, neighborhood, and bed count for affordable, supportive, and temporary housing. The system utilizes Plant Prefab’s offsite construction to minimize disruption to the neighborhood while significantly reducing labor hours and the overall construction timeline.

In addition to time savings, the hyper-efficient machine automation in Plant Prefab’s solar-powered factory also saves resources, minimizing carbon emissions and reducing material waste to less than two percent. Such low impact building methods are in keeping with the project’s sustainability goals, which account for not only the project’s construction, but also its use over time. Berkeley Station is designed to meet LEED Gold standards and incorporates solar panels and Energy Star appliances to minimize resource consumption.

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ABOUT COMMUNITY CORPORATION OF SANTA MONICA
Community Corporation of Santa Monica is a non-profit organization that restores, builds, and manages affordable housing for people of modest means. Founded by community leaders in 1982, Community Corp. has built or restored more than 95 properties throughout Santa Monica, creating over 2,000 affordable homes and transforming the lives of more than 4,000 people every year. Our work contributes to the distinct character of Santa Monica. For more information, please visit communitycorp.org.

ABOUT PLANT PREFAB
Plant Prefab is the first Certified B Corporation™ building technology company dedicated to sustainable design, materials, and operations. The company’s patented Plant Building System™ utilizes advanced digital modeling and fully customizable Plant Panels™ and Plant Modules™ to help developers and general contractors build housing 20 to 50 percent faster than site-based methods. The system provides better quality control, design flexibility, and time, cost, and material efficiency than traditional methods of offsite or on-site construction. With a mission to build a better world by design, Plant Prefab was the first housing prefabricator to announce a net zero goal and has achieved carbon neutrality in their operations since 2020. The company has factories in Rialto and Tejon Ranch, California. For more information, please visit plantprefab.com.

ABOUT BROOKS + SCARPA
Brooks + Scarpa is a collective of architects, designers, and creative thinkers dedicated to enhancing the human experience. Honored with the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, the firm is a multi-disciplinary practice that includes architecture, landscape architecture, planning, environmental design, materials research, graphic, furniture, and interior design services that produces innovative, sustainable, iconic buildings and urban environments. Awarded the State of California and National American Institute of Architecture Firm Award for more than two decades of consistently exemplary work seamlessly blending architecture, art, and craft, Brooks + Scarpa has also garnered international acclaim for the creative use of materials in unique and unexpected ways. The firm has also been recognized for pioneering more holistic approaches to delivering award-winning environmentally responsive designs.