Student housing loses green feature

Developers of a long-delayed 660-bed student housing complex are facing minimal opposition as they abandon plans for a center atrium that they had once billed as an essential environmentally friendly feature.

Mukesh Majmudar, developer of the StarView Plaza, scheduled to open late next year on Route 1, said he could no longer afford the atrium, which he once said would provide private amenity space and reduce energy costs by moderating the building’s temperature.

On Tuesday night, the College Park City Council, which had sent Starview Plaza’s architects back to the drawing board last year after criticizing its appearance, barely touched on the loss of the atrium at its worksession meeting with the developers.

In an interview yesterday before the meeting, College Park planning director Terry Schum said the slumping economy justified the developer’s decision.

“Yes, we’re bemoaning the loss of the atrium, but I think it’s a victim of the economy and the banks ruling the world,” Schum said. “We’re sad to see it go, but we’ve come to grips with that and we’re trying to get the best building we can get realistically.”

Original plans called for a six-story apartment building built around an enclosed five-level atrium. But with credit tight across the country, developers decided to replace the atrium with an unroofed grassy space, which will be built atop the building’s parking garage.

Hours into Tuesday’s meeting, city officials were not in a mood to argue when they began discussing StarView, one of their last agenda items of the night. District 2 Councilman Jack Perry, who customarily likes to thoroughly evaluate every item, suggested this project could move forward for a council vote next week without any further study.

City planning staff raised some concerns about the design of the building’s proposed ground-floor retail space and the logistics of ensuring that both phases of the project would be built, but the council finished quickly without mention of the atrium.

Developers downplayed the significance of the atrium’s energy efficiency. In a reversal from the development’s previous position, architect Christopher Harvey suggested that the costs of heating and cooling the large open area could have proven to be a net negative, even if individual apartments would not have needed as much air conditioning or heating.

“You can pitch it any way you want,” Harvey said in an interview before last night’s council meeting.

Harvey went on to explain the discrepancy between Tuesday’s explanation and the atrium that had been enthusiastically supported by Jon Grant, another architect on the project.
Even without the atrium, StarView should still achieve the second-highest of four available Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) ratings, developers said.

Majmudar said he hopes to break ground on the first phase of the Starview project by the end of this year and open the first 94 apartment units — plus a 355-space parking garage and 9,580 square feet of retail space — by December 2010. An additional 78 apartments would open in the second phase of the building by August 2011.

The project has been in the works for most of this decade and was originally scheduled to have opened over the summer in time for this school year.

bholt at umdbk dot com