Developing a Living Community with Matthew Grocoff
When the Living Building Challenge was first conceived in the early 2000's many people had their doubts. Lauded as the world's most rigorous and aspirational green building standard, the challenge was deemed almost impossible. And in many places illegal.
But what about an entire community based on those same set of green building standards? That's where Matthew Grocoff comes in. He is a founding member of THRIVE Collaborative that is one of a few developers in the world to attempt a Living Community Challenge.
On this episode Matthew talks about how his background buying and retrofitting a turn of the century house to be Net Zero for energy and water helped lead him into his current endeavor of developing Veridian at County Farm.
Veridian is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the US and will be an all-electric, mixed-income, integrated community with trails, gardens, woods, and playgrounds. Multiple building types are slated to be developed that meshes several different progressive urban forms that will definitely help put this community on the map.