FishBay Cottages, Housing Lopez
Fishbay Cottages is the first project to be developed by the non-profit organization Housing Lopez. Officially formed in 2018, Housing Lopez started as a grass-roots effort to address rental housing shortages on Lopez Island.
The Lopez Island Family Resource Center, looking to expand rental housing development capacity on Lopez Island, invited a group of local community leaders, real estate, construction and project finance experts to join together to address this issue. This informal team of concerned Island residents took on the challenge. They began looking for suitable sites for a small initial rental housing project, reviewing project developing costs, construction strategies and funding alternatives.
Eventually Housing Lopez identified a potential project site owned by San Juan County located in Lopez Village. The County agreed to sell the land to Housing Lopez in 2019 at a below market price to be used for affordable housing. Housing Lopez immediately got to work raising the funding necessary from public and private sources. The Lopez community was extremely generous, with over 400 people donating over $1m.
With total funding commitments from the San Juan County Home Fund just over $700,000, the project was able to begin construction of six new rental housing units in the Spring 2021. Housing Lopez decided to partner with Method Homes, a prefab modular homes builder based in Ferndale, WA. Method can build a custom home 60% faster than the traditional site-built construction cycle. Their process is especially useful to our island community, where construction is often more burdensome than in other locations. Their process reduces on-site work by 60 to 80% and total construction costs by up to 50%. Sections of the Cottages were built in Method's factory, then shipped and installed together onto the prepared site using cranes. See the video below.
Construction for this project was completed in the Fall of 2021, and the project was quickly fully occupied housing six households totaling 13 people, some with children and with occupations include teaching, construction, firefighting, landscaping, housekeeping, and retail.
Visit Housing Lopez’s website at: https://housinglopez.org/