Two CNU Charter Awards for Work in Jackson and Sacramento
The Congress for the New Urbanism named two projects to its 2026 Charter Awards — and Cascadia Partners contributed the financial and analytical work on both, as a sub-consultant to Opticos Design.
The Northern South Park Neighborhood Plan and Code in Jackson, Wyoming took the award in the Neighborhood, District, and Corridor category. Jackson is one of the most constrained housing markets in the country — average home values near $2 million, one-bedroom rentals approaching $3,000 a month, a workforce pushed further out every year. The plan opens a 225-acre site previously zoned for 118 estate homes to 1,319 new units, with at least 70 percent deed-restricted for affordable and workforce housing. Cascadia’s role was the analytical core: outcomes scenario modeling, market analysis, and financial feasibility testing that showed the denser, more affordable alternative was viable for landowners — not just aspirational on paper.
The Sacramento Citywide Missing Middle Strategy won in the Region: Metropolis, City, and Town category. Sacramento is working to deliver 45,580 new housing units this decade, more than 25,000 of them for lower- and moderate-income households. A sliding-scale FAR system is central to the strategy — designed to make fourplexes more financially attractive to build than luxury single-family homes. Cascadia served as the financial and displacement-risk analyst, producing the pro forma work that tested feasibility across submarkets and the technical analysis showing 88 percent of new housing would land outside high-vulnerability communities.
