During the late 1990s, officials at an organization that provides affordable housing realized that constructing single-family homes on individual lots just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
"We realized there’s not enough land in the area and that a single-family house was often too far out of the financial reach of low- and moderate-income people — the teachers, maintenance workers and even college professors who were not making a lot of money," said Tanesha Van Leuven of HomeSight.
The nonprofit group helps educate people about homeownership and provides affordable homes in Snohomish and King counties. Van Leuven said HomeSight looked for new ideas and settled on one from the East Coast — manufactured townhouses sold as condominiums.
"We came back to the Pacific Northwest and looked for a (manufactured home) builder who was interested in playing with the concept," she said.
The result is a two-story townhouse built by Marlettethat was first used at the Noji Gardens development in King County. It’s now being used at Kokanee Creek, a 35-unit development on 3.44 acres on 128th Street SW in south Everett.
The townhouses are intended to look like regular stick-built houses.
"We were trying to achieve an architectural design typical of the Northwest so people couldn’t tell the difference in the exterior or the interior from stick-built components," Van Leuven said. "We also wanted to make sure it was something that would be very durable."
The homes, which have two or three bedrooms, or three bedrooms and a bonus room, range from $180,000 to $220,000. That is lower than the median home price in Snohomish County, which was about $228,000 in March.
The homes range in size from 1,266 to 1,571 square feet.
In addition to lower prices, qualified first-time home buyers can get up to $35,000 in purchase assistance, financial coaching from HomeSight and preferred loan rates and fees.
A family of three with an annual income of $51,750 could buy a two-bedroom, one-bath home for $180,000. The family would need to come up with $3,600 for the down payment, and would have to make monthly payments of $1,100, including taxes and insurance.
The Kokanee Creek property was sold to HomeSight by the Snohomish County Housing Authority, which purchased it in 1992 for use as a manufactured home community.
"On this particular site, if we’d used the single-family manufactured product, we would have had fewer homes," said the housing authority’s Ann Schroeder Osterberg.
She said it made sense to have HomeSight develop the project since it had experience with Noji Gardens.
"They cut their teeth on it down at Noji," she said. "They know how to put these developments together.
"Then it becomes one among a number of strategies brought together at that site. There are savings because HomeSight is a nonprofit developer. There are savings because manufactured housing is used. Then you add their education and counseling program, along with purchase assistance and affordable financing."
Dashiel Wham, a spokeswoman for Northwest Pride, the manufactured home association for Washington, Oregon and Idaho, said the two-story townhouses recently won an award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
"Mostly it was for visibility and an affordable package," she said.
Wham said the homes are also well-constructed, using the same fixtures and materials as stick-built houses.
"They’ve moved to building exactly the same home a builder would do on a lot, but they do in a factory," Wham said. "They truck it to the site, and it locks down to a foundation."
Builders started constructing the development last week on a site that also includes a landscaped play island for kids and a wetland greenbelt.
Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.
MICHAEL O’LEARY
/ The Herald
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