No-Frills Green

On a bustling block of East 3rd Street on Manhattan’s lower east side, an inconspicuous 38-unit apartment building stands as proof that you can build green for no additional cost. When the building’s developer, Mary Spink, first came to this historically working-class, immigrant neighborhood forty years ago, many of the blocks were lined with shabby apartment complexes. Now her building, not far from the Nuyorican Poets Café between Avenues C and D, shares the block with fancy co-ops and $3,000 studio apartments. 

Spink knew when she began building in 2001 that her tenants would pay no such rents. She is executive director of the Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association, which builds housing for low-income families. Her goal was to offer affordable housing, meaning two-bedroom apartments in the $500 to $600 range, to a new wave of immigrant families—Chinese, Filipino, Hispanic—that have moved in since the ‘60s.

Spink had long been interested in green building. But because the apartments at 299 East 3rd had to be built on a two-building budget of less than $11 million, she knew she would have to make some sacrifices. She says she wasn’t in the market for anything fancy; just a high-quality, energy efficient building that would last. “I knew I couldn’t do the bells and whistles stuff—solar panels, greywater systems,” says Spink. “I did want a heating system that worked. What’s so innovative about that?”

She shares this no-nonsense sensibility with Henry Gifford, a longtime New York City builder and mechanical systems designer. When presenting slides about his projects, Gifford always includes one blank one. “This,” he proclaims, “is how much more this building cost to build than an ordinary building. It is also how much grant money we received to build it.” He explains: “Every time someone gets a grant to do something better in a building, it sends subtle messages that without grant money you can’t be energy efficient.”

In this building, the crew took time to design the building right from the start, using an innovative exterior wall design and a carefully designed and sized heating system. They took extra time, money, and care to “air tighten” the building, largely sealing off each apartment from the outdoors, common areas, and other apartments. Components of the wall include a thick mineral wool insulation blanket between the brick and the cinderblock and carefully caulked interior window frames and other openings. “The ventilation actually works,” says Gifford, who claims most builders skip air tightening. In the stairways, he installed an energy-efficient lighting system that uses a single sunlight sensor to control outdoor lights instead of a timer. “There’s no strange technology here,” he says. “The only things in this building that are not available at