SAN DIEGO – A Los Angeles modular housing builder has finished two San Diego apartment projects with a third under construction and more planned.
Impact Housing is targeting middle-income renters with market-rate apartments built without government subsidies.
“The goal for all of our projects is to try to make them naturally occurring affordable housing,” said Impact Housing CEO Drew Orenstein.
CEO
Impact Housing
“When it comes to the housing affordability crisis that we have in Southern California, it’s really a volume problem. We need so many units, we really need to figure out as an industry a way to build those units without using public subsidy,” Orenstein said. “There’s only a limited amount of subsidies that are available for these projects and, in our opinion, they should really be reserved for the most at- risk communities that don’t have the wherewithal to pay for any amount of rent.”
So far, Impact Housing’s San Diego projects include an $8.2 million building with 34 apartments in the Stockton neighborhood that was finished in October, a $20.2 million North Park project with 72 apartments that was finished in July, and a $90.7 million College Area project with 324 apartments that is expected to be finished in February 2025.
With zoning that encourages multi-family projects, especially near transit lines, “San Diego is one of the best cities in the country right now to be developing in,” Orenstein said.
“We’ve had amazing support from all different parts of constituents inside San Diego, so we plan on continuing to build here and help rebalance the supply and demand for housing,” Orenstein said. “San Diego is a great place for us.”
Vertically Integrated
The Stockton project at 3167 Market St. has a mix of one-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments, the North Park project at 2911 Adams Ave. has a mix of studio, one-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments, and the College Area project at 6440 El Cajon Blvd has a mix of studio, one-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments.
Monthly rents in the Stockton apartments start at about $1,800 for the smallest apartments and top out at about $3,200, Orenstein said, with rents comparable at the other locations.
The buildings are made of modular units manufactured in Yorba Linda that are trucked to San Diego, then stacked on top of each other by crane to create the buildings.
Each modular unit comes with finished interiors, including everything from kitchen appliances to bathroom fixtures and lighting fixtures in place.
Studio and one-bedroom apartments use one modular unit and two-bedroom, and three-bedroom apartments use two units.
The off-site, modular construction helps keep down the overall cost of Impact Housing’s projects, but Impact Housing also uses in-house architects and is its own licensed construction company.
“We do everything internally, we’re fully vertically integrated. We do everything from the acquisition finance work to the development and entitlement work,” Orenstein said.
Shared Look
The San Diego buildings are similar in appearance, differing primarily in size. They have a stucco exterior with sharp lines and a color palette that is black and white with blue accents.
“We try to make sure that our portfolio is quite timeless in terms of how we believe it’s going to age,” Orenstein said.
In designing the projects, Orenstein said Impact Housing wanted “to find a consistent design aesthetic rather than kind of the one-off buildings that sometimes are hard to understand.”
“They’re not overwhelming the neighborhoods and becoming the focal point of attention as an individual building,” Orenstein said.
Impact Housing focuses on “a much more cohesive design thesis” in developing multiple projects in San Diego.
Orenstein said that local artists have been hired to paint murals on the buildings “that have to do with the local flora and fauna, but also not overwhelming, still giving some artistic aesthetic to the neighborhood,” Orenstein said.
In the case of the Stockton apartment building, the mural on the building’s east wall is of a stylized hummingbird that can be seen from Interstate 15 and State Route 94.
Orenstein said that the Stockton project was a bit of a challenge because the site is small – 6,500 square feet.
At five-stories, it also is a bit of a rarity because of its height and because there hasn’t been much new development in the neighborhood.
“If you go to our site, you’ll see that we’re probably the only five-story building in any direction,” Orenstein said. “It’s a sea of one to two-story buildings. It was a great opportunity for us to show the city of San Diego and its residents what we can do and the areas that we can develop in areas that are otherwise considered undevelopable without subsidy and still build projects that give good value to the consumers that are going to be living in the units, as well as meet the return on investment criteria from our investors.”
Impact Housing
FOUNDED: 2021
HEADQUARTERS: Southern California
CEO: Drew Orenstein
BUSINESS: Multifamily developer/manufacturer/builder
EMPLOYEES: 150
WEBSITE: www.ihousing.us
CONTACT: 213-479-0564
NOTABLE: Impact Housing offers investors ESG / SRI investment opportunities in unsubsidized workforce housing developments in San Diego.
