Real Estate

Good Earth

In the seven years since Battery Park City’s Solaire building became New York’s first LEED-rated residential development, eco-conscious construction has gone from being rare to almost run-of-the-mill. As of September, New York boasted 46 LEED-certified buildings, and another 550 future developments were planning to apply for LEED status.

Green, as Corcoran Group broker Susan Singer puts it, “is a growth business.” She should know. In 2006, she got certified as an “EcoBroker” with just such a future in mind. But if environmentally friendly construction is becoming more the standard than the exception, that doesn’t mean everyone is going about it in the same way. From high-tech modular homes to gut-renovations of 160-year-old townhouses, people all across the tri-state area are putting their own twists on going green. Here are four of our favorites:

COLUMBUS SQUARE

Lots of buildings have roof decks. Upper West Side rental high-rise 808 Columbus has one that’s three blocks long.

The development, part of the five-building Columbus Square complex that began leasing last summer (with everything from studios starting at $2,262 to four-bedrooms starting at $12,880), features a number of eco-friendly elements. They include one of the city’s largest photovoltaic arrays for solar power. There’s also a tri-generation plant, which burns natural gas to produce electricity for the building’s common areas and heat and air-conditioning for its retail space.

But while green energy gadgets might be cool, they aren’t ultimately what move units, says Peter Rosenberg of Stellar Management, co-developer of the complex. For that you need more obviously tangible perks — like a 60,000-square-foot roof deck.

Perched two stories above street level, 808 Columbus’s deck, which just opened to residents for the first time this month, stretches from 97th Street up to 100th Street. Fully landscaped, it includes roughly 50 trees and a 70-foot saltwater pool. The deck evolved as a response to zoning laws that resulted in the building having a huge amount of third-floor roof space. “We decided to commit a little bit of funds and create something nice with the space,” Rosenberg says.

It seems to be paying off. Not surprisingly, potential residents like the idea of 2 acres of outdoor space attached to the building. “It’s been a huge selling point,” Rosenberg says, “especially in the last couple of weeks.”

NEW WORLD HOME

New World Home co-founder Mark Jupiter explains his decision to build houses modularly like this: “What airplane would you rather fly in? One built in someone’s backyard, or one built in the Boeing factory?”

Put that way, he has a point. Why pound nails in the unpredictable outdoors when you can build more precisely within factory walls?

“It seemed to us that houses were being built the same way they were 100 years ago,” Jupiter says. “We set out to build a better mousetrap.”

At the root of Jupiter’s quest for innovation was his desire to build green. By having total control over each step in the process, he thought he could construct houses far more environmentally friendly than those built by traditional means.

So far, it seems he was right. In the last year, New World has turned out three LEED platinum-rated homes — all of them achieving that distinction without using any alternative energy sources such as geothermal or solar.

“There’s a lot of building science within the houses that most homebuilders don’t go into,” Jupiter says. By paying close attention to details like framing technique and window and eave placement, the company has been able to turn out homes more than twice as energy-efficient as typical models.

And they manage to look good doing it, too.

“All the green houses I’d seen looked like boxes from outer space,” says Ethan Litwin, who recently commissioned a LEED gold-rated home from New World in East Hampton.

His new center-hall Colonial, though, “looks exactly like two of the houses on Main Street.”

BUILD IT GREEN

New York nonprofit Build It Green (BIG) is like Home Depot for people who prefer their construction materials to come with a back story. The organization sells salvaged and surplus building supplies, offering some 75-plus tons of materials out of its Astoria warehouse.

Opting for recycled goods is certainly eco-friendly, and in this case it’s thrifty, as well — many BIG items sell for half of what they’d go for new.

Homeowners doing demolition can save money, too. The organization will tear out and take away, at no charge, things like kitchen appliances, flooring, windows, doors, sinks, toilets and bathtubs. (Although, notes BIG program director Justin Green, the job “has to be reasonably easy”; otherwise a fee may be involved.)

Lately, a number of the organization’s wares have been making their way to Greenpoint, where designers Evan and Oliver Haslegrave have built two new venues — the Manhattan Inn bar and the Paulie Gee’s pizza place — largely with items from BIG.

For example, the stage in the back of the Manhattan Inn is composed of pieces from the stage at the Broadway production of “The Little Mermaid.” Some of the bar’s chairs were once part of a West Side theater. And at Paulie Gee’s (which, Evan notes, was built entirely of recycled material), old port and vermouth barrels make up part of the bar.

“The wonderful thing about it are the stories that each piece has,” Evan says. “There’s an endless supply of construction materials that are essentially being thrown out. Why not reuse them?”

TRENTON

Building green is good for the environment — even better, though, is not building at all.

That’s the notion underlying HHG Development’s work in Trenton, NJ, where the company has recently adapted several historic buildings for residential use. The firm’s Trenton portfolio includes an 18-unit development in a former cracker factory (named, appropriately enough, the Cracker Factory), eight units in a three-building cluster called Everett Corner, and four restored single-family townhouses.

“Given that Trenton has an incredible fabric of 19th- and early 20th-century buildings, we’ve focused on adaptive reuse and renovation,” says HHG principal David Henderson. “It’s one of the greenest things you can do.”

With features like front-loading, condensing washer/dryers (which remove moisture from the air and save energy), Watersense-certified toilets and solar power-ready wiring (one resident is currently in the process of installing panels on his apartment), the buildings have attracted buyers since pre-construction sales started in 2008. Only two units remain — a two-bedroom, 1,424-square-foot loft for $239,000 and a 1,444-square-foot two-bedroom for $277,000.

HHG has lured in ex-Manhattanites such as restaurateur and shop owner Jerry Nixon and his partner Lou Sarantakos, who traded their Chelsea co-op for a three-bedroom, 2,600-square-foot 1840s-era townhouse. An eco-conscious couple, the pair was worried at first about the impact of stretching out in a sprawling home. But, Nixon says, “I talked to people. They told me, ‘It’s a renovated 150-year-old building — you’re green.’”