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Cooltown -- Ultra-affordable urban green housing?

Wed, 2006-03-08 23:32 — joemoraca

Cooltown Studios one of may favorite blogs has a posting about a new building in San Francisco..

It's a brand new building. It's in the heart of San Francisco. It's incredibly affordable. It's a certified green building. It has a roof deck with great views. But it's probably not for you.

Eleven of the newly constructed Plaza Apartments units will have rents at 13% of area median income (AMI), sixteen at 35%, and the remaining 79 at 42%. Yes, there are government subsidies involved, but there are two main factors that allow such high-quality housing to be rented at such low cost:

- The units are brightly lit 300 s.f. mini-studios. Would you buy one for $99K if everything else was going for $250K? Many would. Those in Manhattan and Paris would kill for the opportunity.

- It's located in an 'up-and-coming-but-not-there-yet' area in downtown San Francisco, the standard qualifier for nascent bohemian neighborhoods.

Much too small for me but I like the "green" part of the building. Look at the pictures it's not a bad looking building either.

PS the previous several articles on Cooltown are also very good. What makes sucessful downtown events (not boring stuff) ...

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Thu, 2006-03-09 07:12 — joemoraca

more info on this project

New Supportive Housing in San Francisco Provides Green Oasis

But that's where the new Plaza Apartments stand stocky and tall -- an eight-story cube that not only is designed to provide shelter and support for 106 once-homeless adults but to do so as a showplace of "green" design.

The Plaza, which has its formal opening March 15 now that the tenants are settled in, succeeds on both counts. In the process, it also adds a deceptively rich piece of contemporary design to a South of Market landscape where you're more likely to see someone passed out in an alleyway than pausing to survey the architecture.

The $22 million complex was developed by the city's Redevelopment Agency to create housing for extremely low-income residents and then tweaked during construction to focus on a chronically homeless population, with space inside for social workers and medical care.

Another goal was to improve the physical environment of Sixth Street, which has languished for decades. Although nonprofit developers have built needed housing in the area and the city has improved the sidewalks and even planted palm trees, there's still an air of forlorn blight.

So the Plaza has retail space for a credit union as well as theater space reserved for Bindlestiff Studio, a nonprofit Filipino American performing arts center that was in the small building that formerly occupied the site.

The final priority at the Plaza is environmental. Concepts such as recycling and energy efficiency were folded into the design work from the start. The architecture and choice of materials were shaped by a desire to attain at least a silver rating from the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Whatever the final score, this would be the first residential building in the city to receive such certification.