Feature

by Robert Shurell

On a typically difficult street corner in South of Market, a new building has appeared that rises up and elevates the neighborhood. The city of San Francisco has contributed yet another green gem to the SoMa housing market. This apartment complex, designed by Leddy Maytum Stacey Architects and Paulett Taggart Architects, further explores the elements of sustainability.

In January 2001, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency purchased the lot at the northeast corner of the intersection of Sixth and Howard streets as a part of the agency’s Sixth Street revitalization effort. The original program replaced the old Plaza Hotel–37 rooms of single-room-occupancy (SRO) housing over street-level storefronts–with affordable housing. Little did the city know that by the time they opened the doors last year they would have 106 units of fully supported SRO housing over a replacement theatre space for the Bindlestiff Studio, which had been displaced by the wrecking ball.

The SFRA had several driving factors in the creation of this building, the most important being to provide supportive housing to those who need it most using sustainable building methods. Once the organization realized the development would be in-house, its staff decided to test themselves to see if the sustainability requirements they wrote into their requests for proposals were fair and realistic. To achieve these goals, several levels of sustainability had to be addressed, beginning with broad issues of demographics and disparity of wealth, and narrowing to the technical issues involved in certifying a project under one or more green rating programs.

Approached from Howard Street, the building is the tallest on the block–nine stories. A perfect 85 ft. by 85 ft. by 85 ft. cube, the additional zoned height is an element of sustainability with far-reaching consequences. It addresses the demographic shifts that are occurring in the United States and elsewhere in the world: populations are moving toward and concentrating in urban centers. To contain sprawl (which contributes to irreparable harm to green field sites, the loss of arable land and atmospheric degradation from extended commutes), cities must reassess their zoning requirements, allowing additional height and density. The Plaza Apartments, which fits 106 individual living units into the 85-foot cube, achieves those goals. The building also has an underground theatre space to house the Bindlestiff Studio, a local Filipino-American community theatre. With 19-foot-high ceilings, this community-serving space could easily have been turned into two levels of below grade parking. Instead, no parking was provided for this entire project, which aligns with the idea that dense urban development will be surrounded by adequate civic and commercial infrastructure, rendering automobile ownership unnecessary.

The fact that this is an SRO with supportive services further promotes the sustainability of the building and its concept. Disparity of wealth is becoming a very dire problem in the world; the separation between those with accumulated wealth and those living in poverty is widening. With more people lacking the financial ability to meet their basic needs, the instances of disease and crime increase, along with other factors that break down the core functions of society. The Plaza Apartments addresses this issue head-on by providing a well-designed, dignified place that allows people to pull themselves free of their troubles in a supportive environment. This is accomplished in two ways: by providing a full range of supportive on-site services and by providing a design that encourages healthy social interaction.

The residents who live in the Plaza Apartments are asked to pay only one-half of their income as monthly rent, up to a limit of $560. The rest is subsidized through a combination of funding sources. In other similar subsidized scenarios, residents may pay only one-third of their incomes, but the scope of services available and included at the Plaza Apartments are so inclusive that one-half is justified. These services include a director and five case managers, one of whom is assigned to each resident, and a full-time nurse and psychologist, each of whom work onsite and are available to any resident. Many of these supportive services were incorporated into the project at Mayor Gavin Newsom’s request halfway through construction. It was at this late stage–construction is not typically the time to make basic programmatic changes to a building–that the Mayor’s Office of Housing decided this standard affordable housing project would become supportive housing for the city’s Direct Access to Housing program. The services are a welcome addition that provide the residents access to a safety net of mental and physical healthcare, and a concerned staff person to monitor their progress.

The design of the building fosters interaction by producing a warm, welcoming atmosphere through the use of material, common space and layout. Though the building is primarily concrete, which may not be viewed as a “warm” material, in this case it is juxtaposed with light, medium and dark wood panels, allowing the concrete to soak up their warmth and create a very inviting façade. In fact, the Plaza Apartments was just recently included in a list of the 25 best buildings in the city, created by the board of directors of the American Institute of Architects’ San Francisco chapter. The materials, simple and durable, are further developed on the interior through a subtle use of colors that echo those of the exterior, and by placing custom light fixtures or other elements at strategic places. These custom elements give the residents a sense of pride in their home. This concept is important because many times they come directly from institutions that may feel cold and inhuman, and the design of their new residence plays a large part in setting the psychological stage for their reintroduction to society.

The design of the common spaces further develops this welcoming feeling. A common outdoor courtyard spans the length of the building and is adjacent to the building entry, reception desk, supportive services and shared community lounge. These adjacencies enlarge the common spaces and create a unique interplay of interior and exterior space, at the same time allowing excellent visual control of the area. Also, the building laundry room is on the ninth floor, and opens onto a community deck with a beautiful view to the north and west. Finally, the floor layout is designed to minimize double-loaded corridors, which are considered institutional and undesirable from the residents’ point of view. This institutional feeling is further eroded by recessing the unit entry doors slightly into alcoves, making the private act of unlocking the front door more personal and homey.

The building embraces sustainability in more concrete terms as well. The project is certified by Green Communities and meets many of the requirements of the GreenPoint Rated system; it will also be certified LEED Silver. The project will serve as the baseline for the development of the SFRA’s Green Guidelines for Affordable Housing. These guidelines will be the document that the SFRA requires all of its affordable housing to adhere to in the future. In order to develop these guidelines, however, the SFRA had to test themselves and, as the request for proposals for the Plaza Apartments had little response from developers, the Public Initiatives Development Corporation was created by the SFRA as a 501(c) nonprofit and charged with the task of developing the project. The PIDC developed their working principles based on specific programmatic end-use goals: sustainability and supportive services.

LEED is the premier green building rating system in the United States. However, this product was developed primarily for office buildings, and many requirements aren’t as appropriate for residential occupancies. To gain as much exposure as possible to green rating systems, the PIDC also adhered to the requirements of Green Communities, a rating system administered by Enterprise Partners. Enterprise offers grants and technical support to developers who want to “go green” in the affordable housing market. Further, the project is being analyzed for adherence to another set of green guidelines, GreenPoint Rated, which is a statewide program administered by Build It Green in Berkeley. This program is intriguing not only because it addresses region-specific issues, but also because a certified inspector reviews the drawings for conformance prior to permitting, and then performs onsite inspections at the time of their installation. The Plaza Apartments won’t achieve certification by a GreenPoint rater since the required inspections weren’t done, but the development team believes that it could have been certified.

Why did the SFRA make this effort? The Plaza Apartments serve as an in-house case study in sustainable affordable housing, allowing the SFRA staff to demand a higher standard of developers who work for them, and will allow them to produce a well-rounded guiding document addressing the sustainability issues most critical to them.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Robert Shurell is a licensed architect with Chong Partners Architecture, a firm specializing in architecture that serves the needs of our communities in the fields of education, healthcare, transportation, and civic and cultural facilities. He can be reached at rshurell@chongpartners.com. Copyright © 2007 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.