Project Activities For Spring 2021

Our next steps will focus more specifically on the changes that need to happen to the building. This will come from conversations with people in the policy, real estate, city planning, and finance sectors. Additionally, we hope to visit the building in person to better understand its construction and layout so that we can better produce updated floor plans and 3D renderings for our project. Now that we have selected a Midtown Manhattan office building that meets all of our desired criteria and performed background research related to zoning, EnerPHit, affordable housing, and financing, moving forward we will begin the actual drafting process. Because we have officially selected a site, we now need to decide how many units in the building will be set aside for low-income residents. This will need to be determined in tandem with finalizing our financing decisions, as some funding only supports developments with a certain percentage of low-income units, with additional income bracket restrictions. We hope to have a contact at the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD) or elsewhere who can further guide our financing decisions to ensure we are maximizing our resources and developing a financially feasible plan. In terms of zoning, we have a contact that we plan to reach out to next semester who has previous professional work experience with the NYC Department of City Planning in the Zoning Division. We are going to work with him to help us sort out the exact zoning specifics to ensure we are on the right track in terms of building class and zoning changes that need to happen on our property. We also already have a few contacts who are well versed in Passive House and EnerPHit standards. They can help us in understanding and implementing the exact applications we find necessary to make this building perform well while still being cost effective.

Additionally, because we are spending a lot of time and effort in making this a high performing building, we want the people who occupy the space to understand what is going on in the building and how they are impacted. Therefore, we would like to find a way to educate residents and others entering the building on the energy efficiency measures in place in the building. To support this engagement, we are thinking of adding some type of signage or maybe a Building Energy Kiosk. This would be available next to the elevator and perhaps online too, and it would make real-time and historic building energy use data available for sustainability research and education projects, in addition to being informational for the general public. For this component, we will have to do more research on how that type of system could be implemented. We also would want to ensure the information displayed on the Building Energy Kiosk is easy to understand for people who may not be familiar with high performance measures or energy efficiency terminology, so the display would show the building energy usage in a comparable metric. For instance, the kiosk will ideally display recent trends in energy use and help tenants understand the scope of their energy use. We are trying to show these in everyday terms, such as monetary values, CO2 emissions, and equivalencies like gallons of gasoline burned.

In terms of drafting the final proposal and developing renderings, additional insight from analyzing case studies would be useful in providing inspiration or other valuable guidance. Since we are both new to AutoCAD and SketchUP, the final deliverable will likely be a simple yet visually appealing and clear depiction of our intended design. Case studies could help us understand what the most important features of an effective design proposal are. Additional research will also be required to generate a plan for the green roof we intend to incorporate. This would entail research about how green roofs are installed, and whether any updates to the existing roof would need to be performed in advance. Because this is a sustainability-driven project, all aspects of the building both inside and out need to be considered. This means that, in addition to laying out the overall building plan and individual spaces, the environmental and health impacts of construction materials and some furniture will also be evaluated. We hope that our final plan documents how all aspects of a sustainable mixed-use affordable housing development can be integrated in order to be successful.