Northfield Raises the Bar for High-Performance Affordable Housing
The Hillcrest Village development from Community Action Center of Northfield meets today’s needs with future-focused solutions
By Sheri Hansen | February 11, 2021
The site plan for Hillcrest Village, a project slated to break ground in spring 2021. Drawing by Argyle Design.
FEATURE
The City of Northfield has set ambitious goals for its energy future: It aims to have 100 percent of produced energy be carbon-free by 2030, and to have the entire community be carbon-free by 2040. Hillcrest Village, a new design-build affordable housing development in Northfield, is rising to meet that challenge; when completed, it will be among the highest-performing housing developments in the state.
The project is the brainchild of the Community Action Center (CAC) of Northfield, which owns the lots and will manage the homes once they are built. Goals for the project included integrating the development into the community, making it flexible and adaptable for the future, maintaining affordability for residents over time, and ensuring high performance from an energy and systems standpoint. These goals are being accomplished through a collaborative, inclusive, and data-driven design strategy.
Charting a New Course in the Predesign Phase
Given its ambitions for the project, CAC enlisted experts to help them create an innovative, equitable, and resilient development process. Martha Larson, Manager of Campus Energy and Sustainability at Carleton College and a CAC volunteer, was the project manager who helped bring it all together.
“We were very fortunate to have CAC board members who just got what was possible with Hillcrest Village,” says Larson. “This project will intertwine social justice and environmental issues, so we raised the funds to get the right consultants to help us work the predesign process for success.”
CAC engaged Precipitate, an architecture firm specializing in advanced sustainability, to assist in the predesign process, and it received a grant from the University of Minnesota Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR) to harness CSBR’s expertise in emerging technologies.
“We knew we had to have data that showed return on investment for up-front spending, and also space to carefully consider all the options for the project to make it as welcoming, healthy, and sustainable as possible throughout its life cycle,” says Larson. “The modeling done by Precipitate and CSBR helped us look at options for site placement, building envelope, mechanical systems, user experience, and more, which got us to the great result that we’ll be breaking ground on soon.”
Driven by Data
Precipitate’s Elizabeth Turner, AIA, emphasizes the importance of careful exploration in the predesign phase to the final success of the project. “The predesign process we had for this project allowed us to focus our work and understand what success meant to all of the stakeholders.”
For Hillcrest Village, that meant evaluating options for high-performance design elements to maximize the lifetime efficiency of the project, and thinking about the feel of the project for residents and the surrounding community.
“We knew we had to have data that showed return on investment for up-front spending, and also space to carefully consider all the options for the project to make it as welcoming, healthy, and sustainable as possible throughout its life cycle.”
“Because CAC will own and operate these buildings for a long time, they were thinking not just about triple-pane windows and a well-sealed building envelope but also about how residents and the community will experience the project,” says Turner. “Will it support residents’ health? Will it help them integrate into the broader community and put down roots? We made sure that all the voices at the table during planning were treated equally, so that the long-range impacts on those stakeholders were understood as well as they could possibly be.”
The predesign process also included modeling and other research services provided by the Center for Sustainable Building Research. CSBR often serves as a bridge between research into sustainable building techniques and their real-world application—a role that has been valued by the collaborators on this project.
“This team was committed to high-performance goals, and we had an opportunity to help them bring that to life using data and systems analysis,” says CSBR research fellow Dan Handeen, Assoc. AIA. “For example, they started with a commitment to net-zero development. But there are several definitions of net zero out there, so we helped them focus on the right one for the project, and model the different systems that would help them get where they wanted to go.”
CSBR worked closely with Precipitate to model different elements of Passive House design, from advanced solutions for building envelope and insulation to those for thermal bridging and mechanical systems. Their access to information on options from all over the world helped the Hillcrest Village team develop a combination of systems that will get them to the performance level they seek.
“Our goal at CSBR is to help build capacity within communities to take projects to the next level,” says Handeen. “A lot of the low-hanging-fruit changes to the development process have already been widely implemented, so now we need to help build understanding of the more technical and detailed approaches.”
Modeling the Future
The combined efforts of CAC stakeholders, Precipitate, CSBR, and the design-build team, including Sweetgrass Design Studio, will result in a high-performance development that comes close to qualifying for Passive House certification. The homes will be affordable, energy efficient, and healthy, and will blend in with the community. The CAC team believes Hillcrest Village will be a model for success for all Minnesota communities.
“The lessons we’ve learned from this project, both about the process and about the importance of data and modeling, are something that more projects could benefit from,” says Larson. “When challenges are new, they can be daunting, but we have the numbers to show how we got to this point. And we can’t wait to have residents experiencing life in these homes, to add that element to this story.”
“This project is a perfect example of what’s possible with a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team,” says Turner. “We won’t have a future that is socially just and carbon-neutral if we don’t have all voices at the table and contributing.”