The High Point Neighborhood is Seattle’s first green community, and represents a model for future urban and neighborhood developments. Started in 2000, the project is among the first in the United States to integrate new urbanism, eco-friendly homes, and new technologies in drainage design. The project replaces a 716-unit low-income housing project built in 1942 with approximately 1,600 new dwelling units in a wide variety of building types. The units consist of low income, senior, and market-rate housing.
As High Point’s principal infrastructure planner and designer, SvR provided the civil engineering and landscape architecture for the new street grid, undergrounding of utilities, site utility infrastructure system, and the natural drainage system and right of way plantings for the 120-acre, 34-block area.
The natural drainage system includes: amended soils, raingardens, grassy and vegetated infiltration swales, conveyance swales, two miles of pervious sidewalks, and the first public porous pavement street in Washington State, 32nd Ave SW. This system helps to improve water quality in the nearby Longfellow Creek by reverting the site, 10% of the Longfellow Creek basin, to pasture conditions.