By MBAKS Marketing Coordinator Chancellor Wallin

In decades past, public health crises brought to mind a very different picture than what’s painted today. Before shelter-inplace, school closures, and social distancing, the most serious threats facing the American public existed outside our homes.

Now, a new set of risks have emerged.

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it was how to spend a lot of time with the most important person in each of our lives—ourselves. While we were stuck at home in a world with an uncertain future, the pandemic brought with it an unintended side effect: an increase in the prevalence of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse disorders worldwide.

MBAKS community partner Valley Cities Behavioral Health Care knows this better than anyone. Jessica Forshee, clinic manager of the Kent branch, described how the past two and half years changed their operations.

“Our clinics never closed throughout the pandemic. While our care became accessible and flexible with telehealth, it also flooded. The past two years have been a constant balancing act between supporting our staff and clients. But we never closed our doors.”

Established in 1967, Valley Cities is a nonprofit organization that has been providing care to people of all ages for over 50 years. With a dozen clinics scattered all over the greater Seattle area, Valley Cities offers comprehensive outpatient and inpatient treatment in direct response to the changing needs of the communities they exist in.

Today their services include licensed mental health care counseling and substance use disorder treatment, outreach to unhoused and displaced members of our community, and specialized care that delivers counseling and family support to veterans and their loved ones.

At the core of their philosophy is the belief that the resiliency and strength of the human spirit can overcome the obstacles that confront the people who walk through their doors or dial in to their phone lines. But, unlike many traditional mental health care providers, their belief in a holistic approach supports individuals in reaching their highest potential.

Working collaboratively with over 25 community partners, Valley Cities is integral to the King County mental health care system. They believe recovery is a road with many different exits and that every patient has different needs and obstacles—and understanding these is key to providing care that works.

Rejecting prescriptive treatment means some of their services aren’t what you’d expect. Resume building, professional development, and community connections all make the list. This intersectional approach means that behavioral health treatment doesn’t always entail therapists and prescriptions. It’s not enough to cure someone of their depression or anxiety if their environment is cultivating bad or unsafe habits and behaviors.

Valley Cities comprises teams of nurses, grant writers, and case workers—talented professionals from all different backgrounds with a singular purpose: helping give back to our community. These passions aligned in the fall of this year to forge yet another community partnership: MBAKS’ Painting a Better Tomorrow.

Jessica explained, “It’s important to make our clients feel like our space is welcoming, soothing, and calming so they feel safe enough to access care. That’s exactly why we looked for programs and grants to create spaces of belonging.”

Built in the 1990s, the Kent clinic is one of Valley Cities’ most prominent offices— servicing the entirety of south Seattle with the biggest capacity and staff the organization has to offer. Over the years, the priority has been on keeping their care accessible and open; cosmetic and decorative repairs, while necessary, fell to the wayside.

That’s why on November 5, MBAKS staff, members, and volunteers took to the walls of the Valley Cities Kent office to provide a fresh coat of paint— and a promise. While our means may be different, for a moment, our ends aligned for the same goal—Caring about the people around us. And that’ll be a promise worth keeping.

Interested in learning more about the Valley Cities mission? Whether you’d like to donate, volunteer, or be a part of others’ recovery journey, Valley Cities is always looking for those passionate about the cause. There’s a multitude of ways to help, just as Valley Cities believes there are many ways to care. Learn more at valleycities.org/volunteer.

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Nona Raybern, PR & Media Manager
Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties
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Master Builders Association Inducts Todd Levitt as President

BELLEVUE, Wash—January 11, 2021—The Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties (MBAKS) inducted Todd Levitt as its 2021 president of the board of directors during a virtual passing of the gavel ceremony in December 2020.

Levitt brings an extensive background in homebuilding to his role as MBAKS president. He has worked for more than 19 years across four western states on the land side of homebuilding—13 years as vice president of land at Pulte Homes and six years at Murray Franklyn as director of entitlements and government affairs. Levitt received his bachelor's in marine engineering from the United States Merchant Marine Academy and his master's in finance from California State University, Los Angeles.

Levitt set the 2021 MBAKS agenda as one of service: to the communities that homebuilders work in, to the jurisdictions that make housing policy possible, and to the association’s members and staff.

“Service is something I am very passionate about that is engrained within me,” says Levitt. “If we can serve our jurisdictions in a way that helps them be more successful with their councils, staff, and residents, this should only help us in accomplishing our goals in delivering more housing that is desperately needed in our very fast-growing region.”

Over the last four years, Levitt has performed as the service chair for his son’s Boy Scout troop, where he has organized community events like canned food drives, trail clean-ups, and Santa Scouts, a program that generates food, clothing, and games for underserved children. He also has dedicated time and resources to Habitat for Humanity and helped Doxa Housing build homes in Mexico, as well as participating in MBAKS’ Rampathon, where accessibility ramps are built for those in critical need.

The newly inducted 2021 board of directors is rounded out with First Vice President Cameron McKinnon (Gamut360 Holdings), Second Vice President Traci Tenhulzen (Tenhulzen Residential), Secretary Luellen Smith (Rhino Wine Cellars & Cooling Systems), and Immediate Past President Brian Holtzclaw (Village Life).

About MBAKS

Founded in 1909 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties (MBAKS) is the nation’s oldest and largest local homebuilders association. Like our founders, our members continue to take a leading role in all facets of homebuilding and support the planning for a growing, thriving, and inclusive region.

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