Building History and Use
Project for Pride in Living has been building affordable housing and economic opportunity in the Twin Cities for more than 50 years. Opportunity Crossing, located at 3030 Nicollet Avenue in South Minneapolis, represents PPL’s largest investment to date: a six-story, mixed-use development offering 110 units of affordable housing alongside ground-floor commercial spaces designed for local entrepreneurship and a redesigned Wells Fargo branch.
The development serves residents earning up to 50% of the Minneapolis area median income, with studio through four-bedroom units available and 12 homes specifically set aside for adults exiting homelessness. Beyond housing, Opportunity Crossing was designed as a community hub, with a community room, playground, underground parking, and coworking spaces. The commercial ground floor was structured so that local entrepreneurs own rather than rent their spaces, creating a pathway to long-term economic stability alongside the housing it provides.
The building opened with a ribbon cutting on July 9, 2026, bringing together residents, project partners, community and civic leaders, and elected officials to celebrate what PPL President and CEO Karla Henderson described as an example for the nation of how to build projects by, with, and for community.
Why Geothermal?
Opportunity Crossing was designed from the start with sustainability as a core component. The project brought together more than 30 funding partners and approached green building elements as integral to the development’s long-term value for residents and the neighborhood.
The site at 3030 Nicollet presented a meaningful constraint given its dense urban footprint with limited space for conventional HVAC infrastructure. A traditional closed-loop geothermal system would have required far more land than the site could accommodate. Darcy’s groundwater-enabled approach resolved that challenge directly. Two wells access the aquifer beneath the site, delivering full heating and cooling capacity for the 110-unit building from a compact above-grade footprint that left the construction site’s limited space available for the project’s other priorities.
Groundwater geothermal was the only realistic path to fully electrifying the HVAC system on a site of this density, and it provided PPL with a long-lived, low-operating-cost infrastructure investment that benefits residents through lower utility costs and a more stable thermal environment for years to come.
Design and Construction
The Darcy system delivers 138 tons of cooling capacity and 1,464 MBH of heating through a two-well aquifer-based configuration, integrated into the building’s central mechanical system. The installation was coordinated within the broader construction activity of a six-story mixed-use building on a constrained South Minneapolis site, requiring precise sequencing and close coordination with the project’s general contractor, Weis Builders.
The project was designed by Design by Melo, with the building’s architecture reflecting community input gathered throughout the development process. The building also features a multi-story Afrofuturist mural created in partnership with Juxtaposition Arts, making the exterior of the building itself an expression of the neighborhood’s cultural identity.
A Model for Affordable Housing
Opportunity Crossing demonstrates that sustainable building systems and affordable housing are fully compatible, and that groundwater geothermal in particular can work within the kind of constrained urban sites where affordable housing most often gets built. By delivering high-efficiency heating and cooling from just two wells on a dense city block, the Darcy system gives PPL’s residents the long-term benefit of lower energy costs in a building designed to serve them for generations.