A Blueprint for Resiliency in East New York

By Jay Fox

Alafia is more than a development. It’s more like a new community. Emerging from a long-underutilized site in East New York that sits opposite the Gateway Center, Alafia will bring approximately 2,400 units of much-needed affordable housing to the city. It will also serve as a new model of neighborhood-scale design that incorporates passive building principles with a host of other sustainable building practices to create community that prioritizes resiliency, health, efficiency, and affordability.

ReVITALizing Central Brooklyn

The problem of affordability is nothing new, and the city and the state have long been committed to creating more affordable housing through agencies like New York State Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) and even the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Investment has been especially strong in many traditionally Black communities in Central Brooklyn, including Bedford-Stuyvesant, East Flatbush, Brownsville, and East New York, where the need for safe, healthy, and affordable housing has long outpaced supply.

Of the many programs meant to bring relief to residents in these neighborhoods, the state’s $1.4 billion Vital Brooklyn initiative stands as one of the most ambitious. Launched in 2017, Vital Brooklyn is a comprehensive community development program designed to address chronic social, economic, and health disparities in Central Brooklyn through eight pillars of investment. No surprise, these pillars include affordable housing and resiliency, but they also reflect a broader interest in quality-of-life issues. To that end, the remaining six pillars are: open space and recreation, community-based healthcare, healthy food access, education, economic empowerment, and violence intervention.

As part of this initiative, ESD (Empire State Development) and HCR issued a series of requests for proposals (RFPs) to convert underutilized and state-owned sites across the borough into affordable housing projects designed to champion the pillars noted above. The agency dedicated approximately 40% of Vital Brooklyn’s funding ($578 million) to these developments in the hope that they will serve as anchors for holistic neighborhood revitalization. In the end, funding was awarded to six projects that will ultimately create more than 4,000 units of affordable housing.

A Master Plan Built on Connection

When L+M Development Partners and Apex Building Group reached out to Dattner Architects to collaborate on the RFPs, the team recognized that the scale of the site demanded something far more comprehensive than a collection of apartment buildings. The seven-building Brooklyn Development Center that previously occupied the property had its own power plant and sat within a gated campus that effectively cut it off from the surrounding community. L+M, Apex, and Dattner agreed that reintegrating the property was an integral part of the project. Moreover, they recognized that reintegration had the potential to be a boon for the surrounding community of East New York, especially if community leaders who understood the area best worked with the development team to shape the project.

After being awarded the RFP, Dattner Architects Associate Principal and Project Manager Jen Switala says the team began regularly meeting with local officials and residents to better understand their needs and how the master plan could enrich the neighborhood. Through extensive community visioning processes, the team refined the master plan to ensure the neighborhood supported the project.

What emerged was a 2,400-unit masterplan organized around planning principles, key design elements, and a general project plan. As Switala explains, the general project plan (or GPP) is New York State’s way of changing the zoning specific to this site so that it can incorporate more density allow for the implementation of the project. Dattner was instrumental in the site planning, but Switala notes that the firm may not design all the buildings that will eventually be constructed. Rather, they set design guidelines to which design teams need to adhere as part of the master plan.

As shown in Figure 1, the site is divided into several clusters of buildings that are oriented to optimize solar exposure for each of the buildings while also making courtyards prominent features. Clusters consist of a single building with a shared podium and two towers in the shape of a C, while a shorter building sits along the open side of the C-shape to enclose the courtyard. The courtyards are not the only green spaces, of course. Within the center of the development sits a large public park with lawns, a running track, dog parks, and extensive plantings, all of which are owned and maintained by the developer rather than the city. The central park provides a shared communal space that ties the entire development together.

Walkability and connectivity are central to the plan in ways that go beyond aesthetics. The development includes two new streets that will eventually be mapped as public thoroughfares, one of which is lined with bioswale tree pits and incorporates pervious pavement, making it among the first streets in Brooklyn to deploy this kind of green infrastructure at a neighborhood scale. Internal circulation relies on woonerfs, a Dutch-inspired concept (translation: “living yard”) for shared-use paths where vehicular traffic is discouraged and pedestrian activity takes priority. The result is a 15-minute neighborhood where residents can walk to retail, healthcare, recreation, and public transit without ever feeling that they are navigating an environment designed primarily for cars. Meanwhile, the rest of the city is easily accessible, as bus routes along Erskine and Seaview Avenue connect to several subway stops and the East New York Long Island Railroad station.

The wellness component of the project is perhaps what distinguishes Alafia most from other large-scale affordable housing developments. The name itself is derived from a Yoruba word meaning health and well-being, and the team has taken that ethos seriously. Each building cluster includes courtyard-level space for urban agriculture. Meanwhile, RiseBoro Community Partnership, which has a well-established urban farming and nutrition education program, will manage a plot in the southeast corner of the site that is expected to produce up to 180,000 pounds of fresh produce annually. There will also be smaller farms in each courtyard.

Residents also have easy access to healthcare facilities, as the One Brooklyn Health outpatient clinic will be completed next year. Of the 576 units completed in this phase, 132 units have been set aside for formerly homeless individuals, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and seniors, all of whom receive onsite supportive services through this clinic via Services for the UnderServed.

Switala says that the decision to pursue Passive House certification was established early in the design guidelines, and that Dattner, L+M, and Apex agreed that a higher standard of performance was essential for a development of this scale. (It’s worth noting that the project guidelines are agnostic as to the certification pathway, and that phases one and three are pursuing certification through the Passive House Institute, while phase two is pursuing certification through Phius.) Passive House design also reflected the priority of resiliency in the face of extreme weather events and sea-level rise. During power outages, the passive envelope acts as a thermal battery, keeping residents comfortable without any active heating or cooling for extended periods. Meanwhile, onsite solar arrays and geothermal systems ensure that even when the grid fails, emergency systems and heating and cooling stations can remain operable, providing a layer of resilience that code-built buildings simply cannot offer.

The renewable energy systems are scaled to match the ambition of the project, and Switala notes that L+M and Apex prioritized building out this system across the site. The geothermal system for phase one alone includes 90 bore holes beneath the woonerfs serving buildings C1 and C2, and another 24 for the smaller C3 building. Subsequent phases will install comparable systems. When the full buildout is complete, the network of geothermal bores beneath the site will be extensive. The bores are positioned primarily beneath the woonerfs and courtyards, sharing that underground real estate with the stormwater retention chambers in a carefully choreographed arrangement that required significant coordination. Switala says that the team learned early on that geothermal bores should not be placed under planted park space because the heat exchange kills the vegetation, so the pathways and roads became the most rational location.

The geothermal system works in concert with a wastewater heat recovery system manufactured by SHARC to provide heating, cooling, and domestic hot water to the residential units. Water-source heat pumps by Ice-Air in each unit draw from the geothermal loop and the wastewater system to provide supplemental or backup capacity depending on the season and demand. If the geothermal system is not reaching the required temperature at a given moment, the wastewater heat recovery can take over, providing redundancy that enhances both comfort and reliability.

The ERV systems, manufactured by Petra, are housed on the rooftops. Additionally, the rooftops have been outfitted with photovoltaic arrays, a decision that was made in lieu of green roofs because the team prioritized energy generation—plus they recognized that the development was already going to have a lot of green space!

The Passive House Envelope

The wall systems for the phase one buildings reflect a pragmatic approach to meeting Passive House performance targets. Switala explains that buildings C1, C2, and C3 rely on a CMU block-and-plank structure with brick cladding and some metal paneling, a typology that is standard for affordable housing in the city. The foundations across all buildings are slab-on-grade with insulation consisting of two feet of vertical insulation at the perimeter, which proved sufficient for hitting PHI performance targets.

Continuous insulation and airtight envelopes, including triple-pane windows by Intus, keep conditions not only comfortable but quiet. The latter was of particular concern given the site’s proximity to commercial corridors and air traffic from nearby JFK International Airport. Bird-friendly glass was also specified in accordance with local regulations that took effect during the design process, which makes sense given the site’s proximity to Jamaica Bay, which is home to a host of native bird species and a vital stopover point for migratory birds. One of the more notable detailing challenges involved the brick returns at the window openings, which are not standard for Passive House construction. The team worked extensively with their Passive House consultants to detail the returns so that they would not become thermal bridges.

While Intus supplied the windows for the residential portions of all three buildings, the team opted for double-pane Kawneer storefront systems at the ground level. The exterior doors are thermally broken, insulated hollow metal. The storefront systems are the same for the residential lobby, as well as the retail and clinic spaces on the ground floors, even though the latter are not included within the Passive House envelope. The frequent opening and closing of doors and the large storefront glazing systems make it impractical to maintain the airtightness required by the standard, and the energy profiles of commercial and medical spaces differ significantly from residential units.

Thinking Holistically

When the last phase of Alafia is completed sometime in the next decade, the development will have transformed a walled-off institutional campus into a community of 2,400 households with access to healthcare, fresh food, renewable energy, and some of the most efficient and comfortable housing in New York City. It will have done so while addressing flood resilience and survivability, managing stormwater and waste at a scale that few developments in the city have attempted, and demonstrating that Passive House design is not a luxury reserved for boutique projects in wealthy communities. Passive House can be applied to affordable housing at a scale that actually moves the needle on the housing crisis.

Moreover, achieving Passive House levels of performance is becoming far less of a challenge as the industry takes efficiency more seriously, particularly in states like New York and Massachusetts. “Honestly, it’s so close to code now that it really wasn’t that big of a lift,” Switala says. “If you’re already switching to heat pumps, you might as well go for it.”

Beyond creating thousands of Passive House units, Alafia provides a template for creating communities that integrate overlapping green infrastructure—including stormwater management, geothermal, and wastewater energy recovery systems—at the neighborhood level via a master plan. Switala notes that these green systems, when implemented at the neighborhood level, don’t just boost efficiency; “they can help contribute to a better neighborhood.” By taking a more holistic view to development, designers and planners have the opportunity to create more comfortable spaces, she adds.

Other cities and states contemplating large-scale affordable housing investments would be wise to study what is happening in East New York, because the blueprint for resilience and survivability is taking shape on 25 acres of reclaimed land along Jamaica Bay.