Davies St.

A pro bono project with Greater Fredericksburg Habitat for Humanity: a cul-de-sac of six homes on a difficult site, where construction began in late August 2026.

The site is most of the story. Wetlands and Resource Protection Area buffers take up the majority of the parcel, confining construction to a small portion of it. The original hope was twenty-two homes. What the environmental constraints permit is six. That is the arithmetic of building affordable housing on land that is affordable precisely because it is hard to build on, and it is why the approvals took several years to work through the city.

Six homes from one layout. The houses are modular, and we worked directly with the manufacturer to choose plans that would fit the small lots the buildable area left us. All six are variations on a single layout — some front entry, some side entry, some mirrored — which keeps cost down without producing six identical houses in a row. Varying entry position and handedness across a cul-de-sac does more for the look of a street than varying the houses themselves would.

The renderings are for fundraising. A development like this has to be paid for before it can be built, and donors respond to a place they can picture. Showing the homes in their actual setting — the shared drive, the split-rail fence, the stormwater pond, the trees that had to stay — does more than a floor plan can.

One of our partners sits on the board of directors of GFHFH. We care about housing affordability and access to housing, and we believe in the mission of Habitat for Humanity — which is a straightforward reason to give the work away.

Working within that buildable envelope meant the usual order of design was reversed: the lots were drawn by the wetland line and the RPA buffer first, and the houses were selected to fit what remained. It is a constraint worth stating plainly, because it is the ordinary condition of affordable housing rather than an unlucky exception.