Brooks + Scarpa Evokes the Porch at a Supportive Housing Complex in Sacramento

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Located on the east side of a quiet north–south street in Sacramento’s River Gardens neighborhood, Northview replaces two single-family homes with 66 studios for formerly homeless residents and one manager’s unit in a trio of two-story bars. The 1.23-acre site is unusually deep—a remnant of the farming that had taken place historically on this side of the American River—and the project is configured to take advantage of the condition. Toward the rear of the lot, Brooks + Scarpa ran one of these rectilinear volumes parallel to the street and extended two additional, breezeway-punctuated structures perpendicularly from that volume to meet the thoroughfare.

Photo © Brooks + Scarpa

Along the street, the architects stretched a corrugated scrim and entry gates across the two bars, to create a unified public face for the overall campus. It also aligned a two-story management office to that western elevation to strengthen the sense of a street wall. From that arrangement it conjured the porch: the design team connected the three volumes with outdoor circulation that includes second-floor deck seating; overhead, a canopy whose metal trellises alternate directions shades the activity.

Photo © Brooks + Scarpa

While Scarpa says he and his colleagues have never felt obligated to add gables or other domestic flourishes to their affordable housing designs, the abstracted porch “serves an important purpose” beyond protection from Sacramento’s scorching summer rays. “Instead of making symbolic gestures and turning your back to the street, we tried to give people the opportunity to have chance encounters. We’re not forcing people to interact, but we also know that, in these settings, they can be reclusive.”

Photos © Brooks + Scarpa

Northview’s massing deserves a second look through the lens of unforced social experience. The site plan, which loosely resembles a lowercase d, invites residents to trace multiple paths from the street or parking lot to their studios. At the heart of the Northview campus, too, Brooks + Scarpa erected a central pavilion encompassing a lounge, a community kitchen area, and social services offices occupied by local nonprofit operator Hope Collective. In addition to hosting necessary and enlivening programming, the pavilion divides the campus courtyard into an asymmetrical pair of outdoor rooms.  

In describing the courtyard, Scarpa notes, “We try to connect people to the outside even in very dense situations. Connection to green space helps people feel like they have a property and not just a unit in a building.” In the case of Northview, Scarpa says the suburban context invited indoor-outdoor links that his team had not tried previously, such as natural landscaping that incorporates bioretention. (The all-electric campus is LEED Platinum–certified.) “We even have a little dog park in the back,” he adds.

Photo © Brooks + Scarpa

Reflecting on the design further, Scarpa observes that, dog park aside, Northview is not a radical departure from the firm’s affordable housing oeuvre in principle. “We focus on issues like cross-ventilation and daylighting,” for example. Colorful cement-board siding and extruded window frames are other longstanding strategies for adding rhythm and texture, respectively, to buildings that “tend to suffer from lack of depth.” Brooks + Scarpa adapted these hallmarks to the lower-density context, “because they make a qualitative difference in how people live.”

Northview is the second development by Excelerate Housing Group, after its completion of the Michael Maltzan Architecture–designed 26 Point 2 Apartments in Long Beach. The project is a collaboration between Excelerate and Hope Collective.