New Housing for Farmworkers Taking Shape: Stone Pine Cove Helps Fulfill a Promise

Half Moon Bay - Piece by piece, new homes that will provide local farmworkers with an affordable place to live on the Coastside are taking shape in a Central Valley factory.

Sparks fly at one end of an indoor complex larger than a football field northwest of Sacramentoas welders forge steel bases. At the other end, past framing and plumbing and painting stations, nearly complete homes with full kitchens and bathrooms roll out for quality inspections.

A total of 47 manufactured homeswill ultimately be trucked to and installed at Stone Pine Cove, a new neighborhood in Half Moon Bay that helps fulfill a pledge by local officials to provide a worthy place to live for some of the area's lowest paid yet vital workers. Barring severe winter storms or unexpected delays, the new homes will be installed on foundations this spring.

"If we value locally grown, healthy food, we must equally value the hard workers who cultivate the fields and tend to crops in greenhouses. And that means providing them with safe and affordable housing options," said San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller, whose District 3 encompasses most of the county's coastal growing areas.

The need for local affordable housing is acute. The cost of living in San Mateo County is so high the federal government considersa family of four earning $156,650 a year "low income." A three-person household earning as much as $201,500 annually is listed as "moderate income."

The statewide average annual earnings for farmworkers in 2022 was $24,871, according to a report by U.C. Merced. (Earnings estimates vary by location, type of work and other factors.)

That leaves market-rate housing far out of reach for most of the laborers who fuel San Mateo County's $100 million agricultural industry.

The monthly median rent for a two-bedroom Half Moon Bay apartment stands at $4,150; the average home value tops $1.5 million, according to real estate firms.

Those high costs pose a challenge for local officials who want to provide affordable options farm workers who may be living in substandard, unpermitted housing to places like Stone Pine Cove, which is being paid for by the County along with its partners.

Two factors drive the push to create more affordable housing options.

A January 2023 mass shooting that left seven workers dead on two coastal farms put a spotlight on the substandard housing where many of the victims lived. Nineteen families displaced by the fatal shootings will be given priority for housing at Stone Pine Cove.

And while agricultural work has long been seen as seasonal, three quarters of farmworkers in the county live here year-round, according to surveys.

Stone Pine Cove is being developed on a site owned by the City of Half Moon Bay about a mile east of downtown, just south of Highway 92.

The one- to three-bedroom homes will be all-electric (no natural gas appliances) and Energy Starcertified.

All of the homes will be available for purchase, with the assistance of a state programdesigned for low-income farmworkers.

To fast-track development, County officials turned to the Central Valley factory where "it never rains," said Chris Roland, sales manager for Skyline Homes, which operates the indoor plant.

"The assembly-line process is in a controlled environment. It's not in the elements so we don't have to wait to finish a home because of rain," Roland said. "That really helps with streamlining."

That streamlining begins with forging the steel-beam framework that will eventually become a home's floor. The framework moves to more than a dozen stations with specialized materials and crews at the ready, reducing the home-build time to four or five days, Roland said.

Unlike mobile homes, manufactured homes have wood-frame exterior walls filled with pink insulation. Windows, pipes and wiring meet federal Housing and Urban Development building codes.

On a recent visit, the first two homes destined for Stone Pine Cove were undergoing quality-control inspections behind the factory.

"We'll have the homes built well ahead of time so we can have quality control done here," said Chris Lippi, chief operating officer for Bigfoot Homes, which will place the homes on foundations at Stone Pine Cove. "Any issues that we have we'll fix here before we bring them on site."

Crews have completed about two-thirds of the site preparation work, which includes laying out new roads and placing utilities underground, according to Mike Wassermann, the project manager for Capital Program Management, the firm hired by the county to manage the project.

"Our mission," Wassermann said, "is to get these families housed."