Three hundred units of rental housing and

Three hundred units of rental housing and about 125 for-sale homes have been completed and occupied in NewHolly, a Hope VI redevelopment in Southeast Seattle. The new mixed-income neighborhood replaces Holly Park, a functionally obsolete and unsafe garden apartment community. The design team, led by Weinstein Copeland Architects of Seattle, replaced the curvilinear street pattern with a modified grid, opening up streets, parks, and amenities to the larger community. To keep construction costs down while creating diverse streetscapes, the team developed a system of repetitive unit plans that include variations in roof forms and in siding patterns and colors. The units can be combined into single-family houses, duplexes, or four-unit townhomes. Plans for the 102-acre site include 800 rental units and 400 units of market-rate, for-sale housing. The latter have been selling at the rate of five a month for between $160,000 and $275,000, says Peter Greaves of Weinstein Copeland. Despite using principles espoused by the CNU, the design team believes that NewHolly should not be viewed exclusively as a new urbanist project. “We diverge from the principles because we don’t provide retail and community services in the neighborhood,” Greaves says. “It would be counterproductive to NewHolly’s integration into the community to compete with nearby retail, which is already fragile.”