Shannon interviews Lynn Eshleman of Pacific Ridge Homes at our annual Crab Feed and Elected Officials Reception. Shannon and Lynn discuss the big issues facing Snohomish County residential building professionals.

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By MBAKS Content Strategist James Slone

Reducing greenhouse emissions means housing more people in healthier, more energy-efficient homes in cities near jobs, amenities, and transit. Unfortunately, a lack of affordable options has priced residents out of booming cities like Seattle and into sprawling suburbs with long, carbonintensive commutes.

A new generation of homebuilders understands that the lack of affordable housing and climate change are related problems requiring interlinked solutions. One of the leading lights in this new way of thinking and acting is Green Canopy NODE.

Where housing is located and who can afford it matters as much as how it’s built—a realization Green Canopy NODE intuitively grasps. For them, solving the housing problem at scale means creating a new paradigm where green housing is accessible to people of all income levels. It sounds easy, but it’s complicated.

Green at Scale

Green Canopy NODE brought together Seattle-based carbonmitigating construction firm NODE with Green Canopy, a green development and construction company based in Seattle and Portland with a long history helping lead the net zero revolution.

In a 2021 press release announcing their merger, Green Canopy NODE Co-CEO Bec Chapin said that the company’s aim was “an evolution of the industry to build more houses faster that create greater health, wellbeing, and resiliency for people and communities now and in the future.”

For Aaron Fairchild, Green Canopy NODE co-CEO, it’s as much a moral question as a practical one.

“As humanity continues to grapple with the need to house more people, our communities and planet feel the strain. We’re trying to lessen the strain and offer more regenerative solutions that help build communities while prolonging the life of the resources required to do so.”

For Green Canopy NODE, transforming the homebuilding industry requires a multifaceted approach: building more housing where it’s needed, offering a full suite of development services to other housing providers, prefabricating building components offsite, and deploying an impact investment fund for projects.

Build, Build, Build

Green Canopy and NODE’s coming together allowed them to pool their respective experience in green development and technological innovation to scale up construction, leading to their multifaceted approach. I recently chatted with Fairchild to find out more about each aspect of their overall work.

Obviously, the first is building housing, lots of it.

Green Canopy NODE builds rowhouses, townhomes, and multifamily units because they’re a more affordable option for families who want to live in high-quality neighborhoods with jobs and amenities. They are experts in the “missing middle” with the real estate chops to secure land for infill development.

Not an easy ask in a city where land value is through the roof.

“It’s hard to build affordable housing in urban areas where housing is needed most,” Fairchild explains. “It requires greater subsidies and a more flexible approach. As time goes on, private, nonprofit, and public partnerships will become the norm.”

It’s not enough to just build them. They also have to be green.

“Nearly 100 percent of our homes are Built Green or Earth Advantage Certified,” says Fairchild. “At Green Canopy, we historically focused on energy efficiency. We’ve always built all-electric homes and have completed several net zero homes,” or homes that produce more energy than they take from the grid.

Building green homes not only helps the environment; it also makes housing a more affordable proposition. “Because we build homes that perform well beyond code, utility costs are lower, and residents save money.” Remarkably, the company is able to deliver net-zero-ready homes to the market at the same price as code-built.

But decarbonization is no longer just about saving energy. Green Canopy NODE has recently started focusing on carbon emitted from the production of their building materials, what’s known as embodied carbon. Making sure embodied carbon doesn’t outweigh a home’s performance is the next frontier in green building.

Promoting Innovation

Perhaps the most essential element of lowering green construction costs is using new technologies to increase productivity, including standardizing building components, modernizing the workforce by training them in the latest in construction methods, and manufacturing pre-fab building components.

For Fairchild, manufacturing is especially important. “To scale up and lower costs, the industry will need to embrace the power of off-site manufacturing more and more. It is the only known pathway to the sort of efficiencies required to build more sustainable, higherquality, lower-cost housing.”

By manufacturing offsite in the controlled environment of a factory and quickly assembling components onsite, Green Canopy NODE avoids inefficiencies. The company is investing heavily in pre-fabricated solutions that can be moved directly from manufacturing facilities to project sites.

They’re especially excited about fabricating cross-laminated timber (CLT)—an engineered wood product made from wood stacked and glued together at 90-degree angles—for residential mid-to-low rise construction.

CLT is easy to carve and groove with computer-controlled cutting machines, making it uniform and easy to install. The best part? “Along with being a beautiful and exceptionally strong building material,” Fairchild enthuses, “CLT also sequesters carbon and can be reused at the end of a building’s life."

Spreading the Love: Development Services and Impact Investment

To deliver the high volume of housing needed to have a substantial impact, Green Canopy NODE also needs to be able to employ their strategies on an expansive multi-project scale. The best way to do that is by extending a helping hand to other builders and nonprofit housing providers.

Their real estate development services have helped complete hundreds of homes reliably and cost-effectively. Current projectpartners include Sunnyside Village Co-Housing, Habitat for Humanity, Africatown Community Land Trust, Homestead Community Land Trust, and Grow Bainbridge.

Their services cover all aspects of homebuilding, including acquisition, finance, estimating and feasibility, architecture, construction, and warranty services. The key to their services’ effectiveness, says Fairchild, is that they’re vertically integrated.

“Vertical integration means our team can work with you at any stage of the development process, avoiding the headache of external bottlenecks.” It lowers the cost of developing housing projects because it cuts construction costs by consolidating different stages like R&D and procurement.

The result is a high degree of flexibility and control. “We’re able to rapidly respond to requests, enhancing our ability to collaborate.” And because the company manages real estate funds, they can drive housing demand in a way that’s “aligned with our sustainability and technology goals.”

The company created an impact investment fund management firm, Green Canopy NODE Capital, to invest in infill building projects in Seattle and Portland.

Currently, Green Canopy NODE offers both investment and fund management for more than 90 shareholders and over 45 limited partners. Over the last decade, the company has leveraged their building expertise and knowledge of the housing market to raise and manage over $70 million in accredited investor capital.

Heart and Soul

Green Canopy NODE has already tallied an enviable list of accomplishments. As of this writing, they have built more than 300 Built Green and Earth Advantage Certified homes in and around Seattle and Portland, mitigated 33,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas, and steered investment to six major infill projects. And they’re just getting started.

This success isn’t just an outcome of their business acumen. It’s driven by a housing philosophy. Housing is the “nexus of our lives,” their website declares, “providing shelter, safety, and security,” a place “where one can develop a sense of love, belonging, acceptance with friends and family.”

Housing is also a solution to sprawl, homelessness, and climate change. Its importance goes far beyond profitability. It may seem idealistic, but the company genuinely believes that a change in paradigm requires a change in thinking. Fairchild says that a sense of mission permeates their company culture.

The Green Canopy NODE team, he says, shares a sense of purpose, and “a desire to regenerate communities and environments.” When they take on new team members and partners, they “look for people from communities seeking greater empowerment and renewal.”

Of course, technology, experience, and expertise are crucial to carrying out the day-to-day work. But it’s their focus on community that may be the key to unlocking the new homebuilding paradigm. It’s the heart and soul of Green Canopy NODE.

Article photos courtesy of Green Canopy NODE

By MBAKS Content Strategist James Slone

Everett-based Pallet is helping lift people out of homelessness one shelter at a time.

Cabins at Chandler Village in Los Angeles

Homelessness is a national problem. While a lot of the media focus has been on California, all major cities in the U.S. have large homeless populations, especially where affordable housing is scarce. Depending on who’s counting, King County alone has between 13,000 and 40,000 unhoused people.

For many individuals, past run-ins with the justice system and struggles with addiction or mental health make it difficult to utilize traditional shelters. But a temporary shelter that is clean, safe, and private can help them attain stability, access care, and move towards a permanent home.

That’s where Pallet comes in.

A public benefit corporation based in Everett, Pallet’s mission is to create “private and safe spaces for anyone transitioning from homelessness to more permanent housing.” How? By fabricating private sleeping cabins with lockable doors that can be easily assembled anywhere.

Composed of fiberglassreinforced plastic, foam insulating cores for shelves and panels, and aluminum framing, Pallet cabins are less expensive than traditional shelters and can be deployed quickly and cheaply to create rapid-response villages anywhere in the country.

For Amy King, CEO and founder of Pallet, the company’s business model is not the end point but the beginning. “Our ultimate goal,” she tells me, is “a world where no one goes unsheltered.” But she’s quick to add that others will “have to step in and innovate to make that happen.”

“People Are the Bottom Line”

Pallet grew out of Square Peg Construction, a company Amy founded with her husband Brady in 2014 to employ formerly incarcerated and homeless people in homebuilding. While helping employees reenter the workforce, they realized that many struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This made staying in congregate shelters, where residents reside together in a shared space, virtually impossible.

Years before, the Kings had explored the possibility of deploying private shelters for families displaced by natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Perhaps, they thought, the disaster idea could be adapted.

“The real lightbulb moment for us was when we brought the original idea to our staff,” says Amy. “They unanimously agreed that a community-based model with private space was the missing piece” of the housing puzzle. That led to the shelter design that, in Amy’s words, “encourages people to come inside who would otherwise reject services.”

Community Focus

Pallet’s model is already bearing fruit. Since 2019, they’ve constructed thousands of sleeping cabins and are looking to build thousands more.

“We’ve built nearly 100 communities in 50 cities across the U.S.,” says Amy, “with 76 currently operating in 45 cities, seven in Washington alone. That’s one in five states!”

Building individual units is just one part of creating villages. To be effective, they have to offer more than just shelter. 24/7 onsite social services and public amenities—such as laundry and shower facilities—are essential to improving the quality of life for residents transitioning to permanent housing.

To deliver this, Pallet works closely with nonprofits and municipalities across the country.

“Our primary customers are public entities: cities, counties, states, and soon, federal agencies,” Amy tells me. “But we do sell shelters directly to nonprofits and faith-based groups to build the cabins themselves.”

Working closely with community-based partners is essential to success. “We’ve met hundreds of service providers across the country that are doing amazing work in their communities to serve those in need. And we always defer to them, since they know what’s best for their communities.”

Construction for Change volunteers assemble 20 Pallet shelters in Everett

Anywhere, Anytime

Pallet’s villages can be built in a wide range of locations and easily moved or dismantled. Because the villages are only active for a few months to a few years, they can be placed on vacant land before it’s permanently developed— making the cost of renting the land negligible.

Vertical integration makes Pallet products scalable and cost-effective, further bringing down the price of deployment. Each panel is fabricated in Pallet’s shop in Everett before being shipped to the site. According to Amy, they can fit 20 to 25 standard shelters, accessories included, in one 53-foot trailer.

Pallet cabins are built to last for up to ten years, pretty impressive for structures that can be built by two or three people in under an hour. Community rooms are a little more complicated, taking one to two days for assembly, and hygiene facilities must be connected to onsite services by licensed plumbers and electricians.

Depending on the needs of the customer, the deployment team can assemble the village in a matter of days, especially when partnering with local organizations like Conservation Corps or Team Rubicon.

Quality Assured

Before Pallet ships a cabin, customers are contractually required to meet five “dignity standards”: access to services, hygiene centers, food, transportation, and security for resident safety.

I asked Amy about organizations that can’t meet the requirements. “We have an in-house Advisory Services and Government Affairs team who will assist them,” she explains. “We also have a village success manager who travels around the country auditing our sites and serving as a partner to help them succeed in getting their residents’ needs addressed.”

“We’ve had the privilege of meeting hundreds of amazing service providers and are quickly learning how to assess their success. We’re constantly working with them to identify and share best practices and serve as a catalyst for collaboration and idea sharing.”

Private bathroom and showers at the Pallet village at Skagit First Step Center in Burlington

Prioritizing People

Pallet has had a great run thus far and continues to grow. But Amy says there is still much to be done. “Pallet is not yet profitable due to very high growth in the last few years and investment in our ability to scale to serve as many communities as possible.”

“A public benefit corporation, Pallet’s profits are designated first and foremost to our mission,” says Amy, “which, beyond housing people, is providing living wage jobs to people that need them most in the communities in which we operate.”

Pallet currently has 105 full-time employees. Many of them (about 80%) have histories of homelessness, addiction, and/ or justice system involvement. To stabilize and help them break the cycle of poverty, Pallet offers health insurance, 401(k) plans, mental health support, on-the-job and life skills training, and other support.

This doesn’t just benefit their employees; it helps the construction industry as a whole, which continues to face a shortage of skilled workers.

“As demand for our product continues to grow, we plan to create more production facilities in cities across the country that have the highest rates of homelessness and recidivism to train the next generation of [the] manufacturing and construction workforce.”

Big Problems Require Many Solutions

Scalability is key to taking on a problem of such magnitude. The scale Pallet’s aiming for is epic. “In five to ten years,” says Amy, “Pallet will have a global presence and will offer products to meet the needs of international communities displaced by conflict, disaster, and poverty.”

This is no small order, and Amy encourages other companies to take up the challenge. In a recent interview with LA Currents, she declared, “We welcome competition in the space and want people to come up with more innovative ideas. We need more housing; everyone agrees with that.”

She tells me, “We recognize that the global housing crisis is too massive for Pallet alone to solve and hope to inspire and collaborate with other housing innovators to create housing technology that can overcome the many challenges of the regulatory and built environment.”

Pallet may not be able to take on homelessness alone, but if other innovators follow their path, one day everyone will have access to a home of their own—or at least take the first major step on their way.

Pallet has been building villages across the nation. Here’s a look at just a few of them.