This grant program is intended to assist diverse low income farmworker, Hispanic, and Native American communities of the Yakima Valley working in partnerships with local organizations to improve their communities and the quality of their housing.  This hands-on design-build is intended to produce innovative and sustainable designs and construction technology/systems/strategies towards the demonstration of affordable housing prototypes.  This is part of the HUD Office of University Partnerships:  Community Futures Demonstration Program grant awarded to the College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the UW Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC).  This year we are working in a cross-cultural educational exchange and alliance with the Yakama Nation Housing Authority Development and Construction Trade Apprenticeship Program in the vibrant context of Toppenish/Wapato.

 

 

 

Our first demonstration house cycle was completed last fall and included the participation of seventeen faculty/staff and twenty six CAUP graduate and undergraduate students.  Five visiting architects, three UW CAUP Alumni, twenty six visiting students, twenty eight County and City leaders and staff, sixty four residents, and ten members of our community partner’s staff also participated.  Our research work yielded critical information on agriculture worker housing profiles in the Yakima Valley.  Our participatory design work assisted our partners in their local jurisdictional efforts and communications; as well as significantly increased public awareness of sustainable community planning, density, and housing design strategies. This resulted in increased cooperation between the non profit housing

sector, the City, and the residents; and our alliance successfully facilitated our partner with the annexation and rezone process of a fifty one unit mixed-use farmworker multi-family housing project.  Our work inspired a great deal of interest within the community and had comparable influence on the planning of future residential projects by our community partner.  

 

Our UW team effectively met the program as developed by our alliance; and then completed Design Development, Permitting, and Bidding/Negotiation/Value Engineering in preparation for the On-Site Learning and implementation on schedule last summer.  We successfully resourced and outsourced our consulting engineer partners.  Our program was awarded a substantial North West Energy Alliance sponsorship that provided ground-breaking energy consultant engineering services.  This award gave tribute to our project as the Energy Star Poster Demonstration House used to launch PacifiCorp’s new Energy Star Program adopted last spring.  Our UW team obtained northwest community program sponsors, donors, and partners that conservatively brought over three hundred thousand dollars in additional support to foster our intense research and development efforts for last year’s program.

 

Last year’s academic and technical training continued during construction on schedule with a sensational Ground Breaking Ceremony that brought over fifty attendees including members of the Community, northwest sponsors, the future owner’s extended family, local television, radio, and newspaper reporters. With the help of SCCC Wood Construction Center and other community partners, our team’s superlative efforts were able to maintain the construction schedule and budget.  Thanks to the efforts of some very charitable students, last year’s summer program is available on line at

 

 

 

The UW CAUP multidisciplinary team includes faculty and undergraduate and graduate student participation from the Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning and Construction Management departments working in all of the components towards the completion of the project at each summer.  The Research Team completed this year’s research and findings spring, 2005, working in conjunction with community based farmworker and student focus groups, housing providers, their findings are available online at

 

Our fall, 2005, Architecture Graduate Participatory Design Studio outreach work included community design charrettes and reviews in alliance with our new community residential development/construction education partners and the people of the Yakama Nation.  Our continued program objectives to produce innovative, energy efficient, and sustainable community planning, cluster planning and unit design concepts are incorporating new goals to better respond to native extended family and cultural traditions.  The students in this intense paced participatory design process greatly benefited from the workshops and have become ever more knowledgeable and proficient as this year’s project program evolved.  Two final collaborative team design concepts were presented to the YNHA in a forum setting that brought over twenty jurors from the tribe and a northwest residential development/construction exchange that offered a mélange of professional disciplines and objectives.  

 

Our Spring 2006 UW team continued collaboration with the YNHA team to reach the final design  through permitting and construction documents.  Continued design processes included work in leadership and teamwork skills, as well as work in energy conservation and sustainable strategies/ technology, construction systems mechanics, consulting engineers and systems research, constructability, estimating, scheduling,bidding/negotiation, value engineering, construction documents, construction preparation, and safety.  Our team also continued their efforts in the outsourcing and resourcing of sponsors and donors, as well as their organizational preparations for the remote on-site ‘learning while ‘doing’ summer program.  

 

This year we again continue to work with the Seattle Central Community College Wood Construction Center faculty and students to further enable our on-site learning to include all phases of construction.  Our design/build project will conclude with a coalition roundtable evaluation and a published UW CAUP Case Study to summarize and document our service learning partnership with the Yakama Nation Development and Construction Apprenticeship Program.  This will be presented to HUD Office of University Partnerships, exhibited in Washington DC and throughout the country, and presented to each of our sponsors.  

 

 

 

The HUD COPC university grant program is intended to assist colleges and universities with a portion of the overall costs that may be required to complete the ‘Scope of Work’ in their approved COPC Research and Outreach Grant.  The UW COPC Community Futures Program is required to equitably match HUD’s award towards the administrative funding the work.  These combined funds make up the approved program ‘budget’ that is intended to ensure the completion of specified scope of work and schedule, and the conditions of approved grant places restrictions on and purposely limits the use of budget funds to the fixed costs of the approved educational research.  This requires the UW and its community partners to shepherd any necessary funds in excess of the budgeted administrative costs from community sponsors and donors.  These ancillary funds are vital to the remote operations and completion of our project, and unfortunately amount to several times the amount of our program budget; last year supplementary funds in excess of $300,000 were required (See attached 2005 donor list).  Regrettably, in spite of generous support from substantial northwest community sponsors, our program suffered from serious deficiencies in equipment, organizational staff, student scholarship, and the management staff and provisions for our volunteer labor workforce.    As this program continues to interest increasing numbers of faculty, student, community partner, and volunteer participants, we are continuing to resource the necessary means to assist with these funding shortfalls in support of our 2005-06 program.  

 

We appreciate the early endowment commitments we have already received for this year’s design/build program that include the following sponsors:Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance/Ecotope Engineering Consultants/Betterbricks Daylighting Design Lab; Swenson Say Faget Consulting Engineers, Seattle; Mithun Architects, Seattle; Pyatok Architects, Oakland; Arizona State University Stardust Center for Affordable Homes, Phoenix; University of Washington Graduate School Huckabay Fellowship; UW College of Forestry Resources; Minigan Family Endowment; and the Yakama Nation Tribal School.  The UW /YNHA alliance endeavors to generate considerable additional community sponsors/partners to support this year’s program objectives.   The grant budget does not allocate funds for remote design/build program start up equipment costs or maintenance expenses.   The UW team initially anticipated the availability of tools and equipment through our previous design/build association with another university; however scheduling and funding conflicts prevailed.  In addition, our budget provides for very minimal operational and management assistance.