Page 24 - RE-NJ

22 MARCH 2024
The welcome gift at Birch House, Halpern Real Estate Ventures’ new 337-unit rental property in Jersey City, includes a tote bag and a compost bin aimed at encouraging residents to use the building’s on-site composting system.
are already taking shape at the state and local level, Johnson said, noting that many municipalities
are “requiring
or certainly encouraging” some type of approved green building certification
for projects
within a planned redevelopment area.
“Part of the trend is that towns are wiser about it
... and they’re writing it into redevelopment plans,” said Johnson, noting
painstaking in their design.
Both Fifty-Five Union and Birch House place a premium on open space. The latter, which hit the market in mid-February, includes both a 20,000-square-foot landscaped roof deck and a 25,000-square-foot landscaped courtyard. It’s rare to have both, Halpern said, adding that “we wanted to build a real park in the middle of our building,” so the firm depressed the concrete slab in the courtyard by about five feet and filled it with soil, allowing the property
to have real, deep-rooted trees and “create a canopy effect” for residents of the upper floors.
“The real inspiration there was thinking about living in a walk-up in Brooklyn on the second and third floor and looking out into the tree- lined streets,” Halpern said. “We wanted to mimic that throughout the Birch House.”
He cautioned that “not all projects have the same amount of available space to put these sorts of amenities into it, so that’s a prohibiting factor.” But “where we can do it, we are
absolutely looking to do it.”
That goes for the composting system, which is new to Halpern’s portfolio but marks an expansion of what it’s done previously. The firm, which treats sustainability as a core mission, has always incorporated compost collection into its past projects, but that typically requires hiring private haulers to remove the organic waste from the property. Birch House, Halpern said, is the first commercial project in the United States with what’s known as an anaerobic digester, allowing it to process the compost material on site to produce both a methane gas that is redirected to its central boiler and a liquid fertilizer that is used in its landscaping.
That makes it a strong candidate to appear in future Halpern projects.
“We are diverting waste, and we are generating energy,” he said. “And we’re able to take a waste stream that, in the past, would cost us money to remove from the property and we’re actually utilizing that on site to offset operating costs.” RE
Donald M. Pepe, Chair
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Victor E. Kinon
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Patrick J. McNamara
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Kenneth J. Hollenbeck
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Michael A. Jedziniak
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Theodore A. Schwartz
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Robert L. Baker, Jr.
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New York | New Jersey | Washington, D.C. www.sh-law.com 201-896-4100
out and have others hopefully follow,” he said.
Embracing those features today is also a chance to save time, expense and effort in the future, when they may no longer be optional. Those discussions
that Glen Haydu, Minno & Wasko’s director of sustainability, is documenting the growth of energy master plans in New Jersey and elsewhere. That will likely challenge developers to become even more
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