Monday LEEDoff: Pending Imminent Decision, 50 West Street Could Seek LEED Gold

A decision due early this week from downtown’s Community Board 1 will, in part, determine the fate of a proposed sixty-three story, LEED Gold hotel and residential building designed by Helmut Jahn at 50 West Street. Developer Time Equities hopes to stack an additional twenty floors on the forty that it, by law, is permitted to build on the site of a 1912 office tower (image to the left via Downtown Express), which would be razed under the plan. (Time would purchase air rights from above the adjacent Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, as well as include a public plaza in the development along Ward Street that would entitle it to the additional square footage). The Downtown Express reports that, so far, the Community Board seems lukewarm to the proposal, mostly because Time has refused to include affordable housing units, citing prohibitive cost ($1,000 per square foot, in part from the “complex” green design) However, the developer hopes that Jahn’s sustainable design, the public plaza, and a proposed laptop program for the local I.S. 89 school, as well as a promise that it will use low sulfur diesel fuel and emission filters on all construction vehicles, will swing the Board’s vote in its favor. (New York City’s Ulurp process requires the Department of City Planning to consider the Board’s decision - in the form of a conditional approval or disapproval - in making a recommendation on the project to the City Council, which will render a final decision.) The 50 West Street project could be an extremely telling litmus test for LEED in the residential context. Will the promise of a high-performance green building help trump Board members’ concerns that the tower will not fit into the context of the neighborhood? Is the developer truly concerned about how the building performs or is it merely using LEED as a public relations tool to circumvent local opposition? Regardless, we're heading towards an important moment for both green building here in Manhattan and the LEED rating system in general as Community Board 1 prepares to convene on Tuesday.

• Developer Says No to Affordable Housing (Downtown Express)
• Murphy/Jahn
• Time Equities