Postgreen's Mojo

First Steel, 1703 and 1705 Howard

Can Postgreen do it again?

Postgreen Home's 100k House at the corner of Susquehanna and Amber in Kensington is fueling a mini-boom around it. It recently sold for $300k and Postgreen and other builders, mainly LEED, but not all, have been infilling that stretch like crazy. Postgreen developments within three or four blocks or so of 100k include: Passive House, Skinny, and 2.5 Beta, with Passive being furtherest away.

Will Postgreen spark another renaissance? They have just unveiled two projects along the 1700 block of Howard in Old Kensington, about a mile from the Susquehanna and Amber nexus of their previous efforts. These two projects are the K'House and First Steel. K'House is designed by DIGSAU, and First Steel by Postgreen's stalwart architectural firm, Interface, the folks behind most (if not all) Postgreen designs to date, as well as other impressive infill designs, like Fishtown's Nine.

The corner of Howard and Cecil B. Moore today looks like the corner of Susquehanna and Amber two years ago, when 100k first went up. There is no question Postgreen's innovative and pioneering presence at that corner is what sparked the mad development there today--but the question still has to be asked: can they do it again? Or was that corner somehow unique? Can K'House--and K'House is really the big one--be the destination "spark" 100k was? Postgreen certainly thinks so, and I hope so. This is an area of the city ripe for reinvestment, and reinvestment has been percolating north of Girard and west of Frankford for some time now, but only recently has it been this far from either.

K'House, 1713 Howard, 1712-14 Hope