Sustainable facelift of a World War II housing project combines social and
environmental needs.

Rosie the Riveter wouldn’t know the old neighborhood.

She’d probably want to move back.

The Seattle Housing Authority has taken the deteriorated one-time temporary housing project for factory workers known as High Point and is transforming it into an award winning, mixed-use residential development that is riding the cutting edge of sustainable design.

The standards it set for itself and owner/builders like Portland, Oregon-based Devland, Inc., created a sustainable laboratory of integrated design concepts. This includes innovative stormwater system to porous pavements and bioswales to energy efficient building units.

“There are a lot of layers to the project,” said Tom Phillips, Senior Development Manager for the housing authority and the project’s developer. “There is the sustainable piece in the housing and in the streetscape and there is affordable housing mixed-in with market-rate housing, which is pretty revolutionary.”

Started four years ago and slated to be completed in 2010, the project, which is located ten minutes from downtown Seattle, has already drawn favorable attention beyond that of home buyers who are snapping up properties as they become available.

The Pacific Coast Builders recently awarded the project its Gold Nugget for Master Planned Community of the Year and the Urban Land Institute named it one of the ten outstanding projects in the country.

“This project will have 15 units per acre when we’re done, but it will perform like a mountain meadow when it rains,” Phillip said.


Temporary Beginning
The 120-acre, 34-block neighborhood in West Seattle known as High Point was built in 1942 as temporary housing for workers in the city’s shipyards and factories during World War II.

“In 1953, it was turned over to the Seattle Housing Authority,” Phillips said. “Over the years, as society got rough, it got rough. Particularly in the 1990s, it was a dangerous place.”

The streets, sewer systems, and other infrastructure were breaking down; homes were in bad shape. So, prior to the new millennium, the housing authority decided to make a change. It turned to the federal government and landed a $35 million HOPE VI grant from the Housing the Urban Development department. That money leveraged a $200 million financing package to totally raze the neighborhood and rebuilt its infrastructure, literally from below ground up.

“We cleared the whole site. All you see is dirt and the trees that we saved,” Phillips said. Even the sidewalks and streets were torn up, with the cement crushed for new road bed material. “We put in all new water lines and sewer lines. We took the telephone poles down and put in all underground cable.”


Multi-Use Dream
The project will host a range of housing types from market rate homes and rental units to assisted living and low income housing. It is being built in two phase, in part to accommodate those who lived in the old neighborhood. Some who chose to leave permanently got a voucher to acquire property elsewhere, while those who wished to return were promised a place when the project was done.

“We’re the master developer. We created the site plan,” Phillips said. “We are building 600 rental units and we are selling land to builders who are building another 1000 units.”

For those who want to buy, there is a range of prices in a market where the median cost of a home is nearly $400,000. A studio flat of 500 square feet will run $180,000.

“$630,000 would be a three bedroom, 3 ½ baths, three-story house with a view,” Phillips said.

The project sports 35 “Breathe-Easy” houses, special spec homes that were built to address issues faced by children with asthma.

“University of Washington medical folks do pre-tests and post-tests, monitoring the health of the children. When they move in and a year late to see how they’re doing,” he said.

Also incorporated into the design is a clinic, a library, a four-acre common central park, five neighborhood parks and a neighborhood center to compliment existing athletic fields and a recreation area near by.


Sustainable Elements
The housing authority set the bar high on sustainability, for both the infrastructure it would install to the homes and the systems they would support. It paid special attention to stormwater by retaining more water on the site to filtrate through to the ground water.

Porous pavements are put to use for sidewalks and other hard surfaces, but the primary tools incorporated into the design are bioswales instead of curb and gutter.

“The idea is the streets slant to one side and the water goes through curb cuts into bioswales, where it gets cleaned by the soil,” Phillips said.

Strategically placed perforated pipe is installed several feet below grade to drain off excess water to keep the soils from becoming saturated.

“Some will make its way to a storage pond and slowly be released into a salmon-bearing creek,” Phillips said. A storm sewer system was also designed into the initial plans. “It’s a back up system. In a few years, we may not even put that in,” Phillips said.

Channeling stormwater from the building to the bioswales and design of porous pavements was the challenge faced by Cindy Wellborn, a civil engineer with David Evans and Associates, Inc., which provides engineering services for its sister company, Devland Inc. Her solution was to create conveyance furrows away from the homes, and landscaped with plants and rock.

“In order to disperse as much of the runoff as we could, I used dispersal trenches and gravel level spreaders, so it would not be a concentrated flow, less energy and would be spread out over a greater area,” she said. Another tool was the use of yard drains that linked to the underground system of perforated pipe. For driveways and patios, she used pavers to take advantage of their aesthetic value while still allowing water to drain through.

Builders like Devland were given a set of overall “green” criteria to use in building designs that were energy efficient and sustainable. Phillips said they wanted the new homes to go above and beyond the building specs of the local building code, and called upon builders to use the green standards set by the Master Builders Association in the Seattle area.

“Since then, the Energy Star program has come into being and some of the builders like Devland decided to just go all the way and use that program,” Phillips said.

Devland’s President Eric Evans said they took their one block portion of the development to create a zone that would reach back to Seattle’s past.

“We developed a series of five, moderate sized, 1,640 foot bungalows that harkens back to those that you see in old parts of Seattle that we thought residents would fall in love with,” he said.

Coupled with two, smaller carriage homes on the block and an innovative, shared-parking garage arrangement, the homes have sold well.

“We responded to an RFP for builder/developers in early 2005, began construction in early 2006, with the last delivery in April 2007,” he said.

The housing authority called for the homes to be well insulated and wrapped tight to prevent energy loss and energy efficient. Devland’s approach called for fiberglass insulation to be blown in behind nylon mesh on the interior stud walls and around outlets, along with Energy Star-rated water heaters and heat-pumps systems.

They took the extra step in using hard wood flooring from the deconstruction of an area high school for several of the homes.

“It’s beautiful, 1900 maple that gave a lot of the buyers a connection with the community,” he said. “We did the same thing with some of the exterior ornamentation. We bought some bricks from the deconstruction of an old, 1900 bakery and put those on the porch columns.”


Lessons Learned
Evans said the project fell in line with his company’s core purpose to improve the quality of life while demonstrating a stewardship for the natural and built environment. Positive lessons have been learned in the process.  

“We’re looking at the next generation of these houses, to improve them to where they are highly efficient and they can accommodate a low-level solar array to approach net-zero energy thresholds,” he said.

Wellborn said the varied and wide ranging application of such low impact development concepts can be incorporated in other places.

“It’s a matter of getting it accepted by some of our agencies. That seems to be a challenge right now along with acceptance by clients who might be willing to try it,” she said.
Phillips said the project is a trend-setter.

“It’s a healthy place for everybody to live. People really appreciate it. It’s more than its component parts,” Phillips said. “It’s something special because those component parts are very integrated together.” SLDT

Devland, Inc., and David Evans and Associates, Inc. are wholly-owned subsidiaries of David Evans Enterprises, Inc. (DEEI), based in Portland, Oregon. DEEI and its subsidiaries have more than 20 offices in seven states and employ more than 1,000.