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PDXSpaces: Great interview, sexy (new, I think) exterior rendering.
Cyan Is the New Green
Posted By Randy Gragg on 01/28/2008
Today marks the opening of a new market for Portland housing – or so Gerding Edlen Development hopes. Portland’s premier condo developer is unveiling the fancy new sales office at SW Harrison and 4th for The Cyan, the company’s first “workforce housing” development. Aimed at those making 80-150 percent of the region’s median family income, the Cyan’s units will sell for $200,000-400,000 with penthouses running a bit higher. With no governmental subsidies, the way Gerding Edlen is getting there is by making the units small – most less than 600 square feet.
But destined for LEED Gold, designed by Thomas Hacker Architects located a block from the streetcar and light rail, the Cyan mixes environmental idealism, high style and top location. We caught up with Gerding Edlen’s Mark Edlen and Damin Tarlow to find out more.
Spaces Magazine: Who’s the market for the Cyan? And about the advertising campaign: “Kill your car.” “Small is beautiful.” Your branding designers, Ziba, typically has a model consumer. Who is it for the Cyan?
Damin Tarlow: Well blue is the new green. Cyan is the only naturally occurring blue. The concept is that people, given the choice, want to do the right thing. They want to be responsible. The target is the hip, savvy person who’s looking for an emotional connection of living in a building with other people think similarly. You’re making a lifestyle choice to live on great mass transportation and in a cleverly designed unit.
Mark Edlen: I think it’s fair to say we think the demographic younger. But we also think it may not be as much to do with age as it does with values. I think we’ll see some people with an affinity toward PSU: learners and teachers. Like a friend of mine, Bob Huntington, a lawyer with Stole Rives. I ran into him at PSU where he’s studying geography. He’s always wanted to do it. Now he can.
DT: Over 500 people have signed up on our “interest list,” but good or bad, we’re not seeing any one type. The average one-bedroom will sell for 280k $400k; 2-bedroom, between 200-500k. The 14 penthouses range from 600 feet for $341,000 to 1184 feet for $600,000. Then at the top, the numbers go up. But 85 percent of the units are under $400,000.
Spaces: The Civic on West Burnside was similarly inching down in both price and square footage. How did sales there go?
ME: We have about 20 left, out of 265. We hope to be out by end of first quarter. The average age is 33 years old, 60 percent male. We have a couple of floors that are pretty, well, rockin’ – open doors in the evenings. We were worried about the penthouses because we had five of them left, but as soon as the building opened, like, four of them sold.
Spaces: So 600 square feet is small.
DM: We traveled around and looked at other models around the world. Toronto has a lot of these units. There was a grouple of 12 of us standing in one of them and Mark asked, hey does anybody feel like we’re crammed? The idea with the sales center was to let people stand in one of the units and ask, is there anything more that I need? You need to stand there and touch it.
ME: The other challenge we faced is the exterior. If you look at Broadway Housing with all due respect, the design is unit, unit, unit. With small units it’s hard to articulate dthe building very much. The biggest architectural challenge is the exterior. Hacker came up with this weave concept, which we like but it will be interesting to see how it ultimately works.
DT: It’s a fun design challenge inside as well: the smaller appliances and such. All the appliances are 24 inches wide. The cooktop is AEG, a German brand that wasn’t UL approved. There’s Blomberg fridge and dishwasher which is the number-one selling refrigerator in Europe. There’s little things like the cooktop is flat, so if you’re not cooking on it use it as a counter top. It’s a Scandinavian dual-use concept.
Spaces: Are you trying other new things?
ME: If you can figure out how not to have air conditioning, you could save a boatload of money for the consumer. Or if you take out hardwood flooring and leave it exposed concrete – which we didn’t have the guts to do, quite frankly. One thing we’re going to try in a couple of units is old-fashioned ceiling fans, temperature activated. Put them in the master bed and living room and just get the air moving around and see if people will accept it.
Spaces: Well another way would be to just do operable windows high and low and let thermodynamics do the work.
DT: We worked a lot on the windows. There isn’t a door, because if door swings in, it takes space. There are two2 giant windows that tilt so you can get your air high and low. And you get the connectivity with the outside.
Spaces: You also incorporated some novel flexibility in that you can easily change some units from 2- to 3-bedrooms.
ME: Yes, my thought was, that we cold gauge the market. If we see a lot of people wanting 3 bedroom, we’ve got the ability to do more of them. We think the flexibility will serve us well.
Spaces: What about the parking?
DT: We’re uncoupling the parking stall. We’re selling them for $40,000 apiece (and losing about $15,000 on each one). We’re on the streetcar and the new light rail line. There’s Flex Car. If we can get people out of their cars, we can get them to use this infrastructure we’ve built, but also make it more affordable. At The Civic, the units without parking sold just as fast. If someone wants to rent a stall and see if they can get by without a car, we’ll do that. We wanted to sell the right to park in a non-reserved stall, but the banks couldn’t find a comparison, so we had to back off. But, in general, we’re trying to provide a range of options and levels of affordability.
Spaces: You control other land in the area. Where?
ME: Jasmine Tree. The Portland Development Commission owns it, but we have a development right on. It’s 7/8 of a block, but it will have rail line coming through it – which is a challenge and an opportunity.
Spaces: What will go there?
ME: Ideally, more small condos. We’ll see how this one goes? With rail going through it, nothing is going to be easy. But we’re playing around with ideas of automated parking. There’s a new version in NYC: Automotion. It’s the first one I’ve seen that looks like it works really well. With auto parking, nobody has a deeded stall which I think presents a lot of opportunity for cost savings. If you know how many cars are in there all the time, you can be renting them all the time, hourly or daily. We need to move to that to drive down the cost of building parking. That’s another way to make housing more affordable. The shell of these things costs the same as the Henry Condominiums or any luxury condo. The skin can be a little cheaper, but you still have to be responsible. Hard costs on the Cyan were $190/square foot. On The Luisa Apartments (in the Brewery Blocks), we paid about $119. For The Civic, we paid about $155. Now we’re pushing $200.
Spaces: So “affordability” is pretty relative.
ME: We’re trying to enable people at 80 to 150 median family income. Finally, the city is coming around to that conversation. PDC is looking at one right now in South Waterfront. You’ve got people making $35,000 to $65,000 a year, and they can’t afford a lot of the stuff we’re building. The thing the city needs to look at is the property taxes – it’s a huge piece.