“We tried to break the mold”: the story of 803 Knickerbocker

“You need a building that really works, not one that just ticks a bunch of boxes.”
Scott Short, former CEO of RiseBoro

One of the shortcomings of the real estate industry is the insistence on LEED certification as the standard for environmentally friendly buildings.

LEED was all the rage for a while and remains the most popular way for owners to show how “green” their buildings are. But with CO2 emissions overshadowing other environmental issues, what matters most is how efficient buildings are at heating and cooling.

Operating costs are also critical, especially for affordable housing.

LEED doesn’t ignore these statistics, but some of the ways developers make their profits LEED points to obtain certification have little to do with that.

Scott Short knew this 15 years ago when he set out to build the state’s first multifamily Passive House building: a 24-unit affordable project with childcare on site. Knickerbockerlaan 803 for the Brooklyn-based nonprofit now called RiseBoro. (The honor ultimately went to another RiseBoro project that he started later but finished earlier.)

“We were trying to do something new, to break the mold,” Short said. “One of the things that attracted me to the passive house standard was, unlike LEED or these ‘green buildings’ [designations] where you are certified based on plans, with passive house it really revolves around the performance of the building.”

At the end of construction, a blowerdoortest determines how leaky the building is.

“If the building doesn’t perform as you expect, you don’t get the certification,” said Short, RiseBoro’s director of housing and later CEO. “You need a building that really works, not one that just ticks a bunch of boxes during the design phase.”

In the early 2010s, Passive House apartments did not exist in New York, and city officials overseeing affordable housing subsidies were skeptical.

“We had to go four times for funding,” Scott recalled, “and clear the bureaucratic hurdles.”

Contractors were also skittish about passive house construction and increased their bids by 20 percent, Short estimates. “It was the novelty bonus,” he said.

That premium has largely disappeared as more and more contractors have become familiar with the methods, equipment and materials required to make a building virtually airtight, with carefully controlled ventilation.

In New York City, most affordable projects are now built this way, although they do not often seek passive house status because the certification process is expensive. Perhaps the largest is the 277 unit 425 Great hall in the Bronx, completed in 2022 by Monadnock Construction and Dattner Architects. (Outside affordable housing, a 352 unit CornellTech NYC residential building completed in 2017 is among the city’s passive house pioneers.)

I reached out to Short’s successor as CEO, Kieran Harrington, to see how 803 Knickerbocker is doing ten years after opening. “Significant savings have been achieved,” he says.

The six-story, 35,000-square-foot building uses approx 20 percent as much energy like an average building of that size in the city. Annual costs for gas, electricity and water are 62 cents per square meter, about half the Housing Development Corporation’s benchmark of $1.12.

But the benefits of the super-insulated building go far beyond cost savings, according to architect Chris Benedict.

“Not only do we have a very good air barrier on the outside of the building to meet passive houses [standards]we also create an air barrier between each apartment so that air, insects, smoke, noise, none of these things can move from one apartment to another,” she said in a YouTube video.

Building guru Henry Gifford was a consultant at 803 Knickerbocker. His role was partly to allay the contractors’ concerns. When the construction team met near the end of the project, one plumber worried that he would be blamed if the 400,000 BTU boiler proved too small to heat a 24-unit building.

Gifford didn’t miss a beat. “The boiler is not going to provide the heat,” he said. “It will provide the heat and the hot water.”

“No one doubted that I took full responsibility,” Gifford recalled, “and everyone calmed down.”

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