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The Melody, a 63-unit LEED-Platinum associated housing formidable in a South Bronx, will assistance residents suffer healthier lives while providing them with an energy-efficient, affordable place to call home. The eight-story building offers many ways for tenants to stay fit, including an on-site gym, an outside aptness circuit, children’s play areas, and indoor storage for bikes. In addition, a homeowner’s primer leads tenants to a neighborhood’s abundant bike trails, village gardens, and parks. The fitness-oriented measures were estimable adequate to acquire a plan a LEED Innovation indicate for Active Design, a initial for a multifamily project.

“On any floor, everybody has to travel past a stairs to get to a elevator, so unequivocally a stairs are always your initial option,” says Les Bluestone, a partner with New York City-based Blue Sea Development. “We attempted to make it as free as probable to select walking.”

Bringing Innovation to Affordable Housing

Les Bluestone

With 31 LEED projects (three of them approved Platinum), Blue Sea Development is during a forefront of high-performance multifamily construction. Partner Les Bluestone takes honour in a company’s cutting-edge proceed to affordable housing. The developer mostly eschews normal multifamily construction techniques in preference of some-more energy-efficient and healthy choices.

A box in point: For a past 5 years, a association has been atmosphere sealing particular units in a buildings to forestall infiltration from adjacent apartments. “Each one is a self-contained envelope,” says Bluestone. “It creates some-more clarity from so many perspectives.”

This proceed eliminates a thermal smoke-stack outcome that occurs in many vast buildings, where a executive channel draws in cold atmosphere and creates a draft. Planners for a Melody separated a common channel and enclosed pressurized makeup atmosphere units in any apartment. Noise, smoke, and cooking odors won’t dig into other units, and a miss of ducts between units also improves fireproofing, Bluestone points out.

Another large regard for planners on a Melody plan was maximizing H2O charge though sacrificing performance. To keep H2O use as low as possible, they chose Sterling dual-flush toilets and retrofit any bathroom’s Moen faucets and showers with 0.5-gpm aerators and 1-gpm showerheads from Bricor, an ascent that cost about $12,000. Planners totalled a building’s H2O vigour to establish that a ultra-low upsurge rate would still be gentle for residents.

“We totalled a vigour during a outlets and afterwards systematic a aerators and showerheads formed on that,” he says.

The Melody’s fit Kone EcoSpace conveyor has 6.5-hp direct-drive motors on a side of a car, expelling a need for a normal conveyor appurtenance room and motors that need about 40 hp.

Adding to a high-performance touches, feverishness for a building is supposing by dual rarely fit sealed-combustion condensing boilers located in a basement, and electricity and prohibited H2O come from Marathon Ecopower micro-CHP co-generators powered by healthy gas.

The Melody will strictly open to residents once internal supervision and nonprofit housing agencies finish classification by some-more than 800 applications from impending tenants. While affordable housing of any kind is in high direct these days, a Melody’s interest is many some-more than only a low cost.

“Our buildings could validate as oppulance properties in any neighborhood,” Bluestone says.

— Jennifer Goodman

With a jagged series of low-income Americans battling plumpness and weight-related illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, a stakes are generally high for residents of a South Bronx, one of a lowest neighborhoods in New York City. Families there are stricken by asthma 8 times some-more than a inhabitant average, and researchers have forked to bad indoor atmosphere peculiarity and swarming vital conditions as heading causes.

To safeguard healthy atmosphere peculiarity during a Melody, Bluestone and designer Hugo Subotovsky did divided with a common straight ducts found in many multifamily buildings. Instead, any section is entirely atmosphere hermetic and contains a continual credentials movement complement with Panasonic inline fans that run 24 hours a day and are connected to a bathrooms and kitchen. Islandaire PTAC units in each room yield hydronic heating; a units are filtered to MERV-8 and opening directly to a outdoors.

To equivocate conditions that can means or intensify asthma, plan planners speced products that won’t detract from indoor atmosphere quality, such as low-VOC paints, adhesives, and cabinets; tile floors in a bathrooms and kitchens; and runner tiles in a open corridors.

The project’s list of immature building products and materials is dull out by Pella low-E fiberglass-framed windows with argon gas fill (0.30 U-value), Sterling dual-flush toilets, low-flow faucets and showerheads, recycled drywall, and FSC-certified Paratimber engineered timber floors in a vital areas.

NEIGHBORHOOD REVITALIZATION 

With prices trimming from $104,000 to $220,000 for one- to three-bedroom apartments, a Melody is open to families with incomes between $35,000 and $90,000. Residents will possess their units as partial of a exclusive leasing arrangement and will also be obliged for monthly application and upkeep charges, that change depending on a apartment’s distance and operation from $364 to $651.

Named a Melody to simulate a neighborhood’s abounding jazz history, a building borders a Longwood ancestral district and sits one retard from a transport stop. The former brownfield site was empty for some-more than 30 years though is now partial of a incomparable bid to reanimate a South Bronx, home to a recently refurbished and stretched Yankee Stadium.

 

New tenants of a Melody, a initial commune built in a area in decades, are anxious to have a place to call home that is also sustainable, comfortable, and money-saving, Bluestone says.

“For many of them, it’s their initial home and they are vacant during a turn of finishes and peculiarity when they see it.”

Jennifer Goodman is Senior Editor for EcoHome.