Brooks Scarpa Huber

Northview Pointe Apartments 🔵🟡🔴🟢 a passively designed, 100% electric and solar powered affordable housing project located in Sacramento’s Northview neighborhood.

Instead of turning inward behind fences and blank walls, the 67-unit affordable housing community opens itself to the neighborhood through a carved central courtyard. Breezeways and exterior circulation weave residents and visitors into shared gardens, shaded trellises, and gathering spaces. A community room with expansive sliding glass doors bridges the central courtyard and a social garden, allowing activities to spill outdoors and fostering connection across the site. Along the building edges, projecting window boxes and playful fins catch and refract light throughout the day, casting shifting patterns across the facades. These modest but expressive elements, paired with a two-story trellis that filters sun into dappled shade, lend a sense of whimsy, while working hard to provide critical shading. Together they temper Sacramento’s intense climate with a design that is as environmentally pragmatic as it is visually engaging. The arrangement of buildings not only creates strong social spaces, but also enhances environmental performance. Cross-ventilation, passive shading, and drought-tolerant landscaping reduce energy and water demand, while carefully chosen materials and minimal impervious surfaces strengthen the project’s environmental goals. Located near the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, the design also supports riparian ecology through habitat restoration, water filtration, and resilient landscape strategies. Northview Pointe demonstrates how affordable housing can enrich community life, elevate everyday experience, and contribute to broader ecological resilience—all while offering an architecture that feels fresh, inviting, and unmistakably of its place.

📸
Client: Excelerate Housing Group

Our commitment to doing sustainable design has always been a part of our firm. We push ourselves to provide more to the environment every year. This is our report and our AIA 2030 commitment to continue to reduce our emissions, as well as continuing to track the data of our projects.

Say hello to Miramar on 3rd! This eight-story mid-rise project is situated along a busy Koreatown corridor, and it demonstrates how inventive design and strategic development can transform overlooked parcels into catalytic architecture.

At a time when Los Angeles faces a housing crisis, mid-rise apartments often default to formulaic construction: boxy forms, flat façades, and little engagement with their surroundings. Miramar resists this pattern. Its scalloped double façade creates depth, shadow, and movement, turning a 310-foot-long elevation into a dynamic urban canvas. The perforated metal skin modulates light and privacy, offering residents critical shading while projecting an animated face to the street. By pushing and pulling the façade, the building gains both environmental performance and civic expression, reframing the idea of what “affordable” can look like.

Equally innovative is the project’s origin story. During renovation of an adjacent senior housing tower, Brooks + Scarpa identified an untapped opportunity: a lot split that transformed an underutilized strip of land into the site for 134 new apartments. This simple but radical act of reframing the property’s potential demonstrated to the client how thoughtful design thinking could also generate economic value, leveraging real estate strategy to advance urban density and housing supply.

Miramar on 3rd is more than housing. It is a demonstration of how design can elevate development, how development can activate community, and how architecture can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Its lessons—about density, ingenuity, and the public realm—are both timely and transferable, making it a model for cities across the country.