The Tacoma Housing Authority will have Hillsdale Heights in place there by October 2009. The redevelopment will set 50 town houses and 60 affordable apartments on the old sawmill’s 7.3-acre site.

And it will bring something new to Tacoma’s landscape: Every home on the site will be modular, built in Boise, Idaho, trucked here and set onto its waiting foundation.

You should have been at the meeting this week when the housing authority, site planners and Absher Construction Inc. used the words “modular home.”

East Side resident and activist Nancy Davis was incredulous.

“Modular?” she asked.

I was with her on that. I hear “modular home” and think of the manufactured house my family bought for their place in Wyoming in the 1970s. It was a basic brown shoebox, a mess of bad style and worse siding.

Steve Clair, the housing authority’s project manager for Hillsdale heights, stepped up with reassurances. Technology, design, methods and materials have changed for the better over 30-some years. These houses and apartments, he said, are superior to, and less expensive than, homes built in place. The site designers nodded agreement, as did representatives from Absher.

This kind of construction is used extensively in Europe, Clair said.

For this project, Guerdon Enterprises LLC will be building the homes in its Boise factory. (You can check out the company at www.guerdon.com.)

All the homes are built indoors, so they are finished, down to the plumbing, cabinets and wiring, without ever being exposed to the weather. The indoor mass production means they’re done on time, to uniform standards and with economies of scale.

“The modular is built to a higher construction standard,” said Michael Mirra, executive director of the housing authority. “We will save enough money to do a project that we could not do otherwise.”

The construction will be easier on the neighbors, Clair said. Laying the water and sewer lines and pouring foundations will be normal. The buildings will arrive by truck in 15-foot sections, wrapped in plastic. Cranes will lift them onto their foundations, where they’ll be joined together. No one will miss a few months of nail gun noise.

“Will they be boxy, or have character?” asked the skeptical Davis.

Character, answered Mirra, who’s checked them out at high-end developments in California. Styles range from modern to Cape Cod to urban and craftsman. You cannot tell them from site-built homes, he said.

They, like the overall project, will be environmentally friendly and, as Mirra likes to say, lovely.

So, why should we trust him?

This housing authority has demonstrated good faith with its residents and its neighbors.

It brought a neighborhood representative onto the design team.

It paid part of the cost for the traffic light the city installed when it reconfigured the problem intersection at 64th Street East and McKinley.

One objector said the dense development would overburden fire services and be a fire trap. But there’s a new fire station in the neighborhood, and Hillsdale’s site design assures easy access by emergency vehicles.

The housing authority has worked with the Tacoma School District, which says nearby schools can handle the new kids in the neighborhood.

The housing authority and city will improve, and install sidewalks along, the deplorable stretch of 60th Street East bordering the new homes. It will have on-site parking.

Opponents said bringing subsidized housing into the neighborhood would devalue existing homes. The 50 town houses will sell for about $200,000, well in line with values in the neighborhood.

And then there were the charges that the people living in the 60 subsidized rental apartments would bring crime with them.

Salishan, the housing authority’s 1,200-home redevelopment on Portland Avenue, is the rebuttal to that.

It’s safe. And it’s lovely. We can expect the same standards at Hillsdale Heights.

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677

kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com