Veridian at County Farm

The homes

Veridian's housing is genuinely varied for a neighborhood its size. Designed by Union Studio, the plans run from detached Village Homes to Terrace and Park Townhomes, Trillium Lofts, and Nest and Farmhouse Flats — a deliberate mix of single-family houses, attached homes, and smaller flats and lofts meant to put many household sizes on the same streets. Around 150 homes are planned across the community, split between the market-rate parcel and an adjoining affordable parcel, The Grove at Veridian, developed with Avalon Housing.

What every home shares is how it's built. These are high-performance, all-electric houses designed to produce about as much energy as they use — tightly sealed and heavily insulated, with no gas lines or combustion appliances anywhere on site. For a buyer used to Ann Arbor's older housing stock, the contrast is stark: instead of a century-old furnace and a drafty envelope, you get new construction engineered from the ground up around comfort and low operating cost.

How a net-zero home lives

The energy system is the neighborhood's signature. Rooftops across Veridian carry more than 1.3 megawatts of solar capacity, and every home includes its own battery — supplied by the neighborhood's energy partner, sonnen — sized to keep critical loads like a refrigerator or a sump pump running through a grid outage. Heating, cooling, and hot water run on high-efficiency heat pumps, cooking is induction, and homes come ready for EV charging.

The practical result is a house with little or no monthly energy bill and real resilience when the power goes out — a meaningful edge in a region that sees its share of storms. The community has also pursued a virtual-power-plant pilot, in which those home batteries can feed stored solar back to the grid at times of peak demand. For buyers, the takeaway is that Veridian's sustainability isn't a marketing layer; it's the mechanical core of the home, and it changes the math of what a home costs to own.

The Farmstead Commons and daily life

Veridian is organized around a shared center rather than around its streets. At its heart is the Farmstead Commons, anchored by a restored barn dating to the 1840s, a greenhouse, and the Honey Locust Farm Stop — a year-round market where residents and neighbors can buy produce from local farmers. Community gardens, native plantings, and play areas fill the spaces between homes, and a sizable share of the landscape is given over to growing food.

The layout is deliberately car-light: homes cluster around greens and connecting paths, with parking pulled toward the edges, and the neighborhood offers shared amenities like bike storage, a bike-repair shed, and EV bike- and car-share. It's a design meant to put daily life — a coffee, a bag of groceries, a few minutes in the park — a short distance from the front door, and it gives Veridian a communal texture that's rare in new construction.

The land and its history

The ground under Veridian carries an unusually long civic history. It was part of the original Washtenaw County Poor Farm, established in 1836, and later held the county's juvenile detention center, which was razed in 2013. When the county sought a new use for the land, the result was a neighborhood conceived as a public good — a partnership between THRIVE Collaborative and Avalon Housing built explicitly as a mixed-income community, with roughly a third of its homes set aside as affordable.

That origin is a large part of why Veridian has been studied so widely. It has been recognized by the Congress for the New Urbanism with a 2024 Charter Award and featured internationally, including at the United Nations' World Urban Forum, as a model for low-carbon, mixed-income development. For a homeowner, the history and the recognition translate into something concrete: a neighborhood with a clear identity and a reason for being that isn't going to blur over time.

Parks and getting around

Veridian's greatest amenity sits right next door. County Farm Park spreads across roughly 130 acres of woods, meadows, and trails — including trillium-lined paths in spring — and the neighborhood connects directly into it, so the parkland effectively becomes an extension of the community's own greens. Buhr Park and the Washtenaw Avenue corridor are close by as well.

The location is practical, too. From this part of the east side, downtown Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan medical campus, and US-23 are all a short drive, putting the wider region within easy reach while the neighborhood itself stays quiet and self-contained.

Schools

Veridian is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. As with any move, families should confirm current school assignments directly with the district, since attendance boundaries can change over time.

Buying or selling in Veridian

Veridian occupies a niche of its own in the Ann Arbor market, and that shapes how homes here are valued. Because there's little else quite like it locally, the most relevant comparable sales are usually other homes within the neighborhood rather than conventional houses elsewhere in the city — the all-electric systems, the solar-and-battery package, and the shared amenities are part of what a buyer is purchasing, and they don't map neatly onto older stock.

For buyers, it pays to understand the full ownership picture before the architecture wins you over: how the solar and battery systems are owned and maintained, what the community association and shared amenities cost and cover, and how the mixed-income structure works. For sellers, the story runs opposite to most Ann Arbor listings — the home's efficiency, low operating cost, and resilience are the headline, and they reach a specific, motivated set of buyers looking for exactly what Veridian offers. Both sides of the transaction reward working with an agent who can speak to those specifics.