Redefining Lansdowne Park Housing

Increasing Quality of Life for 300 Senior Residents

Landsdowne Park is a public housing development of 300 townhomes comprised of aging buildings in dire need of basic retrofits to provide residents with healthy indoor air.

Built in 1951, the complex consists of seven different building types with units ranging from one to four bedrooms, across one or two stories plus basement. The buildings feature masonry façade with gabled hip roofs. They lack proper air circulation without exhaust fans in the kitchens and bathrooms.

Farr Associates led the design initiative to identify numerous health and energy retrofits that can be made to the buildings to increase the quality of life for more than 300 residents.

Client: Climate Resilience Consulting, LLC

Location: Roanoke, VA

Role: Technical Assistance, Architectural Consultant

Project Area: 71 buildings across 26-acre housing development

Project Completion: 2024

  • Adaptation International: Technical Assistance Lead

    ONE Design + Planning: Architectural Consultant

    JMT: MEP Engineering

    Virginia Tech University: Grant Partner

    Roanoke Housing Authority: Grant Collaborator

  • Shift from Gas to Electric Cooking

    Cooking with gas has been proven one of the leading causes of childhood asthma, particularly in minority and low-income communities and in small units such as those at Lansdowne. Given this, it is a top priority to address the racial and environmental injustice this perpetuates by replacing all gas cooking units with electric ranges. 

    Electric cooking units with ducted exhaust hoods ensure that VOCs which build-up during cooking are exhausted to the outdoors. The electric cooking does not produce nitrogen dioxide like gas cooking does, meaning that a serious health threat and pollutant is removed.

  • Bathroom Exhaust Fans Mitigate Mold

    Together with kitchen exhaust, an important element in ensuring safe indoor air quality is removing hot and humid bathroom air. Currently, the units have issues with moisture build-up and mold growth. Exhausting the bathroom air would be the first step to rectifying that significant health concern.

    These fans would be 50 CFM units that would draw air through and out of the entire unit, even those across two stories. This intervention is proposed in conjunction with air conditioning via ducted mini split units to ensure that the air coming into the units is conditioned, filtered, and dehumidified.

  • Air Conditioning with Mini Splits

    With extreme heat events on the rise, it is important to address not only the exhaustion of used air, but also the intake of fresh air to ensure residents are getting oxygenated, filtered air into their homes.

    We proposed adding air conditioning to the units through ductless ceiling cassette mini split systems. The units would be retrofitted with ceiling cassettes with short 4” duct runs to the outdoors. The duct supplies fresh, oxygenated outdoor air that then gets dehumidified and conditioned to a comfortable temperature. Each unit has capacity to cool the footprint of the townhome with a mini split on each floor.

  • Improving Energy Efficiency

    A healthy interior environment is multi-faceted. In order to reduce energy loads on the newly installed air conditioning systems, and increase thermal comfort in colder months, blown-in cellulose insulation is proposed to fill the attic cavities.

    This relatively low-cost intervention saves residents money on heating and cooling, allowing them to live more comfortably without spending more.