Los Angeles, California, USA
“The goal is to house people as quickly as you can,” said Sarah Dusseault, a commissioner with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority who advised Solis on the project.
“Get people into housing right away, even if it’s going to be operated as temporary.”
NAC Architecture and Bernards have conceived The Hilda L Solis Care First Village–formerly known as the Vignes Street Interim Housing Project–as a social experiment; the project is a hybrid of permanent and temporary structures and will be used flexibly for both housing and shelter.
The Hilda L. Solis Care First Village facility provides 232 beds for people experiencing homelessness.
Located on a 4.2-acre (1.7-hectare) site in Downtown Los Angeles.
The complex is named after Hilda L Solis, who chairs the LA County Board of Supervisors.
The site formerly held a parking lot and was slated to become a staging area for the construction of a new jail.
In 2019, plans shifted, as officials began to explore options for using the site for homeless housing.
Reports indicate there are at least 60,000 people in the LA area who are experiencing homelessness.
The new facility was created by NAC Architecture, which has several offices in the US, and California-based Bernards, a builder and construction management company.
The firms worked in collaboration with LA County’s Department of Public Works.
In 2019, plans shifted, as officials began to explore options for using the site for homeless housing.
Reports estimate there are at least 60,000 people in the LA area who are experiencing homelessness.
Unlike traditional homeless housing projects that are either designed for permanent residency with services or for short-term shelter, the Vignes complex will have both.
The two main buildings, constructed of once-used shipping containers, will have 132 units of permanent housing.
The trailers, each divided into five units, will be for interim housing.
The administrative building will house dining facilities, laundry and support services such as case management and counseling to serve both the permanent and interim residents.
From start to finish in under five months and at a cost of about $200,000 per bed, Vignes Street development has shaved years and hundreds of thousands of dollars off a traditional homeless housing project.
Bernards subcontracted with VESTA Modular, a national company with experience handling one of the big roadblocks in modular construction.
VESTA found a manufacturer in Boise, Idaho, for the 20 wood-frame trailers that would be shipped by truck to the site for the interim shelter. A 6,000-square-foot administrative building with offices, meeting space, a commercial kitchen and laundry was shipped in sections from Texas.
The once-used shipping containers that made up the two main buildings came from Carson.
By a stroke of luck, CRATE, a 2-year-old container conversion company, had capacity in its factory after another job was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The modular construction kept the basic cost to just over $86,000 per bed for the main buildings and $50,000 per bed for the trailers.
Exterior elevators, the administrative building and site preparation, including removal of underground gas tanks, brought the total to $48 million, or $206,000 per unit, not including the county’s cost of $24 million for the land.
Initiated as a repurposing of a site acquired to replace the Men’s Central Jail with housing services, the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic during the design process reshaped the project in two significant ways.
First, each bed is situated in a dedicated room with an adjoining restroom, providing the isolation needed to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Second, design, permitting, and construction of the project was aggressively accelerated to meet the heightened need for people living on Los Angeles’s streets in the midst of a pandemic.
In this intensive joint effort, the NAC team worked closely with the general contractor, modular building vendors, and a dedicated group of project managers from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works.
Design, permitting, and construction were overlapped and completed within five months of funding approved by the LA County Board of Supervisors. Extensive soil remediation and infrastructure enhancement were needed to prepare the site.
Modular construction supported the concurrent fabrication of buildings at multiple off-site locations.
The NAC design team is proud of the fact they remained committed to meeting the individual and collective needs of the residents throughout the development process, ultimately providing in an innovative, dignified housing solution.
Project: The Hilda L. Solis Care First Village
Architects: NAC Architecture
Builder: Bernards
Client: Los Angeles County, Department of Public Works
