Riverbank approves 27 small houses along Claus. What can buyers expect to pay?
A Riverbank developer hopes to keep the prices under $400,000 for 27 small houses that won City Council approval Tuesday night.
Councilmembers voted 4-0 for the project on 1.9 vacant acres at the southwest corner of Claus Road and Stanislaus Street.
The houses will be more like apartments in size, at 780 to 929 square feet. They will be sold to people who can get by with just two bedrooms, a tiny yard and no garage.
“It looks great,” Mayor Rachel Hernandez said just before the vote. “I think we need that variety of housing.”
Councilmembers Stacy Call, John Pimentel and Luis Uribe also favored the project. Member Cindy Fosi was absent.
The applicant, Gary Lev, said afterward that he hopes to price the homes in “the mid to high $300,000s.” Construction could start in early 2026 and take about a year.
The median sale price was $495,000 in Stanislaus County as of June, according to the California Association of Realtors. Most of Riverbank’s recent new houses have been above the median, mainly in the Crossroads West area.
The small houses along Claus will come from a developer who has mostly built custom luxury homes. Lev Designs is based in Roseville and does business around the state. Lev’s team displayed sketches of Riverbank homes that will be considerably smaller.
“Those renderings are his vision of something that is unique,” said Rick Mummert, president of Benchmark Engineering in Modesto. “... It gives everyone an opportunity.”
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Each house will have a living and dining area, a kitchen, a laundry room, one or two bathrooms and a covered porch. Residents will park along an interior driveway and share a playground.
Most of the facades will come right up to new sidewalks on Claus and Stanislaus and Sierra streets. The place will be called Sierra Village. Riverbank High School is a block to the south, as are the Riverbank Family Apartments. The new housing site already has a bus stop for the Stanislaus Regional Transit Authority.
The new houses are “infill” rather than sprawling onto farmland, said planner Michael Arroyo, who handled the application. That qualified them for a less detailed study of the environmental impacts.
“The compact design allows the proposed project to be affordable by design without sacrificing aesthetics or appeal,” Arroyo said in a staff report.
Another developer had proposed 31 small houses on the same site in 2022, selling for perhaps $350,000. Around the same time, the council reduced the minimum size of lots in some areas to encourage affordable housing.
That change allowed approval last year of 38 units behind the Lucky House restaurant on Patterson Road. The owners of the longtime Chinese eatery are still seeking investors.
Yet another small-house project, with services for people at risk of homelesness, fell apart in April. It would have had 67 units and Morrill and Oakdale roads. The council declined to boost the local funding after some of the would-be neighbors complained.
Turlock has its own project with apartment-size homes for sale. Some of the 178 units at Fifth Edition are going for about $375,000 for two bedrooms.
This story was originally published August 28, 2025 at 11:28 AM.
