Student-designed Home for Homeless Youth Opens

July 14, 2025 – The award-winning home students designed for homeless youth has officially opened in Placentia. The modular ADU home was designed by UC Irvine and Orange Coast College students for the 2023 Orange County Sustainability Decathlon and won second place overall and first place for market potential, and engineering and construction.

The team donated the dwelling to Homeless Intervention Services of Orange County (HIS-OC) so it could be used to house at-risk youth, ages 18-24. “This is a population that’s very overlooked,” said HIS-OC program manager Anthony Trejo. “There are so many homeless teens, college students and foster kids who have aged out.” Trejo leads a program in which the youth stay for a few months at HIS-OC and get a job, save money and learn life skills to help them become independent.

Al Jabbar, chief of staff to Orange County Supervisor Doug Chaffee, spoke at the ribbon-cutting ceremony and said the number of homeless youth in Orange County is 400 while 153 are looking for a bed. Students, architects and many who were involved in the project came to show their support at the opening on July 9 while city and state offices presented HIS-OC with certificates honoring the home.

TeamMADE chose to design an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) as a solution to the state’s housing crisis. The ADU is a small, self-contained residential unit that can be put in the same lot as a residential home. This one is 750 square feet with seven beds and is set in the backyard of HIS-OC.  It’s an innovative modular home with many sustainable features associated with materials selection, home automation, water and energy conservation, and a healthy living environment.

The ADU uses easy-to-assemble, cold-formed steel framing custom-produced by the FrameCAD system. People can design their own homes, print the parts on site and build it with friends and family from an assembly diagram.

Eighty percent of the students who built the home for the decathlon were women. “I loved empowering students who’ve never had hands-on training,” said UCI teamMADE project manager Jennifer Wilkens. “I taught several students how to use power tools and by the next time I saw them they proudly told me they had taught other students the skills they’ve learned. By the end, the core students were experts in fields ranging from steel construction, energy efficient building envelopes, smart home systems, phase change materials, branding and business plans.”

UCI mechanical engineering graduate student Alexandra Huff helped lead the undergraduate students who designed the engineering systems, plumbing and cooling systems for the home, which is able to go off the grid. “It was lots of stress, blood, sweat and tears.” Huff said. “For it to come together, I have no words...This is better than what I could’ve imagined.”

Many team members were touched to see the home finally open. “If you took these walls down and looked at the steel you would see blood on it,” said student lead Georgie Ampudia who was studying at OCC during the project. “I get goosebumps and flashbacks of building the framing and have specific memories for every room.”

The opportunity to do real-world engineering and architectural work also helped solidify many of the students’ career aspirations. Ampudia is now studying architecture at UCLA and plans to go to graduate school and pursue work in sustainable design and ADU housing. “It’s California’s intention to push the ADU as they’ve recently passed bills,” Ampudia said. “I just love this project so much and this direction just makes so much sense.”

Huff is conducting hydrogen energy research at UCI’s Clean Energy Institute and hopes to develop technologies that make hydrogen more viable in the future.  “This project helped reinforce why I wanted to be an engineer in the first place,” said Matthew Ramon, a UCI civil engineering major who was a student lead on the project. “I really like the creative aspects of engineering. It was cool being able to see something built with your own hands.” Ramon is now working as an engineer at RK Engineering. Other engineering students on the team who have graduated are also working for MEP (Mechanical-Electrical-Plumbing) firms and credit their experience on this project for helping them land jobs.

“It's important for schools like UCI to participate in these types of projects,” says Mark Walter, UCI professor and faculty lead for engineering, “not only do students get hands-on experience, but they take more advanced and innovative technologies and techniques into careers that improve sustainability and create solutions to challenges facing society.”  

The home's ultimate purpose will come alive when the 750 square-foot home opens to seven residents next month. “This project is literally changing people’s lives, from the young men who will make the house their home to the students who worked on a ‘real’ project,” said Wilkens. “It’s a special reward to see the team’s legacy. This house will stay forever in Placentia.”

- Natalie Tso