Weekend Interview: Sara Levenson On L+M's Billion-Dollar, Passive House Megaproject In The Rockaways
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Building high-density affordable housing on the coastline of the Atlantic Ocean is something that might intimidate most developers. But for Sara Levenson, a managing partner at L+M Development Partners, the idea was an exciting chance to challenge conventional wisdom about what can be built and where.
L+M has been working on Arverne East, a billion-dollar, 1,650-unit housing development on the Far Rockaway shoreline, for years. The project is the redevelopment of one of the parts of New York City that was hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy.
The project involves raising the building above storm surge levels — by 16 feet or more — but L+M also saw opportunities to incorporate field-leading sustainability standards.
So the developer set about creating solar roof gardens, building to Passive House standards, installing geothermal energy systems for heat and cooling, plus using porous pavements and native plants to absorb water when the tide rises or a storm sweeps through the bay.
L+M went one step further when thinking about how to get the existing Far Rockaway community to buy into the development: around 80% of the units will be reserved as affordable housing, including some for formerly homeless New Yorkers.
Levenson has been with the firm for seven years, all while Arverne East has been taking shape. She sat down with Bisnow to talk about working on one of NYC’s most ambitious housing projects of the 21st century and what the future holds for sustainability-focused development.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Bisnow: You started in city planning agencies, including the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Between those and a stint at a real estate consulting firm, it seems like you’ve always had a strong interest in real estate. Where did that start?
Levenson: I went to Clark University and got a degree in urban geography and sociology, with a concentration in international studies. I think when I got there as a freshman, I really had no idea of what I was really interested in. I thought after Clark I was going to go and get an architecture degree or an urban design degree. I had this great professor who pulled me aside and said, “I think your interests probably span much more than just architecture. Maybe you should think more about the city planning or the real estate side of things.” It was probably the best advice I had gotten as a very young student.
After college, I worked in a different industry for a couple years, and I went to Columbia to get my master's in city planning, where I fell in love with real estate and housing. Then while I was at HPD, I went back and got a certificate at NYU in real estate finance and investment. I got to see other aspects of real estate, not just affordable housing, and got exposed to a lot of other students and professors who were from around the country and around the world working on all sorts of different deals.
Bisnow: You’ve been at L+M since 2017. What were the biggest changes you encountered when pivoting from something that seems more straightforward — real estate consulting — to a more specialized firm, with its focus on social responsibility as a component of what it does?
Levenson: I think it was the timing was right and it made a lot of sense in my career. I've known my colleagues at L+M for many, many years, just by the nature of the work that they had done in New York and the work that we had done together in the affordable housing space. Once I left agency work, finding the right fit from a development company was very important. My personal goals and values align quite well with the firm’s, but also there were a bunch of us who had come from public service or agency work.
It's not just about pure economics. There's a human side of this. There's a policy side of this. There's always a bigger picture with everything that we do. I think that aligned really nicely with how I was already thinking about general real estate or community development projects.
Bisnow: Let’s switch to Arverne East. It has a construction cost of almost $1B and is expected to become one of the largest Passive House projects in the whole country by the time it’s done, somewhere in the next six to eight years. You broke ground on that last summer. What’s the status of the project? Are there any parts that are already open, and do you have timelines for the rest?
Levenson: The project has approximately a 10-year build. We did start work in 2020 and 2021 on the more public works aspects of the project, including the nature preserve, the welcome center as a not-for-profit-run urban farm and native plant nursery, and we're wrapping up our first phase of infrastructure work at the end of the year. The first residential component of the project is currently in design and slated to start construction next year, which is super exciting given all the work that we've done over the almost past eight years.
The project will be built Passive House. We're also leveraging our rooftop solar and the space that we have on the site for carport solar. Ultimately we will be producing more renewable energy on site than we are consuming, making it the first net-zero community in New York City. That's really exciting because we're going to be directly offsetting our consumption on-site. We're not purchasing [renewable energy credits] in order to meet that.
I think it's really important, not just for development in New York City or coastal development, but for resiliency. We don't go a day on the Arverne East project without thinking about resiliency or energy efficiency, and so to be able to make sure that you're developing responsibly to not further exacerbate the climate issues and continue to keep your site resilient — not just for those of us here today, but our children and our future generations — is pretty exciting.
Bisnow: For this project, you’ve needed to upgrade storm and sanitary sewers, water mains, sidewalks, do street tree planting, etc. The road work and infrastructure improvements began in July last year. Are those nearly done?
Levenson: The infrastructure upgrades are doing great thanks to our partnership with New York City Department of Transportation, HPD and our elected officials. We are on schedule to complete the first phase of infrastructure by the end of the year. We're currently working on finishing sidewalk, curbs, catch basins, doing the plantings, and hopefully we'll be finishing the utility work as well in the last quarter of this year.
Bisnow: My understanding is this is one of the largest projects in the country to attempt to use geothermal energy to power housing. Tell me about the ways that L+M has been designing the energy infrastructure for Arverne East.
Levenson: We are deploying a district geothermal system, which effectively means that all of the components within the project are going to be connected via ambient piping. A fundamental of geothermal is that during the summer, you're dumping heat into the ground and you do the reverse during the winter.
The whole idea is that the ground is staying at a relatively constant temperature. The idea is that your systems, at the end of the day, are spending as much energy to either heat or cool, whether it's the summer or the winter, compared to other sources of energy. Combining the Passive House aspect of it, where you're hyperinsulating a building so the interior ambient temperatures will stay fairly constant throughout the year, your systems are not working as hard or spending as much energy to either heat or cool. There's also a system that we use in Passive House that is continuously circulating fresh air into the building as well. That provides superior air quality and comfort.
Bisnow: I want to talk in a little more detail about the logistics of geothermal. From my understanding, it's kind of complicated. How did you navigate that?
Levenson: Due diligence, due diligence, due diligence! First and foremost, it was making sure you knew what was beneath your site. Are you within 200 feet of MTA assets? That's the first thing, because that will be an additional approval. It's a little bit different because we are drilling under streets, but we've worked very closely with the agencies to navigate around the infrastructure.
The most important thing, especially in systems environments, is to understand what's underground but also understand what you're next to and within several hundred feet of. The geothermal industry has really advanced over the past several years with their drilling techniques and how they execute. We have heard there's directional drilling where there's co-op owners in Manhattan that have decided that they were going to drill geothermal under their existing building, so they have very small rigs. It just comes back to knowing your site, having the right consultant and doing the proper research.
Bisnow: I ask in part because I've heard developers recently say, ‘We want to start doing geothermal,’ and talking about it as if it's easy.
Levenson: I'm encouraged to hear that the development community is beginning to think there's some ease associated with this. Development companies, generally speaking, have a special sauce — how they like to build, how they like to design, who they like to use. When a new variable is thrown in the mix, there's usually a little bit of anxiety. But once the industry sees others doing it and coming out on the other side, I think it gives a little bit of ease to the larger community, like, “Hey, if this group can do it and do it again, maybe we should give it a shot. Maybe it is not as scary or as difficult as we once thought.”
When it comes to the ease of geothermal, I would never want to tell my colleagues who work in that industry day in, day out it's easy. But I think they’re probably whispering in my ear saying, ‘Tell them, it's not hard!’ Doing the research first on the modeling side, understanding your equipment and having the right consultants and contractors do the design and installation is probably the biggest thing. But really, when you think about geothermal from 30,000 feet, the concept is not super complicated. So I always encourage those who haven't done it before to give it a shot.
Bisnow: I’m also interested in hearing more about the construction materials and the ways in which L+M designed for storm resiliency and coastal flooding. How did L+M decide what materials to use?
Levenson: On the ground, looking at resiliency, we’ve approached this at three different levels. So we looked at it from a site planning perspective, we looked at it from a topographical expected perspective for elevations, and then we looked at it from an individual asset perspective.
From a site planning perspective, we pulled a lot of our density to the north of the site to hug the Edgemere Avenue spine, which is one of the major east-west arteries on the peninsula, and really we're stepping down density towards the beach. We also have ample amounts of open space throughout the entire site — probably about 10 and a half acres of private land, publicly accessible open space that'll be programmed for passive and active recreation uses. We're also leveraging our green space for rain gardens, bioswales and other planted areas to allow water to move throughout the entire site.
I think one thing people don't realize is, they think Rockaway and they think major storm inundation, super storms, nor'easters … things like that. But it's really interesting because you're kind of sandwiched here, right between the ocean and the bay, so water is always moving subterranean in Rockaway. Being able to handle nuisance flooding or something that could be tidally influenced is just as important.
From a site planning perspective, we're elevating the site anywhere between 3 to 8 feet depending on location, supporting all of our first floors, lobbies, access points over the 500-year floodplain. That has involved us importing over 400,000 cubic yards of clean fill onto the site. We're in partnership with the Mayor's Office of Environmental Remediation and the Clean Soil Bank. They have been great partners in connecting us with other donors throughout the city to make sure that we are meeting our soil delivery needs.
On the individual project level, each asset is different. Obviously, the first-floor elevation that we're setting is incredibly important to ensure over the 500 years. We keep checking and making sure with every phase that we design that there has been no movement, or there doesn't need to be an alignment and that we’re keeping all of our mechanical spaces above that elevation.
Bisnow: Have you applied for any funding through the recent infrastructure laws passed?
Levenson: There were a number of different initiatives at the federal level that this project has explored. We are utilizing the opportunities provided under the [Inflation Reduction Act]. We did apply our projects for a low-income bonus as it related to our solar executions, which were successful in two projects. We are actively trying to leverage funding deployment under the GGRF funding.
Bisnow: Are you concerned that there will be less funding available for coastal resiliency projects and other efforts targeted at combating climate change in the next administration?
Levenson: Yes, of course. With any change of administration, especially when one administration was very supportive of something, and another is clearly not, there's always a concern.
Bisnow: I’m also curious what sort of impact you’re expecting the next administration to have on affordable housing, which L+M is very involved in.
Levenson: I think we'll just have to wait and see. I’ll leave it at that.
Bisnow: We’re almost at the end of this calendar year. Give us a bold prediction for the industry — especially as it pertains to sustainability goals — for the next 12 months.
Levenson: I think that the industry is beginning to see the benefits of these methodologies and technologies: the benefits for ownership, the benefits that are provided to residents and also the benefits for the future of our planet. I think, especially in New York, everyone is going to continue to stay the course. I'm hopeful that more colleagues in this space will continue to join us in deploying these strategies throughout projects wherever possible.
Bisnow: Since this is the Weekend Interview, what do you like to do on the weekend?
Levenson: Well, I coach my son’s soccer team, so there's always soccer on weekends. We always try to have this little tradition where we always make a special breakfast, whether it's making muffins or waffles or something different. Our weekends are usually filled with a mix of soccer and making something really delicious together.
