From black smoke to green living
Eco-friendly loft project reuses industrial site
The radio spot bills it as a community of "hybrid lofts" where residents could live "off the grid using wind, rain, and sun."
A canal system will harvest rainwater. A wind turbine will generate electricity. Cutting-edge ventilation and warming systems eliminate the need for central heating or air conditioning. According to the developers, these innovations will allow residents to cut their energy costs almost in half.
Today, Forbes Park is still an 18-acre swath of riverfront property in Chelsea, home to an old, vacant printing factory and a defunct boiler room. But the project's developer, Urban Design and Development in Somerville, promises it will be the envy of even the most devout environmental enthusiasts when completed in 2011.
If all goes as planned, industry watchdogs say, the 350-unit mixed-use project stands to be one of the region's most comprehensive eco-conscious developments.
Developer Blair Galinsky and his partners said it started with a vision to rehabilitate an industrial site that is more than 120 years old, where a sign of prosperity used to be smoke belching from a brick stack. Now the stack is unused. Nearby, the rotors of a 240-foot-high wind turbine stir the air.
"The way people used to find our site was by following the black trail of smoke from the stack," Galinsky said as he puttered around the buzzing construction site in an electric golf-cart-type car recently. "Today, they use the wind turbine."
The 600-kilowatt turbine is perhaps the most prominent symbol of what Galinsky and his partners hope to accomplish on the bank where Mill Creek meets the Chelsea River. The turbine is expected to generate enough kilowatt hours of power to provide electricity at no cost to at least the 70 or so lofts in the development's first phase, scheduled to be finished this fall.
Lofts will be priced starting at $228,000 and range from 650 to 1,233 square feet.
Forbes Park sounds promising to Katherine Hammack - a founding member of the US Green Building Council, a nonprofit trade group that promotes sustainable buildings - because it calls for reusing existing buildings, locating developments near mass transit, relying on alternative energy sources, and being pedestrian-friendly.
Hammack, who works for the accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young, said residents should look for assurance that Forbes Park follows through on its energy-saving and environmentally friendly plans - such as certification from the council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program.
Tom Hicks, who works for the council, said LEED can help substantiate developers' claims because the program requires them to document whether features like energy-efficient appliances have been installed or if alternative energy sources are in use.
"This is, in part, why LEED even exists today," Hicks said. "If you look back in the early '90s, there were all these buildings being built that were saying they were green and all they had were photovoltaics on the roof. And that's not a green building. Green buildings are more comprehensive than that."
Galinsky said the Forbes Park team is "not anti-LEED," but he doesn't believe the project needs the certification. The LEED process can be "slow, confusing, and frustrating," he said, adding costs to a project's bottom line. Galinsky said he would rather use that money on conservation and renewable-energy efforts.
Those efforts are close to becoming reality - the first phase of lofts at Forbes Park is almost finished.
John B. Gill, cofounder of Titan Electric in Peabody, whose company designed the development's electricity management system, said lofts will be connected to the regional power grid, which will act as a conduit for electricity generated by the turbine, as well as provide supplemental power. A turbine of that size could produce about 1.7 million kilowatt hours of power annually - enough to supply about 160 homes, based on a formula used by the American Wind Energy Association.
Gill estimates the turbine will be able to power about 200 lofts because residents will be encouraged to conserve electricity.
A color-coded wall light, nicknamed the Forbes orb, will be installed in each loft to help residents scale down energy use. It will flash red when a signal from the regional power grid indicates that energy use is high and residents should be cutting back, yellow when use is moderate, green when energy use is low and the cost is cheap, and blue when the wind turbine is generating free power.
"It's nice to know when you can feel guilt-free about doing all your electricity stuff," Galinsky said. He used a remote control to flick through the color-coded lights of a Forbes orb in a model unit. The middle of the building - dubbed Building X and one of five existing structures - has been hollowed out to create an atrium framed by lofts and connected by overhead walkways.
"By not having any hallways in this building, you can open the windows on either side of the unit and get free, cool breezes and not have to pay for electrical air conditioning," Galinsky said. "They call it the chimney effect. It's the same concept that makes your chimney draft, that pulls the smoke out."
The windows will further enhance the effect. Their glass panels are designed to "scoop" air through a space when open. On cold days, radiant heating systems powered by gas-heated water and built into concrete floors will filter warmth up and through the air.
Air will circulate freely because of the slatted wall systems - made of sustainably harvested New England red oak - that partition each loft into a kitchen, bedroom, and living room.
"We've eliminated drywall from our vocabulary. It's a cuss word in our office," Galinsky said. "Hardwood floors, as well."
The environmentally motivated features are visible outside, too.
Steps from Building X, a salt marsh blooms. The plants that grow there, Galinsky said, will provide a habitat for wildlife, help clean the air, and filter water from an adjacent rainwater-fed canal into the creek. The canal, with a capacity of 1 million gallons, will harvest rainwater for flushing and irrigation.
Also, developers hope to make travel to Boston easy. They are lobbying to get a Forbes Park stop added to a nearby commuter rail line and have plans for a water taxi service that would collect passengers from a kiosk near the wind turbine.
Wooed by the idea of a cleaner lifestyle, Chelsea resident Joe Mahoney has reserved one of the lofts.
"The planet is fragile and you can either abuse it or leave it for future generations to have a comfortable life," Mahoney said. "I've told Blair he's not a developer, he's an environmentalist."
Erin Ailworth can be reached at eailworth@globe.com. 