Posted Aug 18, 2020, 1:01 PM
|
 |
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Downtown Los Angeles
Posts: 19,383
|
|
Creating a beautiful, quality Downtown for all incomes - GIV Development's Chris Parker - Aiming to mainstream affordability, carbon-neutrality and design quality
...The Exchange Project is many things.
The end-cap to Salt Lake City’s civic campus. Food service business incubator. Co-working space. Mixed-use and mixed-income. All-electric and carbon-neutral (nearly)...
 
The Avia, left, and the Mya, right. Photos courtesy Giv Development.
...The Exchange is also a demonstration project. Its nascent financing model aims to show market-rate developers how high-end luxury can co-exist with deeply-affordable units – and make just as much or more money as conventional market-rate buildings. We visited on site with Giv Development’s Chris Parker last week to check in on The Exchange’s progress. On the tour, Parker spoke to Giv’s philosophies and strategies.
Project specs + elements
The Exchange is two buildings – the muscular, steel-girded, 9-story “Avia” on the west and the 5-story “Mya” on the east. (the narrow, squiggly building)...The Avia will open in Spring-Summer 2021. The Avia’s 286 units include studios, 1 + 2 bedrooms, and it will have “very high-end units – these will be among the nicest and most expensive in the state,” Parker told us. “And yet we’re still getting affordability in that same building.” 20% of its units will be set aside for residents making 50% or less of AMI.
South side of the Avia, location of the food hall. Photo by Luke Garrott.
The ground floor of the building will be wrapped with 14,000 sf of retail, facing 400 S., 300 E., and People’s Way (the east-west woonerf north of the Public Safety Building). It will feature a food hall that will have booths for conventional restaurateurs as well as start-up spaces that will rent for a couple hundred dollars a month and be linked with the Spice Kitchen incubator project of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which serves Salt Lake’s refugee community. The idea is to share the expensive spaces (kitchen and dining room), and increase the volume of customers for everyone – since food courts are an easy answer for a group debating where to eat. The Avia is parked at a 1 : 1 ratio (~280 stalls). Its cost per unit is “north of $300,000” Parker said. He noted that’s mostly due to steel construction and high-end finishes.The Mya, on the east, will add 126 units, all “micro-1 bedroom” (350 sf avg), 30,000 sf of co-working office space dubbed “The Shop,” and 2700 sf of ground-floor retail facing 400 S...
Additional Photos @
...One third of its units will be available to people making 40% of AMI, one third for people at 80%, and one-third will be market-rate.
The units are small, but the finishes will be fine, Parker assures. “What we’re trying to do is not make them cheap so people can afford them, but make quality accessible to everyone. By compressing the unit size, you get quality that everyone would want, because there’s less of it.”...
...The project is a mirror of Parker’s vision for Salt Lake City – a place for everyone. ‘What does it mean to be a building for kind of the whole city?’ Not only do you have the entire spectrum of incomes represented in the building – someone paying several thousand dollars a unit all the way down to someone making $10-12 an hour, but we also wanted to have an opportunity for people to start or launch a business also along that scale.”
“For me, a healthy city is one that has a really strong ability to do whatever it is that your dream is, wherever you might be in life.”
“How do we open up downtown?” he asks, “Because we’ve been producing a ton of units for people who are lucky enough to be on the end of the spectrum that allows them to afford anything.”
Affordability is key, and Utah has the opportunity to “lock in” the affordable units it needs in the next cycle – so that we don’t fall prey to the gentrification forces that have hit San Francisco, Parker contends.
“How could you go ahead and make sure that as the vegan donut shops and the $10 latte places come into town that everybody gets to participate in that sort of expansion rather than it coming at the expense of people who have historically lived here?”...
View from a top floor of the Avia, towards Downtown (west). Photo by Luke Garrott.
.
Last edited by delts145; Aug 20, 2020 at 5:47 PM.
|
Prev
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/64505343/1221591.0.jpg)
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-sltrib.s3.amazonaws.com/public/FSOE5TFXYJEAVJVFS7FENL3F2Q.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10461279/LIberty_Sky_rendering_updated_01_22_18.jpg)
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-sltrib.s3.amazonaws.com/public/PYRK5MMWU5AORCAMUC5PZ5E3CE.png)
Linear Mode
