Noted Habitat for Humanity volunteer recently honored with community service award
Paulson and his students first volunteered to work for the Peninsula Habitat for Humanity in 1995 on a complicated $2 million condominium complex. Despite some initial chaos, Paulson later joined the board of directors and has taken his Autumn Quarter students twice a month to construction sites for hands-on training.
BY GEOFF KOCH
Over the years, Boyd Paulson has gotten used to students passing through his classes on their way to lucrative industry jobs or prestigious graduate programs. These future building barons are immensely talented, but Paulson can't help but offer just one gentle, well-meaning critique.
"They just don't have a good feel for tools," said Paulson, the Charles H. Leavell Professor of Civil Engineering. Earlier this year Paulson won the Miriam Aaron Roland Volunteer Service Prize, awarded to a Stanford faculty member who has demonstrated a personal commitment to community service and integrated academic scholarship.
For nearly a decade, Paulson has worked with students on construction sites managed by Peninsula Habitat for Humanity. His Autumn Quarter class volunteers twice per month, and throughout the year he occasionally takes other students to his frequent Saturday Habitat-sponsored projects in the community.
His first hands-on project -- a condominium complex in East Palo Alto -- began inauspiciously enough in 1995. Paulson likened it to doing triage at the scene of an accident.
"We'd just show up and pitch in like paramedics, helping out where the need was greatest on that particular day," he said.
But the $2 million, 24-unit condo complex was the largest ever undertaken by the nonprofit organization, which quickly found itself in over its head. Soon Paulson found himself as head of the building committee, a "promotion" that came with the added responsibility of doing cost accounting on weekends. Eventually, he joined Peninsula Habitat's board of directors and served the full term limit of six years.
This increased involvement made it easier for Paulson to work with existing Habitat team leaders to set aside discrete projects at the building sites for his students. Today, Paulson's students are assigned the task of building front porches, staircases and second-floor balconies from start to finish.
"They'll set off intending to work on something for 15 minutes, and two hours later they still won't be done," said Paulson, emphasizing that these experiences will help students better manage time and costs when they work on large construction projects in the future.
Of course, managing costs in the local housing market is especially tricky. Though the technology bubble has burst, prices continue to rise in the housing market around Stanford. According to DataQuick, a real estate information firm, the median home price in San Mateo County increased from $537,000 in March 2003 to $587,000 in March 2004. Local newspapers describe a "mania" in which sellers routinely receive multiple offers above the asking price.
Reports like these, or even the rush-hour experience on local freeways, clogged with people who can't afford to live near where they work, lead some to suggest that housing density eventually will have to increase on the Peninsula.
Paulson comes at this problem with the practical eye of an engineer. If new apartments and condominiums could be assembled out of standardized, prefabricated materials, costs could be kept down. With this goal in mind, he is closely following one manufacturer that is using factory automation to reduce the cost and speed the pace of steel construction.
The steel system is being implemented for the first time to replace wood-frame luxury housing at San Jose's elegant Santana Row retail and residential development, a portion of which was razed in a fire two years ago. Metal framing has tremendous potential for mid-rise affordable housing along the Peninsula's rail transit corridor, Paulson says, and this potential is where he focuses his community service energies these days.
"He has done a great deal to help me integrate my background in product design with my desire to innovate processes as a means to add value to the construction industry," said Dana Johnson, 23, a student of Paulson's in the coterminal master's program in construction engineering management.
Several years ago, Paulson joined the board of the Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition, one of California's largest nonprofit providers of affordable housing. His involvement gives him the opportunity to bring new technologies and methods to much larger projects. Started by a few Stanford faculty and senior administrators in the late 1960s, "Mid-Pen" houses 13,000 low-income residents in 75 high-quality developments.
In many ways, Paulson's work in the community brings his life full circle. A construction brat whose father worked for one of the companies that built Hoover Dam, he grew up around tools and lived in a variety of remote locations around the globe. While his parents were stationed at a large construction site in a remote area of Australia, Paulson endured a two-hour bus ride each way to and from school.
Today, he lives in a quiet Menlo Park neighborhood and rides his bike to Stanford. He has built large tunnels and dams and otherwise spent a career contributing to several noteworthy engineering projects. Paulson worked on two of the largest U.S. urban rail projects in the second half of the 20th century -- BART in the Bay Area and Metrorail in Washington, D.C. -- as a project manager and researcher focusing on lessening the disruption caused by construction in urban areas.
But he's never given up his interest in work on a smaller scale. Paulson sat for the Stanford Report interview in the living room of the home he renovated himself as his practiced eye supervised contractors installing a new furnace.
Is he still enjoying his work with students?
"Absolutely. They're smarter than ever, though still, most of them could learn a thing or two on a job like this," he said, gesturing to the contractors.
Geoff Koch is a science writing intern at the Stanford News Service.
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