An eight-story affordable building in Washington, D.C., took the top prize in Phius’s 2026 Passive Projects Design Competition, and three of the other U.S. multifamily winners are affordable too. The message from this year’s passive house awards is that the standard has moved well past custom single-family homes.
Phius, the Chicago-based Passive House Institute US, named the winners at the PhiusCon 2026 opening plenary in Phoenix, which its competition page scheduled for Oct. 9. Building Design + Construction published the full list Oct. 15. Judges score performance, difficulty, cost-effectiveness, design, craftsmanship and health, and every entry had to be fully certified by Aug. 21.
The Faircliff, Phius’s best overall project
The Faircliff, at 2641 14th St. NW, won both Best Overall and the Affordable Housing category. It replaced an 80-unit garden complex with 125 apartments, keeping all 80 affordable units and adding 45 more. Thirty percent of the units are accessible, and nine are permanent supportive housing.
It took a big team. Somerset Development, Jonathan Rose Companies and the nonprofit Housing Up developed it. Eric Colbert & Associates designed it, and John Moriarty & Associates of Virginia built it between January 2023 and December 2024. It’s all-electric, carries LEED Platinum, and has a 67-kW solar array on a green roof.
The numbers come from the developer’s project page. Total development cost was $93.2 million, with $56.8 million in new construction. That’s about $745,000 a unit all-in and roughly $454,000 in hard cost. The developer also says carbon-injected concrete captured more than 1.1 million kilograms of carbon, a claim that rests on the supplier’s accounting and that the page doesn’t detail.
Passive house affordable housing winners in Boston and Queens
In Boston’s Nubian Square, 2147 Washington Street won the high-rise multifamily category. DREAM Collaborative designed and co-developed it, and Kaplan Construction built it on a former city parking lot. It’s six stories and 99,000 square feet, with 62 affordable rentals and 12 for-sale condos.
Beach Green Dunes III in Far Rockaway, Queens, won Best Project by a Young Professional. L+M Development Partners, The Bluestone Organization and Triangle Equities developed the 138-unit affordable building, and Bernheimer Architecture designed it. It’s all-electric with geothermal heating, cooling and hot water, and the apartments and retail sit above base flood elevation on a peninsula that flooded badly in 2012.
The one commercial winner is small. Lake Flato’s 3,739-square-foot Ryerson Woods Education Center outside Chicago earned Phius ZERO certification, and the team says it uses about 80% less energy than a code-built equivalent.
What the Phius awards say about cost
Passive house still carries a reputation as a premium spec. These winners are mostly tax-credit deals with public lenders watching every line. That doesn’t prove the envelope is cheap, but it shows affordable developers are choosing it on purpose, often to cut operating costs for tenants and owners who can’t absorb utility spikes.
It also fits a pattern in New York, where Gilbane and Marvel finished an all-electric community building in Brownsville under budget but still at $2,133 a square foot. The next test is whether these teams publish incremental cost against a code-minimum design. Until someone does, cost-effectiveness stays the one judging criterion owners can’t check for themselves.