The Community Green
Affordable Housing
Sandwich, MA
Community Green will be a self-reliant community, consisting of 65 housing units (studios, 1, 2, and 3-bedroom apartments) on 45 acres of land in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where formerly homeless and other low-income individuals and families will be given opportunities to lead more productive, positive and stable lives.
A 20,000 sq. ft. community center and green business enterprise building will be situated on a commercially-zoned portion of the site. An agriculture program, begun in the spring of 2008 as a community garden, will provide jobs training as well as food products for use in the commercial kitchen or for sale in local farmer’s markets.
Development Goals & Objectives:
1. Provide low-income community members with stable housing that they can afford in a supportive environment.
2. Provide tenants and members of the general community with education and training opportunities that will lead to viable employment opportunities on the Cape and islands.
3. Conduct economic development in the clean energy industry.
4. Build a development that responds to the sustainability issues of our world today, with a particular focus on the needs of Cape Cod and the islands.
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Design Goals & Objectives:
1. To house families – young and old – in spacious-feeling compact housing achieved within the budgetary and design constraints of the Low Income Tax Credit.
2. To achieve a “zero-energy” capacity in the buildings. (To do so will require renewable energy production beyond the buildings in a significant way. This is a goal not realized in the current design).
3. To establish the entire development as an educational model.
4. To create durable affordability, and provide energy security for residents.
5. Create a setting that supports vital, mutually supportive community interactions — which is (we believe) related to achieving Goals 2 and 3 above.
Overall Solution Concept:
1. Aggregate dwelling units in attached, simple rectilinear building volumes, thereby improving the capacity to achieve a highly insulated, reliably air-sealed durable enclosure within a constrained construction budget.
2. Enliven the architecture by:
a. Arranging the buildings in interesting juxtapositions — creating useful, protected outdoor spaces.
b. Enhance the building massing complexity using unconditioned “secondary” components — bike storages, mechanical spaces, porches trellises, pergolas, screen walls.
c. Preserve a significant portion of the existing vegetated landscape.
