The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors has unanimously approved a nearly $11.5 million contract to start work on Stone Pine Cove, a new community in Half Moon Bay where dozens of manufactured homes are planned for low-income farmworkers and their families.

The proposed project will sit on five acres at 880 Stone Pine Road, approximately a mile from downtown Half Moon Bay. The new homes are tentatively scheduled to be ready for occupancy by March 2025.

The action follows a May 7 decision to allocate nearly $6 million to buy and install 47 manufactured homes from Santa Cruz-based Bigfoot Homes for farmworker families, including 19 households displaced by the Jan. 23, 2023, mass shooting at two farms that killed seven people.

“Usually, jurisdictions celebrate groundbreaking ceremonies … and perhaps someday we will hold such an event. But not today. Not this week.” Supervisor Ray Mueller

“Usually, jurisdictions celebrate (and hold) groundbreaking ceremonies with special shovels and numerous officials to commemorate when work begins onsite, and perhaps someday we will hold such an event,” said Supervisor Ray Mueller following Tuesday’s vote. “But not today. Not this week. At this moment we respond to the prayers of those waiting for a safe and healthy place to live with the urgency of this Board action.”

The Stone Pine Cove property is city-owned, and the project is a collaboration between the county of San Mateo and the city of Half Moon Bay. Using manufactured homes rather than building from the ground up carries lower initial construction costs and quicker completion, the county said.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.