We’ll update the Grow Community on relevant news and happenings here, so stay tuned!
President, Marja Preston was speaking on a panel at the recent ULI (Urban Land Institute) conference on how we are building a healthy community at Grow. Here are the visual notes taken by an attendee at that discussion.
Tuesday December 10th – 8am-5pm
University of Washington, Alder Commons, 1310 NE 40th St, Seattle, WA 98105
Grow president, Marja Preston will be speaking on a panel discussion at the Data-Driven Design Forum put on by AIA Seattle. The forum will look at why firms are investing in research, and how is it improving the performance of their buildings and their practices.
The Grow team would like to express our gratitude for the amazing community of Grow Bainbridge. On this day of giving thanks we want to let you know that we are truly grateful for all we have learned from everyone who has touched our lives through this community over the last year.
We want to extend a special thank you to all of the new and soon to be residents at Grow. We are excited, amazed, and humbled by the patience and dedication of the residents who have moved in to this community. Excited to meet each and every amazing personality, humbled by the commitment to sustainable living, and most grateful for the patience of all who waited so long to move in to their homes.
We wish for all of you a joyful holiday, a day of health and abundance.
All the best,
The Grow Team
Fast Company | November 13, 2013 | Adele Peters
A new urban neighborhood on Bainbridge Island, Washington, is arguably the most resilient–and healthiest–in the entire United States. Grow Community is not the first place to have net zero energy homes, community gardens, carsharing, or any of its other features, but it’s the first community to have all of those features, by design, from its inception.
Each home in the new development, from apartments to single-family homes, can run entirely on solar power. The ultra-efficient buildings are insulated to save energy, and include heat pumps and heat recovery ventilators. Wood siding comes from local, sustainably managed forests. But green buildings are only a small part of the community’s design.
“The average footprint for food and transportation is three times the footprint of a home,” says Jonathan Davis, the architect who led the project. Both were considered as integral parts of the development. The location was carefully chosen to be a short walk or bike ride from the ferry to Seattle or nearby shops. Residents will have access to community bikes and a shared fleet of cars–the first car being a Nissan Leaf that plugs into its own dedicated solar panel. Those moving to the area bringing their own vehicles may want to consider getting a car or motorcycle shipping quote to help them figure out the cost of transporting their vehicles during their busy move.
The homes are bordered by community vegetable gardens and fruit trees, and residents will also have the chance to participate in a working farm within walking distance.
The design also aims to help neighbors actually meet each other. The site is divided up into “microhoods” that are grouped around a common yard, and each of the grouping is connected by a series of pathways. No one can drive home; the parking lot is deliberately remote so that people have to walk home, and have the chance to run into each other. Each home has a front porch, and the common yards have community gardens and other shared spaces for people to interact.
Right now, the development is partially completed–22 out of 24 single-family homes are underway or finished, and construction will begin shortly on two small apartment buildings. Eight homes are occupied. The new residents include the architect and his own family. “Someone recently said it must be like my own personal Sim City, and it is,” Davis says, as he watches his creation unfold.
The development is the first in the U.S. to meet the stringent requirements of the One Planet Living program. “It’s a really big-picture look at sustainability,” Davis says. “In a way, Grow Community provides an easy basis for everyone living there to reduce their environmental footprint.”
As a One Planet Community, Grow is intended to achieve Net Zero Carbon from buildings by 2020. We have been monitoring one of the occupied homes in the community since January of this year and it looks like the numbers are coming out positive – the solar is providing more than enough energy to power the house over the year! This not only reduces the owners’ carbon footprint, it also saves them a whole lot in power bills.
Here are a few reasons why you might also want to consider solar for your home:
We are excited to announce that all homes in the first neighborhood are now sold out. Rentals will become available in Spring 2014. Additional homes in the next neighborhood will become available in 2015. Stay tuned for more exciting details about that. To get on our interest list and receive information on upcoming opportunities, please click here and as always feel free to contact us directly for a chat about all things Grow, we’d love to connect with you.
Check out the Rail-Volution conference starting Sunday in Seattle – register now.
This is right in line with our One Planet principle of creating sustainable transportation options for our residents at Grow Community. In fact Grow president, Marja Preston will tour attendees through Grow Community as one of the events Sunday morning. Go here for more details: http://www.railvolution.org/conference-program/schedule-of-events/2013-Sunday.
“Walk through Grow Community, Washington State’s first One Planet Community (35 min). See this innovative Transit Oriented Community and learn about the green building policy initiative that spearheaded it.”
First Neighborhood Sold Out! Residents Moving In.Ok, its official. We are excited to announce the single family homes in the first 3-acre neighborhood at Grow Community are sold out. Eight families have now moved into their homes and more are soon to come. By February the neighborhood should be full and construction almost complete.
We will be starting construction very soon on the Cooper rentals. While many rentals have already been reserved, some are still available. Click here for more information or contact our sales office if you are interested in renting in our Zero Carbon community. Click here to download our flier.
We are finalizing the schematic design for the next two neighborhoods in Grow Community. This next stage of the project will complete the One Planet project, with a trail system leading directly into town and a beautiful community building for all residents to use. The redesign has been driven by a focus on intergenerational community and designing for accessibility. Stay tuned for a release of the design concept next month – we think it’s pretty awesome!
September 6, 2013 @ 11:11am | Tim Kelly ~ KPBJ Editor
The aim of the Housing Design Demonstration Project on Bainbridge Island was to create incentives for developers to build subdivisions that offer green and/or affordable housing. Four projects taking advantage of incentives such as “bonus density” offered by the ordinance are in different stages of development. Ferncliff Village has completed 24 homes that are now mostly occupied, and the first homeowners are moving into the GROW Community, which will be the largest of the four, as it works toward completion of its first phase.
Ferncliff Village
Meanwhile, the HDDP, which was adopted in 2009, is set to expire at the end of this year, but a committee has been working on revisions that will be presented soon to the City Council, and a reworked ordinance could be extended for a few more years or made permanent.
“The HDDP’s intent is to allow for clustered housing and preserving open spaces,” said Mark Blatter, executive director of the nonprofit Housing Resources Board, which developed Ferncliff Village.
Community land trust
Ferncliff’s first phase showcases that concept, with the two dozen cottage-style houses on small lots, with a community garden and an open grassy area in the center of the development. Besides being shared recreational space for residents, the grassy area also handles stormwater runoff.
The six-acre site – off Ferncliff Avenue half a mile north of Winslow Way – was donated to the Housing Resources Board by former City Council member Lois Curtis. The HRB developed Ferncliff as a community land trust, which means the nonprofit builds and sells the houses but retains ownership of the land, with homeowners paying a low-cost, long-term land lease.
“That’s part of the way we make it work as affordable housing,” Blatter said.
The two – and three-bedroom houses range from 846 to 1,138 square feet, and are priced from $195,000 to $220,000. The Ferncliff Village website says the home prices are more than $50,000 below market value. Blatter said qualified buyers are those with 80 percent to 120 percent of the area median income in King County, and additional subsidies are available for potential Ferncliff homebuyers with incomes below that range.
It’s the only one of the four HDDP developments that meets the affordability goal of the ordinance.
Charlie Wenzlau, a local architect who is Housing Resources Board chairman and also helped develop the HDDP for the city, explained that the ordinance has development standards structured in tiers on either a green building track or an affordability track, though they’re not mutually exclusive. “When you go with the affordability track, the green building requirements are still there but not as onerous,” he said.
So even though Ferncliff put more emphasis on providing affordable homes, Blatter said the houses also include various energy-efficiency elements such as ductless heat pumps, Energy Star appliances and triple-glazed windows.
“We think these houses are going to live comfortably and large, even though they are fairly compact,” Blatter said.
Architect Jonathan Davis designed the first phase of GROW Community and is buying a house there. Although Davis is unlikely to need one, some buyers may want to look into fast bridging loans as a way of affording one of the homes.
Changes at GROW
The GROW Community, located at the corner of Wyatt Way and Grow Avenue just a couple blocks from downtown Winslow, is on the green track and has incorporated more extensive sustainability measures, such as rooftop solar panels and a charging station for a shared electric vehicle available for residents to use.
Jonathan Davis, the architect who designed the first phase being built on three acres of the eight-acre GROW site, worked with developer Asani to create a project meeting One Planet Community standards of sustainability. BioRegional, the global sustainability organization that founded the One Planet Living program, announced GROW’s endorsement at last year’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
The community has a charging station for an electric vehicle that’s available for residents to use.The community has a charging station for an electric vehicle that’s available for residents to use.”We had the land and knew we had to do something interesting with it,” Asani president Marja Preston said. “We came up with this concept for a One Planet intentional community. The HDDP ordinance the city had fit very well with that.”
The GROW Community’s first phase will have 44 housing units, with 24 free-standing single-family homes or duplexes that are currently under construction, plus two buildings each with 10 apartments to rent. A park/play area space will be at the high side of the site near the Wyatt Avenue corner.
Only three houses had residents in August, but Preston said builder PHC Construction is finishing about three each month, and should have all of them done early next year. She and Davis are both buying houses in Phase I.
“Our intent is to create a tight-knit community,” the British-born Davis said. “We created a place for that to happen. We have the potential for community here.”
As for the HDDP, he said it’s “a brilliant ordinance” and “what it allowed us to do that’s most beneficial, is create fee-simple lots for the homes,” so they could be sold as single-family houses instead of condominiums, for which it’s harder to get construction financing.
“Our density is no higher than what could have been built here” as apartments and condos, Davis noted.
While he’ll soon be living in the community, Davis won’t be as involved as the second phase at GROW starts to take shape next year. Asani decided to rework the types of housing and the site plan for the other five acres, and held a community meeting this summer to explain the changes.
Instead of homes built mostly on small but separate lots, many of the new units will be in rows of townhouses on the sides of a large central plaza where a community center will be built.
Davis isn’t critical of the developer’s changes, although he said “I think Phase 1 and Phase 2 will be two very different communities, with a different feel to them, and I think different population types.”
He also said that “supposedly what they’re proposing will be more profitable.”
Preston said the rowhouse-style arrangement was adopted in Phase 2 “so we could make better use of the space, to have more usable public open space.”
There will also be more garden space, she said, and a wider variety of unit types and sizes, including single-level homes that will meet the needs of people interested in an aging-in-place design.
There will be 87 units in Phase 2, the same as in the original design, and the redesigned project will still meet HDDP criteria.
To draw up the new Phase 2 plan, GROW worked with Jim Cutler, a renowned architect whose office is on Eagle Harbor but whose work for much of his career has been on projects in distant places.
“For a number of years I eschewed doing any work on Bainbridge Island,” Cutler said. “The only thing we’ve done was Grace Church.”
The builder he worked with a decade ago on the distinctive church with its high walls of windows was Marty Sievertson, president of Asani partner PHC Construction that’s building the homes at GROW. He suggested bringing in Cutler, who taught a University of Oregon 2012 summer program in Portland focused on environmental stewardship through design.
Cutler said the challenge at GROW was “I had to generate a site plan that fulfills all the requirements for family, and for community.”
With a five-acre site to work with, he wondered, “would it be possible to leave three acres open and still fit 87 houses?”
By CECILIA GARZA
Bainbridge Island Review Staff Writer
August 26, 2013 · 2:21 PM
In a meeting Monday with the Bainbridge Island Design Review Board, architect Jim Cutler described a shift from single-family homes to a model that was more all-of-the-above.
Phase One of construction is already wrapping up, with 20 homes sold and two apartment buildings planned for construction on Wyatt Way.
Previously, the plans for the second phase of construction described a connected block of more single-family residences.
After an owner’s analysis of the plan, however, Cutler and his team saw that the project presented too much financial risk.
“Primarily because they were in very large blocks and very similar pieces,” Cutler said.
“They didn’t have enough diversity in terms of being able to market certain diversity and furthermore, it would not be complete until they completed the whole project.”
With the makeover to the Phase Two plans, Cutler has incorporated some major changes for the project.
They have transformed what was a V-shape arrangement of the units to clusters of dwellings with substantial green common space between the structures. This has given Cutler’s team the ability to incorporate a mix of homes in the community. They will now offer apartments, condominiums and townhomes in addition to single-family homes.
The new mixture of homes at Grow will also come with sheltered garages.
With the ground fall between each side of Wyatt Way, Cutler’s design has managed to keep the structures level enough to allow for garages underneath the homes. This will create a two-story out of a one-story and a three-story home out of two story home.
The underground parking will make way for more green space for all the amenities the community envisions, including numerous community and personal gardens, a community center and plenty of play area for children.
Contact Bainbridge Island Review Staff Writer Cecilia Garza at [email protected] or 206-842-6613.
Grow Community is an urban Net Zero neighborhood on Bainbridge Island, just a 35-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. With beautifully designed solar-powered homes, shared community gardens and clean transportation options, Grow allows all generations to enjoy a high-quality and healthy lifestyle.
