Brown Construction executives, including President and CEO Ron Brown, proudly joined Cannery Place developer/owner team, Township 9 Affordable Housing Partners LP, and project architect Bob Kuchman on the morning of September 30 at McClellan Park as their massive joint effort—Cannery Place—was awarded affordable housing project of the year by the Sacramento Business Journal. Cannery Place is a uniquely-designed, five-story, 180-unit, mixed-use affordable housing development ideally situated just one block from a regional transit station and just a short walk from the 33-mile-long American River bike trail system. Cannery Place fills a need for affordable housing near Downtown, Sacramento’s urban and jobs center, while also being an attractive anchor building within Township 9—a 65-acre master-planned community that is being developed just north of Downtown Sacramento, and just south of the American River. The 180 one-, two-, and three-bedroom living units are wrapped around a resident parking garage, disguising the concrete garage within the community and utilizing its second-and third-story roofs to create expansive plazas at the core of the community. Cannery Place is built on land that was once occupied by a large fruit and vegetable cannery. The project’s exterior design pays homage to the site’s history, utilizing materials like brick along the building’s corners and along the ground floor, and other industrial elements like metal shed roofs and corrugated metal siding. Even the large planter boxes that dot the community’s expansive plazas are designed to resemble the wooden crates once used for packing fruits and vegetables at the cannery. In addition to much-needed affordable housing, the project brings retail space to Township 9 as well, with 12,000 square feet of ground-floor retail spanning two sides of the building, marked with colored awnings and dramatic brick-framed floor-to-ceiling windows. Brown Construction built Cannery Place under a design-build MEP contract with Township 9 Affordable Housing Partners and Kuchman Architects, which landed the team with the challenge of building this unique project as it was originally designed while staying within a tight affordable housing budget. Township 9 president Steve Goodwin notes how remarkable it is that the original drawings and the finished product are nearly identical. “Nothing that we had hoped for, certainly aesthetically, was value-engineered out of the building. That is an unbelievable rarity,” Goodwin said. Cannery Place was opened for occupancy in October 2014, and living units are currently 100% leased.
