Being Green

Thursday afternoon I headed over to Chapel Hill for a ULI Young Leader's event for the Greenbridge project in downtown. Greenbridge is Chapel Hill's first venture into a large scale, green building condo, retail, office building. The project is located on the west side of downtown between Franklin and Rosemary Streets and will be a ground breaking addition to the community. The developers have big eyes and are striving for LEED Gold Certification which requires quite a bit of environmentally friendly design. While it should be a great project, the units are pretty pricey but right now green building is more expensive and the Chapel Hill market will bear the prices. The Town of Chapel Hill is also famously difficult to deal with in proposing new developments and this was no different even with the great environmental features. The town required 15 afforable units in the development. While I'm a fan of requiring afforable housing through density bonuses and other methods, I'm not sure if forcing the the inclusion of 15 units selling for ~$100,000 in a building with other units priced ~$400k and up. It should be interesting watching this project come out of the ground.

Here's the website for the project: Greenbridge Developments

After the session, I went to dinner with some friends from planning and the B-school at the Carolina Brewery. It was nice going out and I met some new people.

In other news, Tech made the Tournament!!!