Next Phase of Downtown’s Grow Community Now Underway
It’s growing – again! The third phase of the Grow Community – the urban “Net Zero” neighborhood in Downtown Winslow – is now underway.
Grow is bordered by Wyatt Way, Grow Avenue and Shepard Way NE. The new construction, which will include 14 single family homes, and will be located alongside Shepard Way, facing south.
“It’s the last piece (of the project) that never got built,” says Jonathan Davis, the principal architect on Grow Phases 1 and 3. The development will be “bookends that are more in character with Phase 1, with similar materials,” such as corrugated metal, hardie board, cedar wood and batten siding, similar paint colors and so on. Like Phase 1, the new phase will consist of two-story stand-alone units.
The second phase of the project is a more standard condominium development with several floors built over an underground parking garage. It comprises 135 units. Grow, which is located on land that was once government housing, originally broke ground in 2012, with subdivision and site plan review approved by the City in 2014, and Phases 1 and 2 completed thereafter. Phase 1 includes approximately 23 townhouses that mostly front Wyatt Way.
Davis says he and the project’s developer – Green Canopy NODE – hope Phase 3 will be completed by the fall of 2023. The new phase will include eight two-story homes of approximately 1,150 square feet, all of which will face Shepard Way, and six larger homes of approximately 1,700 square feet that will be accessed from a nearby walkway. Each of the larger homes will be wheelchair accessible and will include a master bedroom on the main floor designed for “aging in place.”
The Grow Community includes solar-powered homes, shared community gardens and clean transportation options, and attempts to follow designs laid out by “One Planet Living,” which adheres to 10 guiding principles of sustainable living. Some of these guidelines include zero carbon, zero waste, sustainable water, transportation and so forth.
“They’ve been built to five-star green standards,” Davis explains. “They are LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum,” the highest standard in green construction. “The big deal is energy performance,” says the architect. The homes will follow energy efficiency requirements that are above those set down by Washington State Energy codes.
According to its website, Seattle-based Green Canopy NODE, which is acting as Grow’s Phase 3 builder as well as its developer, “is guided by the desire for sustainable and healthy homes to be accessible to people at every income level.”
Davis, meanwhile, says the prices for the new homes will be set after construction is complete. “They will be market rate prices, but we don’t have any numbers,” he says. It all depends on “what the market will sustain and what it will cost to build them.”
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