Plant Prefab and Brooks + Scarpa design scalable, multifamily kit-of-parts

The Nest LivingHomes toolkit is a scalable, multifamily housing solution from Plant Prefab and Brooks + Scarpa that is adaptable to a variety of different urban lot conditions and housing program needs.

LivingHomes units are constructed in Plant’s custom homebuilding factory in Rialto, Calif., which cuts the construction timeline in half and significantly reduces building costs. The Nest concept is based on the Plant Building System, Plant’s patented, component-based construction platform.

Nest Livinghomes kit of parts

Nest LivingHomes offer developers and affordable housing organizations a flexible solution they can use for smaller, urban infill lots in order to build affordable housing faster and for a lower cost than site-based approaches.

A driving force behind the concept was that housing for the homeless should be scattered throughout a region and not just concentrated in one community. A main goal was to give homeless people a sense of dignity and shared social spaces on underutilized parcels of land.

Nest LivingHomes concept

“As the demand and cost for housing continues to rise, Nest was conceived to provide a scalable, cost-effective, high-quality solution to multifamily housing,” said Angie Brooks, Managing Principal, brooks + Scarpa, in a release. “Like the nesting habits of birds, the toolkit is based on the different ways people live with the objective of giving everyone an affordable place to live.”

One of the hardest decisions multifamily developers and their design teams have to make is what mix of amenities they’re going to put into each project. A lot of squiggly factors go into that decision: the type of community, the geographic market, local recreation preferences, climate/weather conditions, physical parameters, and of course the budget. The permutations are mind-boggling.

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