California Affordable Housing Community Sets New Standard for Sustainability, Urban Design
September 13, 2010
by Cherie Duvall Jones
The City of Buena Park, Calif., has approved an innovative multi-family, affordable housing community that utilizes a distinctive "green" roof and will be developed on a vacant infill site.
In a public-private partnership between Buena Park and Jamboree Housing Corp., one of California’s leading developers and managers of affordable housing, the community will be built using the recently developed “New Block” approach. The concept features a unique green roof with grass and other landscaping that’s housed over the interior parking area, which creates useable open space for residents and has significant sustainable advantages.
“From an environmental point of view, New Block and its green roof feature benefit cities and the state by reducing greenhouse gas and also reducing the flow and enhancing the natural cleansing of storm water runoff,” explained Kevin Newman, chairman and managing partner of Newman Garrison + Partners, the architectural design firm that created the New Block-inspired project.
Designed for 70 apartment homes that will be affordable to residents earning between 30 percent to 60 percent of the county’s area median income, the community will be developed on the two-acre site of a long-vacant commercial building. The four-story apartment community will consist of one-, two- and three-bedroom floor plans and will be marketed primarily to Buena Park’s working families.
The community’s unique urban design, which includes the sustainable green roof over a 142-space surface parking facility, will provide residents with open space for recreation and other outdoor activities.
“We really like this as a way to accommodate parking while still having residents enjoy recreational space,” said Michael Massie, housing development manager, Jamboree Housing Corp.
Going forward, there’s hope that the New Block concept will solve one of the biggest design issues associated with development in a constrained urban environment: providing enough open space to meet the requirements of most cities.
According to Newman, much of the new residential development in Southern California will be in urban areas. Many of those sites are two acres to four acres in size — too small for many traditionally designed developments. The smaller sites also present the challenge of providing enough open space to satisfy cities’ open space requirements, which most cities in California have. New Block is designed specifically for those smaller sites.
“Without the green roof, which in the Buena Park project provides 20,000 square feet of open space, these infill projects would not be viable,” Newman said.
Additionally, the green roof design benefits the state since developers and cities must plan for the impending implementation of AB-32 and SB-375, California laws designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Scott Riordan, redevelopment project manager for Buena Park, believes that, as these two measures are implemented in the next few years, there will be a demand for urban infill to increase significantly throughout the state.
“Land in urban areas is hard to come by and very expensive,” said Riordan. “This creative type of solution could help to get projects built that may otherwise not happen due to the high cost of land and construction.”
Buena Park’s project will also feature a residents meeting room, fitness center, tutoring center and kitchen and laundry facilities. Residents can also utilize Jamboree’s Housing with HEART, a program that provides onsite services such as after school tutoring, computer classes and health and fitness programs at little or no cost.
Jamboree expects to start construction on the community next year with completion in 2012.