The St. Luke's proposed $32M development ... before it lost its sixth floor.
A long-delayed Whalley Avenue redevelopment lost a floor — and saved $2 million, because of how much more expensive it is to build with steel and concrete instead of just wood.
That’s the latest with the apartment building to-be at 117 and 129 Whalley Ave., 10 Dickerman St., and 34 and 36 Sperry St.
The City Plan Commission has voted to allow the project to shrink from six stories to five, from 55 total apartments to 49, and from a steel-and-concrete “podium” structure to all wood framing. The discussion leading up to the vote shone a light on how building height influences the viability of residential developments. It also underscored how, sometimes, it makes more financial sense to build smaller rather than taller.
This particular apartment project, undertaken by the church-affiliated St. Luke’s Development Corporation, dates back a decade. It includes the demolition of a few existing buildings, including the Papa John’s on Whalley. The church is now working with the public housing authority’s nonprofit development arm, the Glendower Group, to finally make this building a reality.
In September, the co-developers won site plan approval from the City Plan Commission to construct a five-story, 49-unit apartment building with groundfloor commercial space and 24 on-site parking spaces. All but a handful of these apartments will be rented out to tenants making no more than 50 percent of the area median income (AMI), which currently translates to $58,050 for a family of four.
As Glendower Vice President of Development Edward LaChance explained during that September meeting, the five-story, 49-unit plan marks a drop in height and unit count from the six-story, 55-unit building that the City Plan Commission approved in March 2023.
“Due to budget constraints, we lost the top floor of the building,” LaChance told the commissioners.
“Things are very expensive,” he elaborated during that meeting. “By going from six to five, we no longer have to build a podium building. [We] can do all wood construction. That saved us several million dollars … [and is] something that makes the project feasible.”
Several million dollars? For just one floor?
In follow-up comments provided to the Independent, Desire Sessions, a spokesperson for the city’s housing authority, said that the total estimated development cost for this St. Luke’s development project is now $33.4 million.
She said the total project cost would have been $2 million higher with a sixth story.
“The concrete and steel podium is what was driving the cost up,” Sessions explained in an email statement. “Building code allows you to build 5 stories of wood – that’s the maximum that engineering and/or the building code would allow. So to go 6 stories, you need 1 level of concrete and steel and 5 levels of wood. Removing a wood top level is not the expensive aspect. The concrete and steel podium is the expensive part and that’s what we cut.”
Sessions also passed along an email comment from the housing authority’s contractor for this project. That comment reiterated that the $2 million in savings is thanks to “a combination of going from a structural steel/concrete podium to an all wood framed building which reduced the cost of the 2nd floor system by about 60% and the cost savings of eliminating the [top] floor and associated 6 apartments.”
Even though the project has shrunk by a floor and has saved $2 million in the process, this long-in-the-works affordable housing development’s current estimated price tag of $33.4 million is still higher than the $32.6 million the housing authority expected the project to cost as recently as last fall. And that was when the building still had six floors and 55 apartments.
“We often see fluctuations in costs which is why we constantly work so hard to bring costs down when feasible,” Sessions told the Independent. “Without this cost savings, for example, we would be $2M over budget and not have a balanced sources and uses. We must have a balanced sources and uses to complete a financial closing and construct a development.”
In other St. Luke’s development news, the Elicker administration recently submitted a proposal to the Board of Alders that would reduce this apartment building’s taxes to the equivalent of $450 per unit per year, with a 3 percent increase each year, for 39 years.
Construction is scheduled to begin in May 2025, and be completed by August 2026.
St. Luke's church (right), next to where 49 apartments may soon be built.