Woodrow Wilson Commons consists of 173 units of mixed-income rental housing in three project phases. It is a redevelopment of the former Woodrow Wilson Homes public housing project. One of the distinguishing design features of this project was the intense design effort placed on the public open spaces, including a 3/4 -acre rain garden basin in the center of the site, which can store and infiltrate up to 300,000 gallons of stormwater during peak seasonal storm events. This raingarden includes a nature trial and interpretive signage to describe the wildlife habitat provided by the raingarden.
I served as Project Manager/ Project Architect for all three phases of the project. Phases 1 and 2 achieved LEED for Homes Gold Certification and the project won a NJ Future Smart Growth Award in 2014.
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The Commodore Perry Transformation Plan is a comprehensive redevelopment plan for an aging public housing project in the First Ward neighborhood of Buffalo, NY. The First Ward was the location of the western terminus of the Erie Canal, a bustling port community of warehouses and workshops, interspersed with boarding houses and small cottage-like homes for the immigrant workforce that provided the lifeblood of the neighborhood. The Commodore Perry Homes was constructed in the late 1930s as one of the first public housing projects in the nation. It was built to provide clean and safe workforce housing for the neighborhood’s industrial employers. More recently it served as housing of last-resort for extremely low-income families. The project today is functionally obsolete and half-vacant and is a drag on the redevelopment potential of the neighborhood.
The Transformation Plan, administered through a HUD Choice Neighborhood Planning Grant, envisioned the physical, economic and social transformation of the neighborhood through strategic improvements to neighborhood infrastructure and housing, as well as programs to help families and individuals through improvements to public safety, education, behavioral health and workforce readiness.
My role was as Project Architect, working on a multi-disciplinary team of planners, landscape architects and architects. The project as designed consists of 829 units of mixed-income rental and for-sale housing, along with an 80,000 square foot “Life-Chances” Center, providing comprehensive services, including afterschool programs, workforce training programs, and behavioral health programs; along with community meeting spaces, a fitness center and other community amenities. The goal of the housing plan was to tap into the history of the neighborhood to re-create the varied streetscapes and varied housing types of the old neighborhood. The images at left show the range and mix of housing types, from 3-story walk-up flats to duplex homes. One of the other major goals of the project was to address the deficient neighborhood stormwater infrastructure with a series of rainwater collection and infiltration systems to capture sheet-flows from streets and sidewalks into raingardens and bioswales in the neighborhood pocket parks.
Overlook Park HOPE VI was a comprehensive redevelopment of two contiguous public housing projects in Allentown, PA. The two projects: Hanover Acres and Riverview Terrace were often referred to as HART (for the first letters of their respective names). The two projects, while sitting on adjacent sites, were completely different in terms of topography and housing types. The Hanover Acres site was a fairly conventional brick, barracks-style public housing project from the early 1940s (the first public housing ever built in Pennsylvania). The Riverview Terrace site was a terraced hillside, with long rows of housing blocks arrayed parallel to 12-foot high concrete retaining walls. The overall site was functionally obsolete and poorly maintained. The Riverview Terrace site in particular was a very difficult place to live. The terraces were not wide enough to provide road or driveway access in front of the homes, requiring residents to walk their furniture, groceries and other items hundreds of feet down narrow walkways to their apartments.
The differing topography of the two public housing sites required two housing approaches. At the more conventional Hanover Acres site, we designed a traditional neighborhood of rectangular blocks with street-fronting houses and rear parking courts. The main entry road terminates in a hill-top park (the namesake for the site “Overlook Park.” At the Riverview Terrace site, we developed a housing typology of four-unit housing blocks with open carports under the downhill side of the building. This housing typology allowed half of the retaining walls of the former site to effectively be concealed under buildings. This allowed the terraces to be doubled in width, able to accommodate driveways and parking for the units within each terrace. The project also included the adaptive reuse of a former freight depot adjacent to the site into a new community center.
I served in a Project Architect role on this project, leading the design of all five housing phases and the community building. The project won a smart-growth award from the 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania in 2010. All rental housing phases were certified in the Energy Star New Homes program.
The Courtright Neighborhood was a comprehensive redevelopment of the former Courtright Mills industrial site in Wilkes-Barre, PA. The project client was a local non-profit community development corporation and social service provider in Wilkes-Barre. The project master plan envisioned the development of up to 44 new homes in single-family and duplex configurations. The program for the project consisted of 18 senior rental cottages. These cottages were designed with two bedrooms in each unit. All of the senior cottages were designed to be adaptable for persons with physical, hearing or visual impairments. The balance of the homes were designed in single and duplex configurations for sale to low-to moderate income homebuyers.
The center of the site was designed as a small community park with a community garden available to all neighborhood residents. The homes were designed to fit into the traditional neighborhood fabric of the city, with styles ranging from cottages and craftsman-style bungalows to Victorian and Shingle-style twins (duplexes).
I served as both the Project Manager and Project Architect on this assignment. All homes were designed and certified in the Energy Star for Homes and National Association of Home-Builders (NAHB Green) programs.
The Meriden Commons I development represents the first phase of the Meriden Family Zone Transformation Plan, a HUD sponsored Choice Neighborhoods project. This development provides 75 mixed-income rental apartments and approximately 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and commercial space along a principal commercial corridor in the City (State Street). The focus of the Meriden Commons project (and the adjacent Meriden Commons II project) is to provide a mixed-income redevelopment to bolster and support the Meriden central business district and to provide replacement housing for the soon to be demolished Mills Memorial public housing project.
One of the challenges of the Meriden Commons I and II projects was that these were the first two projects designed and built under the City’s new Transit-Oriented Development overlay zoning for Downtown. Owing to how new this overlay zoning was, the City did not have precedent projects on which to base their review. We worked closely with the City to demonstrate that a contemporary building could be built that would conform to the zoning “rules” for contextual design without mimicking existing building styles. This analysis, first presented during the zoning review for Phase I, helped to facilitate the review and approvals for Phase II, as well as for other proposed developments in the City’s downtown.
Meriden Commons I was completed in June 2018. It was certified in the Energy Star Multifamily program. Meriden Commons II began construction in July 2018 with a completion date of October 2019. It will provide 76 additional mixed-income units (49 in a multi-family elevator building and 27 units in two townhouse buildings). In addition to Energy Star compliance, Meriden Commons II has been designed in the Passive House international program. I served as Project Manager for both phases I and II, leading a design team that included planners, landscape architects and architects, as well as civil, structural and MEP engineers.
The Montgomery Choice Neighborhood project represents a comprehensive redevelopment of the former Montgomery Gardens public housing site, as well as the surrounding Montgomery Heights neighborhood in Jersey City, NJ.
The first implementation phase of this project was Catherine Todd Senior Center, a major rehabilitation of an existing 68-unit, 10 story public housing tower into 80 senior apartments. This rehab was challenged by the existing conditions presented by the existing structure, including a floor-to-floor dimension of 8’-8” and a masonry bearing-wall and concrete slab construction that forced all new HVAC distribution to be installed below the existing concrete slab. Despite the constraints, the resulting project presented a transformation of the existing structure into an inspiring living environment for the former public housing residents who call it home. From the newly-constructed 2-story entry lobby and community room, to the generously-sized one-bedroom apartments, the transformation has been total and complete.
The second phase, currently called Montgomery Family Phase I, is a 126 unit family mixed-income rental redevelopment that provides 1, 2, 3, and 4-bedroom apartments in three and four-story walkup buildings. The site master plan calls for a third project phase (Montgomery Family II), with 50 to 60 family, mixed-income rental units and a central plaza with play and gathering spaces for the residents. The central plaza is designed as a raised “table,” where the perimeter streets are raised onto a “speed-table” to sidewalk level. This urban design move is intended as a traffic-calming measure. In order to keep cars in the roadway, the site design includes bollards along the inner and outer curblines of the circle. The master plan also includes a fourth project phase (called Building B), to be located in the surface parking lot behind Building D. This project will consist of a mixed-income, mixed-use tower, envisioned to be between 12 and 18 stories depending upon demand. This tower will include several levels of structured parking below the tower.
The program for the Master Plan for the Winbrook public housing project in White Plains, NY called for the redevelopment of the site to leverage the current 360 public housing units into an 1,100 unit mixed-income, mixed-use redevelopment without temporary relocation of public housing residents or the loss of public housing units. In order to accomplish this, we developed a phasing plan that allowed for a new replacement housing phase to be built prior to the demolition of each of the four existing towers on site, culminating with the demolition of the final tower containing the central heating plant and utility connections.
The overall concept for the interconnected urban public space network was designed to encourage pedestrian flow into and through the Winbrook site from the surrounding neighborhoods, as well as to provide an outdoor urban open-space system within the site for the benefit and enjoyment of residents. This concept served to break up the “superblock” image of the existing public housing project, allowing it to become an integrated part of the neighborhood physical and social fabric.
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The Whitlock Cordage Mills site, located in Jersey City, NJ presented an opportunity to link a beautiful, but underutilized City Park (Lafayette Park) with an emerging commercial corridor along Grand Street, while further reinforcing the redevelopment plan goals of the City of Jersey City’s Morris Canal Redevelopment Plan.
The development plan envisions up to 25,000 square feet of ground floor retail space, centered on the “Canal Banks Plaza,” and the street frontage along Grand Street. This retail is paired with 668 units of new rental housing in both new and rehabilitated buildings on the former factory site. The inclusion of both affordable and market rate units in a 40% affordable/ 60% market rate split serves to increase housing affordability in the neighborhood, while providing a market for the retail and services. The redevelopment plan also includes the re-creation of the historic Morris Canal alignment into the new Canal Banks Park and Walkway. The added retail and housing density proposed for the portion of our site along Grand Street will serve to provide a neighborhood retail node at a critical neighborhood intersection within easy walking distance of the light-rail transit station at Garfield Avenue.
SeaView HOPE VI was a five-phase 257-unit redevelopment of three adjacent public housing projects in Long Branch, NJ. The catalyst for the start of the redevelopment was a successful legal settlement between the Long Branch Housing Authority and the local natural gas utility for historic soils contamination from a coal-gas refinery that had been located on a parcel adjacent to one of the housing sites (Seaview Manor). The settlement money triggered the first 40-unit redevelopment phase which later grew into a successful, comprehensive HOPE VI redevelopment of the other two housing sites (Grant Court and Garfield Court). The HOPE VI application was named in honor of the historic name of the first site. As Project Manager, I led WRT’s master-planning efforts for SeaView HOPE VI and led the successful grant-writing effort that brought a $20 Million HOPE VI grant to the Long Branch Housing Authority.
The HOPE VI program included 238 units of mixed-income rental units, 19 home-ownership units, a new administration building for the Long Branch Housing Authority and a new recreation center, the Earl “Bucky” James Center. This 15,000 square foot facility incorporates a daycare facility, an afterschool study program, meeting rooms and a full high-school sized basketball court.
All project phases achieved certification in the Energy Star for Homes program. The last two rental phases achieved LEED for Homes Silver certification.
