Mammoth Lakes is a small mountain community in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains just south of Yosemite National Park. Home to Mammoth Mountain, one of the most popular ski destinations in the West, the town’s housing composition is drastically skewed toward condominium units, high-end seasonal and nightly rentals, leading to high cost and low availability of full-time resident housing units within the town. These economic factors have led to a critical need for immediate affordable workforce housing for the town’s long-term residents and employees.

This project addresses that need by converting two adjacent industrial buildings sited on the periphery of the town into 11 one-bedroom units earmarked for Mammoth Lakes residents earning below 80% of the area’s median income. The client, a local non-profit with a stated mission of developing and preserving workforce affordable housing throughout the Eastern Sierra region, purchased the property in 2017 and in 2019 selected the submitting architect through a statewide RFP process.

The full scope of the conversion includes eleven ~640SF one-bedroom apartments with six garages, interior walls, plumbing, electrical, mechanical upgrades, an on-site laundry room, secured bike storage, an exterior tenant community area, and water-conscious landscaping. In addition, there will be a new pitched roof to replace existing flat roofs, which has proved problematic and costly, given the massive snow accumulation in the region.

This project is a contemporary case study of the fundamental sustainability strategy of reclamation, transforming an unremarkable and underused structure into urgently needed housing. In an effort to change the existing structures as little as possible while transforming the buildings completely, the project seeks to reclaim the carbon investment of derelict industrial buildings for the greater good of the surrounding community.