News

New York City developer George Aridas turned a few heads among Vancouver's condo builders with his presentation earlier this year to the Urban Development Institute. Mr. Aridas' talk was funny, sported great visuals, and brimmed with financial and technical facts.

But the real reason many Vancouver developers were on the edge of their seats was the New Yorker's details on how his company made a lot of money building an environment-friendly residential tower. Now that got their attention!

Mr. Aridas is a vice president of the Albanese Organization, a New Jersey-based housing developer. He told the tale of how his company built a pioneering "green" high rise residential tower -- so green, in fact, that it was the first apartment tower granted "LEED Gold" status, the U.S. Green Building Council's widely-respected design-for-conservation standard.

What makes the story of the 27-storey "Solaire" so intriguing is not just its green bona fides, but the fact that it got built in the face of calamity.

In the late 1990s developers put out a call for proposals to build an energy-conserving residential tower in lower Manhattan at the north end of Battery Park City. For their bid, Mr. Aridas' Albanese group chose to work with one of New York's most prestigious architectural firms -- Cesar Pelli and Associates.

Early in his career, Cesar Pelli was one of the designers of Vancouver's Pacific Centre and its signature Eaton's store, but it is his Yale-trained son, Rafael, who is now the green architecture specialist in the firm.

Mr. Pelli Jr. worked closely with Mr. Aridas and other Albanese staff on the Lower Manhattan bid.

Given the Pelli firm's long association with the office component of Battery Park City, it was no great surprise that Albanese's team was selected.

Dubbed the 'Solaire' for one of its green features -- the use of photo-voltaic cells to provide five per cent of the building's power -- the 293-unit tower was a state-of-the-art summation of green thinking. With high-performance casement windows, extensive use of natural light, programmable apartment thermostats, storm-water recycling and advanced heating and ventilating systems, the Solaire was designed to use 35 per cent less electricity and half the potable water of typical apartment towers.

The crowning achievement of a career spent in both private development and working for New York's public housing agencies, Mr. Aridas had watched the Solaire's construction proceed up to the first-storey level when disaster struck just three blocks away on Sept 11, 2001. "It was three weeks before we could even come back on site, and even then, everything was covered with dust and debris," says Mr. Aridas, still shaken by the events of 9-11.

Not long after the terror attacks that killed 2,819 people in New York, the Solaire's development financing fell apart because lenders were justifiably worried about the viability of residential projects in Lower Manhattan -- New York housing agency figures indicated that residential occupancy rates dropped from 95 to 65 per cent.

It took public support to re-start the Solaire's construction, in the form of U.S. Congress-approved "Liberty Bonds"-- public guarantees for housing and commercial investments in a clearly-hurting Lower Manhattan. Mr. Aridas says his project was one of the first to receive mortgage guarantees from the $1.6-billion housing portion of the total of $8-billion Liberty Bond fund, otherwise allocated to Ground Zero rebuilding efforts and the support of businesses.

With a tweaking of some of the apartment tower's features, construction resumed after nearly a year's hiatus, with the building completed early in 2004.

When I toured the newly-completed Solaire with Mr. Aridas, it was apparent that its green features were not achieved by compromising on the architecture -- just the opposite, in fact. The tower is handsomely proportioned, with extensive use of a material almost never used in Vancouver condo towers -- brick.

The Albanese Organization wisely decided to make the Solaire a rental building, and in consequence benefited from the huge run-up in housing values in Manhattan that commenced just as their building opened to tenants. Rents there are astronomical even by Vancouver standards -- up to $7,000 a month for a two bedroom apartments -- but there is a mandated sprinkling of "affordable" housing on all building floors, rather than on physically separate sites. "They are integrated through most parts of the building," says Mr. Aridas of the Solaire's affordable housing units, "so riding up the elevator, nobody knows if the person standing next to you is paying one fifth the rent for almost the same apartment."

I hope the Vancouver developers who heard Mr. Aridas speak took good notes. They have built nearly 7-million square feet of condos in downtown Vancouver since the Solaire's 1999 design, but because of a lack of leadership, almost none have Solaire's green features. Solaire's most important lesson is that green projects do not happen without leadership and investment from the public sector.

As described in last week's column, Vancouver's city hall is full of talk these days about an "EcoDensity Initiative." Memo to mayor and council: make your first call to the folks in Manhattan when you want to go from talk to action about sustainable apartment living. Then make your second call to our ever-inventive, world-leading development industry, who would love the opportunity to make money a new way, just as Mr. Aridas did.

tboddy@globeandmail.com