GUILDERLAND — The 78-unit apartment complex planned by Rosenblum Development for its Great Oaks campus has been shaped by the coronavirus.

“In the post-work-from-home era,” said Jeff Mirel, a principal at Rosenblum, “we want to make the office a place where you want to be versus where you have to be, which was the old paradigm.”

The five-story apartment complex, which will be built in the middle of an office park, was awarded $1 million through the state’s Buildings of Excellence competition. Fourteen multi-family building projects received $13 million in awards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“We don’t necessarily think office is going away. It’s going to change,” Mirel told The Enterprise this week. “What we predict is more of a hybrid approach where office will become the center of workplace culture. It is where training will happen, where collaboration will happen. But folks may not be in the office every day of the week.”

The Great Oaks complex now has three office buildings on 17 acres off of Church Road in Guilderland, just west of the Northway, and to the south of Western Avenue. Rosenblum went through a years-long planning process with Guilderland, culminating in the town board adopting a law last November to change the zoning at Great Oaks from a Business Non-Retail Professional District to Planned Unit Development.

The narrative that Rosenblum submitted with its application for a rezone in 2018, to build apartments, said that Great Oaks had experienced attrition and longer vacancies, “which are typically 9 to 24 months and in some cases longer.” The narrative gave the example of General Electric, which it said opted in 2016 not to renew long-time leases at Great Oaks that totaled over 25,000 square feet, or about 12 percent of the complex’s square footage.

Rosenblum’s proposal is for 120 residential units, in two different buildings. The building that received the $1 million award is to be five stories tall, with 78 apartments, and 124 underground parking spaces. It is also to have amenities to serve both residents and office tenants, including a café, a fitness room with showers, bicycle storage, and an outdoor patio.

The other apartment building would be four stories high and contain 42 units, with 32 parking underground parking spaces.

Rosenblum is calling the acreage an “Eco Park” as the apartment complex turns the office park into a mixed-use neighborhood.

“We’re still preserving the green space,” Mirel told The Enterprise.

“Sustainability is actually at the core of our development practice,” he said. Rosenblum has a dozen properties across the Capital Region. “We have a 10-year goal to make all of our new development projects net-zero carbon. We have taken an iterative approach on our path to net zero, deploying high-efficiency assemblies and systems like geothermal heating and cooling and a significant amount of owned rooftop solar systems.”

Building 150

The Great Oaks apartment complex is, for now, being called Building 150 “because the other building addresses are 100, 200, and 300,” said Mirel. “We will ultimately probably brand it with a more permanent name.”

Rosenblum is working with Re:Vision Architecture, which is based in Philadelphia. Rosenblum prefers to work locally, Mirel said, but went out-of-market because there is “a market education gap” when it comes to Passive House.

The Passive House movement began in Germany, where it is known as Passivhaus. While there are tens of thousands of passive-house buildings across Europe there are only several hundred in the United States.

Passive House construction typically features building for tightness with a ventilation system that lets fresh air come in and stale air go out, resulting in ultra-low energy use.

“One of the challenges that we face is that, although Passive House has been around for quite a while, it is typically more expensive to construct both from a materials and labor perspective,” said Mirel.

Building 150 will be a market-rate, multi-family complex, he said.

“We’re going to maximize on-site solar PV,” Mirel said, referencing photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, “and the Passive House design and that includes an airtight envelope that’s coupled with continuous filtered ventilation … energy-recovery ventilation and controlled humidity. That will allow us to achieve not only the net-zero energy goal but also superior comfort for our tenants and resilience for future climate hurdles.”

Mirel also noted another coronavirus effect: “In a post-COVID world, there’s better disease resistance due to the constant circulation of fresh air,” he said of the Passive House ventilation system.

Asked about rental costs for the apartments, Mirel said, “We haven’t really dialed in the rates so we’re not publishing those yet.” He said the complex would have a mix of one- and two-bedroom apartments.

“Our challenge here is that, at least today, a lot of prospective tenants are not necessarily motivated by a greener option alone so it’s important that we make the apartments available at a comparable overall cost of occupancy to conventional construction.”

 The overall cost of occupancy, he explained, is rent plus utilities. “Because we’ll have a much more efficient building,” Mirel said, “the cost of utilities will be lower so we can kind of balance out and be competitive.”

Eco Park

Tenants at all three of the Great Oaks office buildings will be able to use the new amenities at Building 150 — like a fitness center and an elevated courtyard, Mirel said.

“In turn, the residents of Building 150 will have access to traditional office space as well as Hone Coworks, which is the flexible workplace that we opened last year,” he said. “And then all of the tenants, commercial and residential, will still be able to enjoy the park’s walking trail and picnic areas. We have immediate mass-transit access and walkability to shopping and other conveniences nearby.”

The new apartment complex, Mirel said, will make use of currently under-used parking places. Parking for the apartment tenants will be under the building.

“We have sort of an abundance of parking here,” he said. “Unfortunately, that may also be what I hope to be one of the shorter-term effects of COVID … Folks are maybe not utilizing mass transit as much as they had before, just coming out of the pandemic, and maybe not even ride-sharing as much as they once did. Our hope is over time technology will outpace the need to use as much parking.”

Mirel concluded by speaking of Rosenblum’s commitment to stemming climate change.

“If you consider that commercial and residential buildings are responsible for some 40 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. and use about 40 percent of the country’s energy, it’s really incumbent upon our company and the CRE industry,” he said of commercial real estate, “to lower the carbon footprint of our new and existing building stock.

“So we’re very much committed to that path and to doing the kind of sustainable development that not only provides a greener way forward but provides greater comfort and greater convenience to our tenants and our residents.”