3 minute readThe facts are plain as day. The facts speak volumes, and the volume has reached a
A portion of the homes will be built using offsite construction and will be designed to the Department of Energy Zero Energy Ready specifications, putting them in the top 1% of energy performance in the country.
The project will provide much needed “missing middle” housing in a market that has seen considerable growth. By creating a higher density cottage development (20 units/acre) and implementing innovative construction and sustainable design techniques, the project can bring the new housing units online at an attainable price. MiKen will oversee the land development, entitlements, and sitework while Module will manage the design, construction and delivery of the modular homes.
This will be MiKen’s first project using offsite construction, which is built in a climate-controlled factory with about 80% of the finishes complete including cabinets, flooring, fixtures, and plumbing.
We caught up with Module ceo and co-founder briefly this morning for insight into how the project aims at an elusive, literally “missing” group of people, of households, of building types, of urban land use and ground.
Here’s how the path shifts from typical single-family restrictive zoning to making it “easier” to build. In Gaudio’s own words:
The project will add additional density to former single-family infill lots in Nashville. The local developer, Miken is acquiring a handful of single family lots and creating a “cottage development” by clustering a series of right-sized homes around a shared green space. This way, we can build a larger number of units and keep prices of those units more attainable than they would otherwise be. We can achieve a density of up to 20 units/acre using this strategy, as opposed to the density of traditional single family homes.
These homes will also have a shared parking area in the rear of the property, as opposed to garages connected to each house.
This project’s work-in-progress title, Trimble Street, may or may not be ironic, especially in context of America’s opportunity to expand its “equity box” and explore community ownership. Trimble Street harkens to nearby ground that takes its name from the owner of the plantation once situated here and on which the Colored Troops of the Army of the Cumberland began their December 1864 attack on General Hood’s Confederate Army troops in the Civil War Battle of Nashville.
This models both an opportunity for community ownership, and an expanded equity box. It also does one more thing many consider essential to another set of facts that are plain as day, but difficult to address: they unlock carbon neutral sheltered spaces.
Building mixed-income housing in higher-income, urban, or walkable neighborhoods is a solution for both climate and equity. Targeting “upzoning” policies (policies that increase density) toward higher-income neighborhoods expands access to opportunity and counters rather than risks contributing to further gentrification and displacement in low income urban neighborhoods.
Density bonuses and facilitating “affordable by design” missing middle housing offer cost-effective approaches for promoting integrated communities when upzoning. Inclusionary zoning policies, which set affordable housing minimums on new development, also further this goal as long as the requirement is not prohibitively stringent.
Before anybody can make it “easy to build” as Dourado notes, it must first become “easier” than it is. That will come of epic work on the part of policymakers – local, regional, and national – capital sources, and private sector players to break a chokehold that currently obviates supply ever meeting demand.
A step in the right direction, from a private-sector vantage point, is the work of Module, which has engineered value-chain modularity into its physical product offerings in a way that makes inputs more manageable.
“What we’ve been eyeing is a way to put our homes in the hands of thousands of people, and to do that we’re partnering with builders and developers to provide our vertical offsite design, engineering, and assembly capability with their horizontal development investments,” says Gaudio.
That’s at least on the pathway to “easier.”
