The Place Maker-AT GERDING EDLEN, COMMUNITY BUILDING AND SUSTAINABILITY RUN DEEP.

by Martin Middlewood

After living in the suburbs for 24 years, and with his children grown, Mark Edlen decided to experience firsthand one of the communities he’s spent the past 12 years building.

In mid-2007, Edlen, managing principal and cofounder of Gerding Edlen Development Co., and his wife, Ann, moved into one of Gerding Edlen’s projects, the Meriwether condominiums, near downtown Portland, Ore. The couple plan to move into another one of his projects, The Casey, later this year.

The LEED Gold-certified Meriwether consists of two 20-plus-story towers offering 245 urban homes along with ground-floor townhomes and retail. It was the first project completed in the South Waterfront Central District on the west bank of Portland’s Willamette River and the last major undeveloped urban area in the city.

The Meriwether, like Edlen’s future home The Casey, embodies Gerding Edlen’s vision of developing vibrant, livable communities— places where residents can go to work, window shop, or find a bite to eat without getting in their cars. It is expected to be one of the first LEED Platinum-certified multifamily buildings in the United States.

“Developers have a reputation for not looking out for community,” says Steve McCallion, executive creative director for Ziba Design, a Portland-based firm that researched the market for Gerding Edlen’s Bellevue Towers in Washington and Portland’s South Waterfront infill project. “But Gerding Edlen truly believes in long-term goals and community building, and they’re passionate about it.”

Still, implementing such a clear vision requires leadership, focused planning, and an agonizing attention to detail during execution. Under Edlen’s direction, the company is doing just that. As a result, Gerding Edlen’s strategic goals—from harnessing the power of wind to creating the region’s first energy positive building—will likely shape the face of sustainable community development for years to come.

LEGACY PLANNING

Edlen, along with Bob Gerding, a Ph.D. biochemist, founded Gerding Edlen in 1996. Since then, all of the firm’s projects have had a common goal: “We always ask, ‘How do we create more than a building?’ and ‘What’s our opportunity to create a great place?’” Edlen says. “The worst legacy I can think of is a hundred years from now someone seeing what we’ve done and asking, ‘Who built that monstrosity?’”

Though Gerding has since retired, Edlen—who spent 15 years as an international real estate broker for Cushman & Wakefield—has taken the company’s mission to heart. He’s avid about the firm’s long-term vision to create sustainable developments that will last at least 100 years. “Our goal is to increase convenience, decrease reliance on cars and fossil fuels, and help people connect with their environment,” he says, recalling his own love of the outdoors. “Our mountains, rivers, and beaches are treasures beyond imagination [that] we need to preserve. From the time I was a kid, I spent time in the mountains climbing, skiing, and backpacking [or] rafting and kayaking on the rivers of Oregon. We cannot lose these precious parts of our heritage.

“We need to [consider] the legacy we will leave behind to our communities, our children, and their children,” he continues. “We have a choice to leave them with a burden or with a built environment that preserves our natural [one]. Very simply, it is not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do.”

These sentiments are put into action by the Gerding Edlen team, as it collaborates both within and outside of the company to build its communities. Edlen believes that every development, like every community, needs diversity to thrive. “Nine people are smarter than one,” he says, adding that he encourages his firm to partner with smart people to achieve greater results.

While the company has no exclusive partnerships, Gerding Edlen invests a lot of energy in building relationships with financiers, development partners, and architects; setting up public-private partnerships; and doing the research needed to understand what’s important to the citizens of a given area.

GBD Architects is one firm that Gerding Edlen has worked with for about a decade. The Portland, Ore.-based company started working with Gerding Edlen in 1998, designing the Brewery Blocks and South Waterfront, the latter a $2.2 billion infill project covering 38 acres along the Willamette River, according to Phil Beyl, president of GBD.

BUILDING BLOCKS

Together, GBD and Gerding Edlen spearheaded the revitalization of the obsolete Blitz-Weinhard brewery. Soon, Brewery Blocks, a once desolate five-block area bordering the city’s prestigious Pearl District, became an icon for community building and sustainability.

“Gerding Edlen embraces levels of sustainability and community that put a project on the map, and they make it happen by pushing their design teams to do things that have never been done before,” Beyl says.

Completed in late 2006, the Brewery Blocks contains 1.7 million square feet of urban retail, office space, residential housing, and parking. True to its urban, mixed-use vision, office buildings on the Blocks host ground-floor retail space that invites walk-in traffic. (Gerding Edlen occupies one of the office buildings as well.)

Troy Doss, director of Portland’s Bureau of Planning, gives Gerding Edlen high marks for its creativity, accessibility, and willingness to take on the risky projects that other developers say can’t be done. “They’ve taken urban design and sustainability farther than any developer I know—not just here, but nationwide,” he says.

The Brewery Blocks project is certainly a model for community-oriented and sustainable design—more than 94 percent of the project’s construction and demolition materials was recycled, for instance. Still, the effort didn’t get off the ground easily, Edlen recalls. When the firm launched the project in 2000, it was better known for its sustainable commercial development than community building and had trouble signing on partners and securing financing for its big idea. Eventually, the $350 million development emerged as a mixed-use gateway for Portland’s desirable Pearl District and established Gerding Edlen’s reputation for community building.

Today, the Brewery Blocks boasts mixeduse buildings, wide sidewalks, and plenty of places for people to gather. Additionally, it offers the first LEED Platinum-certified performing arts center—the Gerding Theater at the Armory—which has been lauded by the American Institute of Architects. [Editor’s note: The project was also highlighted in the Fall 2007 issue of DEVELOPER as one of the best green projects of 2007.] “Before our development, you could have driven tanks down these streets and no one would have noticed,” says Dennis Wilde, a Gerding Edlen principal and the firm’s resident “green guy.” “Only 200 people worked here; now there are more than 4,000 people.”

GREAT DESTINATIONS

From Edlen’s perspective, placemaking is all about knitting new development projects into the existing fabric of a community and creating great places where people will want to live, work, and shop.

But integrating new projects into the existing neighborhood fabric isn’t cheap— Gerding Edlen spent $1 million to restore a 120-foot-tall smokestack in the Brewery Blocks just because it was the visual landmark for the area. Similarly, the company gutted a building to save its shell and rebuilt another inside it for a Whole Foods grocery store—the anchor tenant that would eventually draw residential housing and offices.

Along with Brewery Blocks, The Casey embodies the firm’s emphasis on architecture and unique design elements. Gerding Edlen worked closely with Portland-based Bullseye Glass and several artists to create a modernistic glass-art spire for the mixed-use building. The spire extends from the building’s second floor to the rooftop so both residents and passersby on the street can enjoy it.

Community building doesn’t occur in a sterile environment—more often than not, it’s a social and economic experiment that many developers consider too risky to tackle. Gerding Edlen’s The Civic project, for example, brings a mixed-use, mixed-income development to an area of Portland that was once best described as edgy.

Gerding Edlen developed The Civic as part of a public-private partnership with the Housing Authority of Portland. HAP owned the property, which is located just east of Portland’s PGE Park. It had fallen into disrepair, and the city decided to redevelop it by partnering with Gerding Edlen.

The Civic, which features 261 studios, penthouses, and one- and two-bedroom units starting at $174,000, is linked to The Morrison, a subsidized apartment building owned and operated by HAP. The two share ground-floor retail space, underground parking, and a pedestrian promenade that encourages owners and renters to mix and also links both buildings to Burnside Street.

For the $76 million Civic, Gerding Edlen created urban appeal by designing wider sidewalks and integrating original artwork into the common Civic-Morrison lobby to make the area open and pedestrian-friendly.

“The Civic was a reconciliation of an enormous urban design problem,” says Tom Cody, a company principal with a master’s degree in urban planning from Harvard. “There are several streets converging onto a little triangular piece of property that blocked people from moving from one place to the next. It was a horrible pedestrian environment with no retail on the ground floor and begging for a number of things. Our solution was a public promenade with $100,000 of public art in it.”

Cody, who worked previously for famed architect Frank Gehry, led The Civic’s project team. He also heads up Gerding Edlen’s mammoth South Park development in downtown Los Angeles.

The firm, along with Williams & Dame Development, is trying to take its community-building concept from Portland to Southern California. [See “Bigger Stage,”]

SUSTAINABLY FEASIBLE

From Gerding Edlen’s perspective, community building goes hand in hand with sustainability— the two are symbiotic because buildings exist for people, Edlen says.

“Gerding Edlen brings a uniquely contemporary perspective to the whole world of development,” says Howard Shapiro, a former HAP executive who worked with Gerding Edlen on The Civic. “They don’t look at their projects as being financially feasible, but sustainably feasible. They’re looking not only at the present but at the future, in terms of being environmentally friendly.”

The firm’s commitment to sustainability couldn’t be more obvious—from the hybrid cars parked in the underground garage below its corporate offices to the solar panels on top of its residential towers, Gerding
Edlen embodies a “green” company.

In fact, Gerding Edlen gives its employees $400 a month toward the purchase of a fuel efficient car, reimburses them for using public transportation, and offers a $250 allotment for a bicycle. Edlen himself owns a Toyota Prius hybrid. Although he sometimes bikes to work, he usually drives the Prius or jumps on a streetcar to get to his office.

Gerding Edlen has built (or has in the planning stages) 37 LEED-certified projects, including 23 LEED Gold and four LEED Platinum sites. LEED Silver certification is a given for all their buildings, but Gold or Platinum
certification is the goal, Wilde says.

The firm’s strategy for winning and developing new projects combines growth and conservation. With the Brewery Blocks, the firm worked to preserve older buildings so they remain standing for generations. For
example, anchoring an old brew house to a new office building with a seismic bridge and connecting the two with an elevator core literally unites the old and the new structures visually and physically.

Today, the firm is widely considered one of the nation’s top green developers, but it hasn’t achieved its reputation just by counting LEED points. “Companies counting points are missing the opportunity. Instead,
you want to make the right decisions to get the efficiencies needed,” Wilde explains. “It’s not rocket science. Very early in the project, we just have to make a lot of little decisions—about low-emissions paint, sustainable materials such as bamboo, and ways to recapture heat—and then deliver on them.”

The company has embraced new sustainable technologies and has installed many in its latest projects. The highlights include heat-recovering HVAC, solar panels on rooftops and as part of building façades, and eco-roofs. The Casey, for example, has solar panels to heat and cool the building and an eco-roof for stormwater control. “When you’re trying to build more efficient buildings that people want to be around, your decisions
can’t always be financial,” Edlen says.

BLOWING IN THE WIND
Now, Gerding Edlen is pursuing wind power, partnering with Portland firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects to design and build a new mixed-use project in downtown Portland called the 12W. The building will use
four rooftop wind turbines to generate 1.8 kilowatts of power, or about 1 percent of the building’s electricity. The 85,000-squarefoot project is targeting LEED Gold certification and will house 274 apartments, office space, and underground parking.

However, Gerding Edlen’s plans for harnessing wind power are loftier than one building. After testing a scale model of 12W in the Oregon State University Aero Engineering Lab, the company found the results so positive that it is considering building Portland’s first city-based wind farm.

This big idea fits well with the company’s five-year goal to build an energy-positive building—one with an environmental footprint that creates more energy than it uses and consumes more waste than it produces.
“It’s good to have firms out there setting high goals and providing leadership because it’s critical to address the climate change issue,” says Steve Kellenberg, principal at EDAW and one of the authors of “Developing Sustainable Planned Communities,” an Urban Land Institute report published in 2007.

Just a year into the goal, Gerding Edlen is looking hard at starting its own energy company as well as another company focused on retrofitting old buildings with newer, energy-efficient technologies.

Are these the types of business activities that developers should be in? Absolutely—if you’re Gerding Edlen. “Just tell us we can’t do something,” Edlen says, “and watch us take up the challenge.”

Bigger Stage
Taking community building and sustainability from the Pacific Northwest to the Los Angeles metro area will be a big step for Gerding Edlen.

When Gerding Edlen, long with Williams & Dame Development, began the South Park project in Los Angeles nearly four years ago, no housing had been built in downtown L.A. in more than 20 years.

The $320 million project consists of 1.5 million square feet of residential and commercial space, including
1,500 urban homes. All five buildings in the South Park project are designed to achieve LEED certification,
and their location is enviable—just two blocks away from the Staples Center, steps from AEG’s sports
and entertainment district, LA Live!, and within walking distance of the city’s main convention center.

No matter where it builds, the company employs a tabula rasa development ethic and used it to show downtown L.A. new ideas, says Tom Cody, a principal of Gerding Edlen. “Our whole process is an act of discovery that is extremely relevant in designing any project,” he explains. “We came with a clean slate and
a willingness to learn what the neighborhood’s environmental, social, and economic dynamics were.”

However, the “clean slate” process bumped into existing building regulations. The plans called for trees, wide sidewalks, gardens, street furniture, and a residential high-rise—all contrary to the city’s existing standards. But L.A.’s willingness to revise its codes resulted in the downtown’s first LEED Gold-certified residential tower, Elleven.

The 13-story, loft-style building, which is part of Gerding Edlen’s South Park project, not only lessens its
environmental impact and uses 30 percent less water than similar buildings, but energizes foot traffic with paseos, plazas, fountains, urban parks, gardens, and ground-floor retail. Elleven also is the first residential development to be involved in the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs’ Private Percentage for the Arts program, which funds on-site public art projects, cultural facilities, and more.

ILLUMINATING: Luma is one of five buildings that qualify for LEED certification in Gerding Edlen’s South Park project. The site is bringing urban living to downtown Los Angeles.