Wood Is The Word As Dixwell Dev Grows

As a crane lowered wood panels made from Central European trees, officials celebrated 69 new ​“mass timber” apartments taking root in a long vacant lot — and envisioned a construction-industry revolution where carbon-capturing materials can be grown and processed closer to home.

That was the scene Thursday morning at a 0.67-acre triangular lot at the southern intersection of Munson Street, Dixwell Avenue, and Orchard Street. 

That used to be home to a gas station, a parking lot, and Joe Grate’s popular barbecue stand. Since last summer, it has become a bustling building site with hard-hatted workers, a growing assembly of light brown wood panels, and a towering HighLine construction crane helping lower each piece in place.

Mayor Justin Elicker, Beulah Land Development Corporation CEO Darrell Brooks, Spiritos Properties Principal Jeff Spiritos, Livable City Initiative Executive Director Arlevia Samuel, city Office of Climate and Sustainability Executive Director Steve Winter, and Dixwell/Newhallville/Prospect Hill Alder Troy Streater, among others, gathered for a press conference celebrating the ongoing development work at that long-vacant spot.

When finished, ideally by the start of 2024, the project will consist of two new four-story residential buildings containing 69 new apartments, 80 percent of which will be set aside for renters making 60 percent or less of the area median income (AMI). That upper income limit currently translates to around $67,000 for a family of four.

Beulah — a church-grown Dixwell developer — and the New York City-based nonprofit HELP USA are building these apartments at 316 Dixwell Ave., 340 Dixwell Ave., and 783 Orchard St.

This building project will ​“transform how we think about affordable housing” and how we think about ​“housing in general,” Brooks said.

“By making it affordable, that’s the best thing you can do,” Alder Streater said. ​“It’s a beautiful thing to see.”

Much of Thursday’s presser focused on the wood panels that construction workers were steadily assembling behind the press conference speakers — and about the environmental benefits of ​“mass timber” method of development.

This project ​“is about reimagining what filling a hole in the fabric of a city could look like,” Winter said. It’s a demonstration of ​“how cities can be vehicles for caring for the most need and also vehicles for directly addressing our climate crisis.”

That’s because this method of construction prioritizes using wood over concrete and steel.

“By using wood, a renewable resource, we’re able to store carbon over a long period of time, over the life of the building,” Winter said.

Steel and concrete make up around 11 percent of global greenhouse emissions, he continued. ​“If we’re able to reduce our reliance on that construction technique and move towards mass timber, there’s an enormous climate benefit there.” Winter also said that this project will be a ​“passive house” and ​“ultra energy efficient,” meaning that the tenants will have ​“really really miniscule utility bills.”

Local architect Alan Organschi and mass timber builder Jeff Spiritos agreed about the project’s cutting-edge environmental nature.

This Dixwell development is about ​“regeneration,” Organschi said. ​“It’s about regenerating a community and a city. It’s about regenerating the climate.” It’s also about ​“protecting our forests” by creating a new kind of sustainable demand for a renewable resource that services as ​“our most important terrestrial carbon sink,” pulling carbon out of the environment and helping mitigate its planet-warming effects.

“It’s proven that buildings lined in wood lower the heart rates of inhabitants,” he continued. 

“All the bedrooms, living rooms will have exposed walls and ceilings that creates natural, healthy environments,” added Spiritos.

He said that the world’s tallest mass timber building is currently a 25-story apartment complex in Milwaukee. A 40-story mass timber office building is now being constructed in Sydney, Australia.

“The world is moving towards mass timber housing. The world is moving towards mass timber affordable housing in a big way,” he said.

If there are so many environmental benefits to this method of construction, why aren’t more developers turning to mass timber?

Organschi stressed that this type of building marks ​“a revolution … in the entire construction sector” which usually relies on mined minerals that are transformed into steel and reinforced concrete. If concrete were a country, he said, ​“it would be the third largest emitter of carbon in the world.” The process of making and building with steel is similarly carbon rich.

However, he continued, we as a society and the construction industry in particular ​“have sunk a huge amount of money and capital into an industry that uses steel and concrete.”

“We’re really swimming upstream” and moving ​“against convention, behavior, and deeply sunk capital costs” by pursuing mass timber right now.

This particular Dixwell project should cost roughly $21 million to build, according to Darrel Brooks. It has benefited from a 30-year tax break from the city as well as other local and state subsidies.

After the presser, Organschi noted that the wood used in the Dixwell development comes from trees grown in Central Europe and then processed in Austria before being shipped to the United States and trucked up to the construction site.

Part of the goal of a development like this, he said, is pushing the local, regional, national, and global construction industries and their various supply chains one step in the direction of using more sustainable materials — and, ideally, growing and transporting and processing those materials closer to where they are ultimately used. 

The way to do that, he continued, is through pilot projects like these — which are ​“marginally more expensive” because of the mass timber method — and then repeating them and repeating them and repeating them again to show that they can work and do have so many environmental and long-term cost benefits.

But that means building them is a little more difficult and a little more costly now.

“There really is a learning curve and a marginal cost,” added Winter.