“It’s really happening,” laughs Matt Grocoff, his face flushed in the wind. “I can’t tell you the number of people who are literally ‘I didn’t think this would ever actually get off the ground.’ And now you’ve got homes that you can actually walk through!’”
Matt Grocoff, Dave Eifrid, and Sara Hammerschmidt expect to welcome their first residents in May. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
Grocoff is cofounder of Thrive Collaborative, and this is Veridian at County Farm. The name is inspired by the Latin word for “green,” and Grocoff and cofounder Dave Eifrid have set extremely ambitious environmental goals. There’s no natural gas service, and though it’s on the electric grid, they hope to achieve “net-zero” emissions. With solar panels for power, batteries for storage, and geothermal heat pumps for heating and cooling, they say, homeowners should produce all the energy they need on an annual basis.
They had hoped to break ground in 2021, but the pandemic set them back a year. When they did break ground in 2022, “the governor sent out someone to speak on her behalf,” Grocoff reports. “Debbie Dingell helped us plant our founder’s oak tree.”
It’s late January, and five three-story buildings are nearly complete. Despite the cold there are workers all over.
“The barn will be right here,” Grocoff says, pointing to an empty plot of ground. “The farmhouse building will have on the ground floor the Honey Locust Farm Stop.” Modeled after the Argus Farm Stop, he says, it will be “the world’s first net-zero-energy grocery store,” with “a hundred percent local supply.”
Though there’ll be parking for cars and plenty of plugs for electric vehicles, Grocoff says Veridian will stress nonmotorized transportation—another empty lot is “gonna be a bike maintenance and a repair shed.” As he envisions it, “you’ll get on the paved trail, and you’ll go to Trader Joe’s right through the woods. And your traffic is gonna be stopping for the deer!”
We enter one of the buildings through the open garage, and despite no door and the noise outside, it’s suddenly much quieter. “We have the insulated ceiling in here,” Grocoff explains. It’s dead quiet inside thanks to thick insulation and triple-pane windows.
Grocoff, a lawyer with ecological stars in his eyes, has absolute faith in Veridian—and humanity. As part of the green energy transition, “I truly believe we’re living in one of the most wildly exciting and optimistic times in human history!”
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In a follow-up phone interview, Grocoff recounts how they got the site. It was 2016, and the county was looking to redevelop the former site of its juvenile court. As he recalls it, then-county commissioner Conan Smith called and said, ‘Hey, you know, the county has this land that we really want to do something with, but if we’re not careful, it’s just gonna be the same junk that always was. Would you be interested in proposing something here?”
He was, and though Thrive offered only $500,000 while others offered as much as $3.45 million, the county sold it to them. As Smith recalled later, “Matt was the one who was most enthusiastic about incorporating environmentalism into the design.”
Affordable housing, too: Avalon Housing’s fifty-unit The Grove at Veridian is under development next door. “We are excited to have closed on our financing and to have begun our site work,” emails Wendy Carty-Saxon, Avalon’s real estate development director. “We will be under construction the rest of this year and all through 2024 and anticipate completion around July 2025, with lease-up by the end of 2025.”
Avalon hopes to make the community center net-zero. The apartments will be all-electric, “to be able to transition to renewable energy sources when and if we are able to implement those projects in the future,” Carty-Saxon writes.
By early February, Grocoff emails, buyers had reserved all twenty-four of Veridian’s Nest Flats (400-square-foot studios priced “in the low $200,000s”) and thirty-four Trillium Lofts (785-square-foot two-bedrooms in the “low $400,000s”). They’re asking the city for approval to add eleven studios, and more of both types will be available for reservation this summer.
Three- and four-bedroom Park Home and Terrace Home townhouses (“mid-to-high $500,000s” and “high $800s to mid-$900s”) were still available, with more this summer. Still to come are nine detached Park Homes (five bedrooms, “$1.2 million+”).
The pandemic stalled work for “at least a year,” Grocoff says, and it also impacted prices. “Construction costs have gone up by ten to twenty percent, record amounts, annually,” he says. Yet Veridian’s director of sustainable development, Sara Hammerschmidt, says they’ve only raised prices by 8 percent since originally announcing them.
Grocoff credits strong relationships with suppliers and the fact that they don’t need a large profit margin. He figures they’ve “spent to date probably over $15 million,” and while it’s too soon to know the final cost, “we expect to be profitable in the end.”
Buyers will benefit from the 30 percent renewable energy tax credits in 2022’s federal Inflation Reduction Act. And all “the homes are designed to produce more energy on an annual basis than we forecast home buyers will use,” Hammerschmidt adds.
“Yes,” says Grocoff. “Everyone can be their own ‘nanogrid!’” They anticipate that Veridian will ultimately produce around 1.3 megawatts.
The first residents should move in this May, and they anticipate being at full occupancy in 2025. But Grocoff won’t be living there himself.
He and his wife, Kelly, “live in a net-zero home on the Old West Side,” Grocoff explains. Their daughters “go to school in the neighborhood, and they scream at us every time we talk about moving anywhere.” Even though their girls are going to go to college someday, he laughs, “by the time these are up for resale, they’re gonna be a lot more expensive!”
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Sarah and Garret Patterson were among the first buyers. Sarah, a U.S. Army project manager, says they’d wanted to “move to Ann Arbor ‘cause that’s the city we love to spend our time in.” But she couldn’t find anything that convinced her Ford software engineer husband to leave their four-bedroom home in Farmington until she found Veridian.
“It’s net-zero,” Sarah explains in a February phone call. “It’s high-density living. We won’t have a yard to take care of. It’s in Ann Arbor and walkable to everything.” And they loved the idea of having their own power source and battery. “We lose power so much in our house,” Sarah says.
That was 2022, and there was nothing to see yet except piles of dirt. But “we walked through County Farm Park, and you can see the development from there,” says Garret. They fell in love with the park, and “thought it would be so cool to live right next to it.”
Sarah says they picked a three-bedroom, two-bath townhome because “it’s affordable for us. There’s only three of us—the Park Home was the perfect size.” They paid 5 percent of the $520,000 price up front and hope to move in this summer.
When we talked, they had just been back to the site. “We actually got to walk through the Park Home for the first time ever and see what the layout’s going to be,” Sarah says. They took their two-year-old daughter with them. “She helps us pick out paint colors,” says Garret.
Calls & Letters, Apr. 2024
Reader Jack Cederquist flagged a mistake in our article about Veridian at County Farm Park. We’d written that the net-zero neighborhood would have a solar generating capacity of 1.3 megawatts a year. Cederquist guessed—and Veridian’s Matt Grocoff confirms—that 1.3 megawatts is the peak generation from the project’s solar panels, not an annual total.
