Best Places to live in NY
Via Verde in the Bronx sets the bar for affordable-housing complexes worldwide
If you don’t think real estate in the South Bronx can get the blood moving and excite the soul, spend some time at Via Verde, a mammoth income-regulated housing complex near the Hub at 704 Brook Ave. at 156th St.
It also gets the money flowing. Group after group and couple after couple who tour the $100 million project with over 40,000 square feet of usable green roof and garden space put 5% down on two-bedroom homes starting at $146,032. Of 71 coop units, only 26 remain. Some went in a lottery. Others are going as fast as you can say “open house.”
The award-winning Via Verde is known around the world as one of the finest projects of its kind, combining green design with affordability to spur urban renewal. But let’s forget urban renewal. It demeans the people who live around this great neighborhood and own businesses here. (Yes, the Hub, with its fashion retail, furniture stores and boxing gym is great). It also demeans the people who plan on moving in here. This project is about opportunity, home ownership and securing a future for your family in New York City. It’s urban survival, not renewal.
John Valverde works up the street. He directs a green career center for the non-profit Osborne Association. The focus is training out-of-work and lowskilled people for employment in the eco-friendly construction and energy efficiency trades. He’s placed hundreds of workers at local construction sites. Valverde, married to an architect from Costa Rica, will move into Via Verde this summer.
“Yes, this is a transformation for this neighborhood, but it’s more than that,” says Valverde, now living in Ozone Park, Queens. “It’s a commitment to sustainability and the difference architecture and vision can make in the lives of people who live here and near here. Via Verde is the future of how we all should live. I want to be able to live well in New York for a long time. We can do it here.”
Designed by London and New York-based Grimshaw in partnership with Dattner Architects, the project is a lesson in ingenuity. You can virtually climb to the building’s seventh floor in a semi-circle via a string
of outdoor green roofs. You walk up an amphitheatre overlooking a children’s playground. Then you pass a small evergreen farm before passing an orchard of apple and peach trees. Turning the corner, organic food boxes to be shared by residents overlook a baseball field and Manhattan skyline on one side and the sheer size of Via Verde on the other.
Still climbing, another straightaway leads up a wired outdoor stairwell past solar panels that provide electricity to all common spaces in the building. A series of trestles and a green roof garden lead to the seventh floor fitness center, another amenity. The point here is that Via Verde is designed as an energy-efficient model and a way to inspire health in a housing community.
Developed by Jonathan Rose Companies and Phipps Housing, which won the right to build the site after winning a contest sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation, the New York chapter of the American Institure of Architects, and the State Energy Research and Development Authority, Via Verde also has a 20-story rental tower and 9,500 square feet of retail set aside for a Montefiore Medical Center.
“This is the next generation of green affordable housing,” says Paul Freitag, managing director of development for Jonathan Rose Companies. “We think urban architecture and development needs to focus on health and efficiency. Via Verde does mean ‘Green Way.’ This is the way we need to build, live and think. The design and sales success says this isn’t just a guess or a trend anymore. It’s a fact.”
Inside the building, eco-friendly homes have cross-ventilation, low Voc-paints, bamboo cabinets, hardwood floors, simple porcelain tile, solar shading for each window, energy-saving appliances and efficient mechanical systems. All units come with built-in work stations, dishwashers and washer/dryers. One line of duplex two-bedroom, 1½ bath homes has balconies, open kitchens and smart lines on the stairwell. A few remain for $179,000. In the West Village, homes less practical, eco-advanced and architecturally stunning list for $1.5 million-plus.
The full variety of homes originally available at Via Verde includes work live townhouses, mid-rise, and high-rise units. From the rental building’s 20th floor common roof space, you can survey the south, north and central Bronx, inspecting the variety of housing projects over the years that attempted to improve the urban condition. Some worked. Some failed. Via Verde hopes to define the new way of building and living.
“This lives up to its expectations of being a global model for affordable housing,” says Michael Wadman, vice president of Phipps Houses, the New York area’s largest and oldest non-profit devoted to the affordable housing sector. “The borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., said it best: ‘Once the Bronx was burning, now we’re planting gardens in the sky.’ We’re excited to see this done, but just as excited to see the community in action when the place is filled.”
On a sunny but cold Saturday in March, Via Verde drew at least 100 house hunters. Some had already put down a deposit. They were returning to check the construction progress. Others were working with agents Eleanor Vernon and Stacey Bond to complete their applications and purchase packages, which include past tax documents, pay stubs and credit reports. With monthly maintenance and a mortgage, buyers of the two-bedrooms for $146,000 can expect to pay around $1,580 total. One-bedroom owners will pay less. Income qualifications cannot be
less than $54,200 per household or more than $145,250. Bronx-native Michael Reed runs sales at the development. A 20-year veteran of selling affordable housing, Reed has a big smile and positive but matter-of-fact delivery that is refreshing from a real estate sales professional. Potential buyers respond to him as well as Via Verde’s one-of-a-kind design. A former bond trader, Reed finds daily fulfillment in working the affordable home sector.
“Here I was on Wall St., watching billions of dollars move around every day,” he says. “Then I would come home to the Bronx, where I was born, and see people living in terrible conditions. I wanted to do something about it, something where I could make a difference.”
Working the condo and co-op circuit, Reed has put thousands of first-time buyers into their homes.
“The big sell here is the price,” says Reed walking three generations of a family through the complex. “That’s why people are here. The location, design and green thing seal the deal.”
Josie Bisono bought a ground-floor three-bedroom. Living in Harlem, Bisono went to high school in the Bronx. She took three friends to see her new home.
“When I first asked people about this neighborhood, they were like, ‘I don’t know, moving there from Manhattan?’” says Bisono, smirking playfully at the friend with her now who said that. “It’s gorgeous, though, and close to the subway. I like the industrial look.”
Anytime I’ve walked it, the Melrose neighborhood and the Hub teem with people. Street vendors joke with pedestrians as they walk by. Urban clothing stores blast music. Around the corner, not two blocks away, Via Verde stands tall, rising like a stadium or giant emblem of a neighborhood on the up-and-up. That’s what it is. This is not social experimentation. It’s a place to live, at a fair price, for hardworking people. Silver in the sun, lit up at night as it will be when full, Via Verde is not a symbol of gentrification or hope, it’s good building and smart thinking.
“This will be a real residential community,” says Reed. “It cracks me up when people come out and put money down and then say, ‘Wait, I’m moving back to the Bronx.’ But now they say it with pride. There is something very good about that.”