Harmonized Resilience at Roosevelt Village: A model for equitable, replicable, grid-responsive urban housing

The Harmonized Resilience at Roosevelt Village project presents a cost-effective, low-carbon, grid-interactive design for a 6-story 71,000-square-foot mixed-use affordable housing development in San Jose, California. Exceeding the California Energy Commission’s (CEC) Next EPIC Challenge criteria, the design can sustain critical loads in both common areas and apartments during power outages for most of the year and curtail 94 percent of daily peak energy use during peak hours (4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.). Right-sizing a centralized solar-plus-storage microgrid in tandem with daily peak reductions lowers the required battery system capacity to 2.6 kilowatt-hour (kWh) per apartment. This is still enough to preserve in-unit critical services for most of the year and sets a new resilience standard for multifamily buildings that is especially valuable for supportive housing.

Informed by resident and staff focus groups as well as techno-economic analysis, this zero-emission design prioritizes economic benefit, operational simplicity for nonprofit ownership, and minimal resident disruption through reliance on proven technologies. Compared to an all-electric LEED project meeting 2022 California Building Energy Efficiency Standards (Title 24), the design reduces annual energy by 23 percent, operational carbon emissions by 70 percent, and embodied carbon by 17 percent.

Meeting the Next EPIC Challenge criteria imposes a 5 percent cost premium to the baseline design (without incentives); this is manageable from a societal perspective but exceeds acceptable levels in the current, highly competitive affordable housing finance environment. For this reason, a key goal of the project was to offer a broadly applicable design framework for dense mid-rise housing in near-coastal urban centers and to validate its recommendations through two additional case studies. A key part of this effort was to identify design and policy strategies that align affordable housing needs with grid decarbonization goals, while minimizing barriers to market transformation. These included thermal storage load shifting, maximizing PV size, and using modest (but not oversized) battery capacity, combined with policy measures, like metering reform, rate reform, and valuing non-energy benefits.