Father Joe's Villages broke ground Thursday on an affordable housing project being built with mass timber, an emerging building material that can offer faster construction timelines and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
The eight-story development at 16th Street and Island Avenue in the East Village will feature 124 apartments, mostly studios and one-bedrooms, as well as a community room, on-site health and wellness services and English language classes.
Mass timber is a kind of engineered wood product made by joining smaller pieces of wood together to form large structural panels and beams. A 2021 update to the International Building Code allowed mass timber in buildings up to 18 stories.
Steel and concrete require huge amounts of energy to produce, and that energy typically comes from burning fossil fuels. Trees grow with a renewable resource — sunlight — and remove carbon from the atmosphere using photosynthesis.
Jodi Rothery is CEO of Arete Development, which is building the project. She said the decision to use mass timber was not just environmental — it also shortened the construction timeline and lowered the project's per-unit development costs from $530,000 to $380,000.
"A lot of these (mass timber) components are off-site built," Rothery said. "That allows for simultaneous work to be happening both on-site and off-site, and also in the end relies on fewer people to put everything together in the field."
Joowan Lee, director of innovation at Arete Development, said advances in mass timber production and proof-of-concept projects in Northern California paved the way for the material to be used in San Diego.
Lee said Arete Development is also preparing to apply for building permits on another mass timber project at the former indoor skydiving facility at 14th Street and Imperial Avenue. That development will feature 13 stories of mass timber above five stories of concrete, he said, making it San Diego's first mass timber high-rise.
The apartments at 16th Street and Island Avenue will have rents that are affordable to households earning between 30% and 60% of the county's median income. Today, that would translate to between $918 and $1,837 per month, including utilities, for a studio apartment.
Deacon Jim Vargas, president and CEO of Father Joe's Villages, said the cost efficiencies enabled by mass timber have the potential to transform the affordable housing industry.
"When we can build for less, we can build more and faster," Vargas said. "This is a model our region can repeat."
