THE NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESSWEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020 N B7Commercial Real Estate
RECENT SALE
$2.775 million
419 West 144th Street (between
Convent Avenue and Hamilton
Terrace)
Manhattan
This five-story, 5,890-square-foot
building in the Hamilton Heights
neighborhood was built in 1898.
The first three floors of the building
are part of a triplex. The fourth and
fifth floors contain four apartments:
three studios and one junior one-
bedroom. The building has been
family owned and managed for 39
years.
Buyer:Hamilton Heights Holding
Seller:IMM Real Estate
Brokers:Josh Lipton and Andrew
Levine of Invictus Property Advisors
RECENT SALE$4.5 million
124 West 78th Street (between
Columbus and Amsterdam Ave-
nues)
Manhattan
This 5,630-square-foot building on
the Upper West Side was built in
1881 and designed by the architect
Rafael Guastavino. A five-story
building, it has a basement office
space, two two-bedroom apart-
ments, three one-bedrooms and
five studios. Two of the apartments
are rent regulated, and eight are
free market. The building has had
the same owner for more than 50
years.
Buyer:Calano & Calano Realty
Seller:McDonnell CompanySeller’s Brokers:Hall Oster, Paul
Smadbeck, Teddy Galligan, Conrad
Martin and Braedan Gait of JLL
Capital MarketsFOR SALE$3 million
1554 St. Peters Avenue (between
Glebe and St. Raymond Avenues)
The Bronx
This 12,528-square-foot, three-
story warehouse in the Westchester
Square neighborhood includes a
freight elevator, ground-level park-
ing and 14-foot ceilings on the
ground floor. It was built in 1927.
Seller:Montefiore Hospital
Brokers:Paul Enea, Marco Lala and
Chris O’Callaghan of RM FriedlandINVICTUS PROPERTY ADVISORS MARTYN GALLINA-JONES RM FRIEDLANDSOPHIA JUNE Email: [email protected]
Transactions
HELSINKI, FINLAND — When his tour as
the American ambassador to Finland
ended in 2015, Bruce Oreck decided to
linger. Part of the draw was a business
opportunity. In a neighborhood just
north of the city center, Mr. Oreck paid
about 11 million euros (then about $13
million) for a vast, abandoned, century-
old train factory.
He has been transforming the site
into a market and community center
that he intends to be a model of green
building and consumerism. But Mr.
Oreck, who was a New Orleans tax
lawyer and professional bodybuilder
before he became an Obama political
appointee, said he had stayed because
he was enchanted by something be-
sides the potential for real estate suc-
cess.
“You don’t hear about it unless you
spend time here, but something is
happening in Helsinki that isn’t happen-
ing almost anywhere else,” Mr.Oreck
said. “Helsinki is a city full of people
waiting for the revolution. They really
want to make the world a better place,
and they’re trying to lead by example.
Which is a paradox, because Finns are
decidedly not showy people.”
The qualities Mr. Oreck is referring to
are sometimes summed up by the term
sustainability. In the world’s second-
most northern capital, sustainability
has moved from concept to guiding
principle. It’s rare for a day to pass
without hearing a form of the word
deployed multiple times as an envi-
ronmentally friendly noun, adjective or
adverb.
But Helsinki has a parallel goal: The
city has endorsed measures it hopes
will earn it recognition as the world’s
most functional city.
In Helsinki this aspiration will be
judged against a measurable and
widely shared benefit: New master-
planned communities must integrate
features allowing inhabitants to enjoy
an extra hour of free time each day.
Nowhere are these ambitions more
apparent than in Kalasatama, a 430-
acre neighborhood east of the city
center. Rising on an area previously
used as docklands, the buildings are all
commercially developed. The city re-
tains ownership of about a third of the
units, which it leases as government-
subsidized housing. Yet even within
projects entirely financed with private
funds, the emphasis on community
building is central.
“What we are seeing is developers
working with buyers before construc-
tion to create more and new kinds of
shared spaces than they would usually
offer, because that’s what buyers are
asking for,” said Maija Bergstrom, a
project manager for Forum Virium
Helsinki, the city agency overseeing
planning in Kalasatama.
One such building is Sumppi, a co-
housing project where costs were
jointly financed by a group of about 70
people who until the process began had
been strangers. Residents chose the
building’s name for its double meaning.
In Finnish, sumppi is slang for “let’s
have coffee,” but the word also means
“small fish,” appropriate for a building
across the street from a Baltic seafront.
In November of last year, residents
moved into 39 units in a structure that
is eight floors at its highest, with a
six-floor wing. During the year-and-a-
half planning phase and the 19-month
development phase, the future occu-
pants met regularly with the construc-
tion manager to review costs and in-
spect progress.
A wine cellar was canceled in favor of
solar panels. There is also a geothermal
heating system, and windows have
three panes for energy efficiency. The
building has underground parking, but
there are fewer spaces than units. At
one of their first meetings, in the com-
munal living room, residents spiritedly
debated whether to purchase four
electric cars to share.
“Before construction even started,
the owners agreed on some core val-
ues,” said Salla Korpela, a driving force
behind the resurgence of co-housing in
Finland and a partner in the firm
Sagarak, which advised Sumpii’s build-
ers. “For instance, the best places
would be reserved for community use,
and when choices had to be made, we
should be guided by what would make
life fun, easier and cheaper.”
The final cost was about €5,000 per
square meter, or roughly $550 per
square foot, around 20 percent over the
initial estimate. But that was still con-
siderably less than the average cost of a
developer-built project nearby, which is
closer to €8,000 per square meter.
Apartments range in size from stu-
dios to four bedrooms, and the layout of
every unit is customized, owners hav-
ing co-designed their spaces with the
architects. One unit features a large art
studio. In another, once the owners’
children reach adulthood, the rooms
can be separated into two units. All of
the apartments have large windows,
and some have outdoor terraces. The
best have southwest-facing views
across the bay to the city center, where
the tallest structures remain the tops of
churches.
The most inviting shared spaces are
the top floors of the two wings, with
their large saunas. A rooftop terrace
has a garden as well as space for yoga
classes and summer barbecues.
Residents moved into Sumppi about
a month before Finland sealed its bor-ders against the pandemic. One of their
first group activities was to form an
in-house coronavirus committee led by
two doctors. For the past several
months, common spaces have not been
used, and the saunas are available for
only one family for one hour at a time.
On Tuesdays, the communal laundry
facilities are reserved for residents with
pre-existing conditions.
So far, about 4,000 people have
moved to the Kalasatama community.
By 2030, that number is expected to
grow to about 25,000, and there will be
office space for 10,000 workers. Most of
the neighborhood will be composed of
midrises under 10 floors, but the area is
home to the city’s first skyscraper, 32
floors high. Within a few years, Kalasa-
tama is expected to have eight sky-
scrapers from 32 to 37 floors in height.
At first glance, the dense but still-
unfinished developments of Kalasa-
tama resemble the new neighborhoods
of most Western cities. But the empha-
sis on doing without fossil fuel is appar-
ent.
“Our buildings have solar panels and
wastewater heat recovery,” said Jo-
hanna Palosaari, a project development
director for Hartela, a developer with
four buildings in Kalasatama. “Thisisn’t normal in our projects elsewhere.
Here, the city gave us requirements
related to electric systems and building
automation and control. We had to
follow those regulations, of course. We
promised also to develop certain smart
solutions for the buildings.”
At the same time, beyond the green
features, the cranes and the commer-
cial infrastructure of coffee shops and
farm-to-table restaurants, a radical
rethinking of urban living and commu-
nity is underway.
Among the projects completed or
nearing completion are rental buildings
for aging musicians and artists, owner-
developed co-housing towers and multi-
generational housing, where residents
range in age from their 20s to their 90s.
Units are slightly smaller than is typi-
cal in new-to-market developments.
Nearly a fifth of the total space, howev-
er, is reserved for common areas like
gyms, cinemas, libraries, music rooms,
gardens and terraces.
Progress in Kalasatama is suffi-
ciently advanced that residents can
enjoy at least a portion of that sought-
after extra leisure time.
In the skyscrapers, the timesavingstarts as residents put on their shoes
and use a smartphone app to signal an
elevator to wait for them. They can use
an app to order from a grocery store,
where a robot will pluck the items from
the shelves and deliver them to the
apartment.
Kalasatama residents are not re-
quired to carry recycling to the street,
nor are they stuck in traffic behind
garbage trucks.
Every building in the neighborhood is
connected to a network of pneumatic
tubes that propel seven categories of
trash to a central collection point,
where the materials arrive pre-sorted.
Until recently, another neighborhoodfeature was a driverless “last mile”
electric bus that would whisk pas-
sengers in less than five minutes to a
metro station, but Helsinki’s growing
fleet of autonomous buses has been
shifted to other neighborhoods for
testing, in settings with more bustling
traffic.
“The area was designed to reduce the
need for cars” said Kimmo Tupala, a
communications manager for UNICEF
Finland who lives in the area. “Maybe
they did too good of a job, because I
hardly see any cars on the road. Before
moving here, I spent at least 40 min-
utes a day in my car. Since last Septem-
ber, I’ve hardly used my car ever, and
I’m thinking of selling it.”
When it comes to green objectives,
clear goals have been set for Helsinki,
whose population is nearly 650,000. The
metropolitan area has 1.4 million peo-
ple.
The policies reflect the concerns of
residents. A 2018 survey indicated that
climate change and the future of their
children were their top concerns, beat-
ing out by wide margins other issues
like terrorism and unemployment.
Committed to becoming carbon neu-
tral by 2035, Helsinki is improving
public transport. The city already emits
28 percent less carbon than it did in
1990, according to the Carbon Neutral
Initiative, a municipal task force.
The city’s transformation has been
noticed by one of its most cleareyed
observers.
“Thirty years ago when I left to live
in Brazil, Helsinki had a kind of Soviet
gloom,” said Mika Kaurismaki, the
award-winning director of art-house
films like “Zombie and the Ghost Train.”
Mr. Kaurismaki, along with his movie
director brother, is a co-owner of a bar
in the Train Factory complex developed
by Mr. Oreck, and he has an apartment
in the city center where he spends part
of each year.
“Now there’s so much less stress in
the city,” Mr. Kaurismaki said. “I
ditched my car, and now I get around
by electric scooter. Today the city is
much more international and open to
new ideas.”Building the Most Functional City Imaginable
In Helsinki, sustainability is not just a buzzword. It’s become a guiding principle for urban development.
Above, a floating sauna in Kalasatama, a Helsinki community with an emphasis on curbing
fossil fuel use. Left, a shared space in one of the area’s sustainability-focused buildings.EETU AHANENSRVSquare Feet
By DORN TOWNSEND
28%
The reduction in carbon emissions
in Helsinki since 1990.