Tribute to Paul Hughes

In Memory of Paul Hughes 
1943-2012

Environmental Activist and Visionary

Founder and President, DeConstruction Services, LLC

and ReBuild Warehouse

by Beth Herman

At 7 p.m. on the bone-chilling evening of December 23, 2010, when Washington had long since gone for the holidays, and though he had a persistent cough, fever and raging bronchitis, Paul Hughes gave me an hour of his time. It was a phone interview and try as I might to postpone it to another day, when some semblance of his strained, raspy voice would have returned, Hughes was intent upon keeping the appointment. Though I pictured the then 67-year-old environmental activist huddled over eucalyptus-infused steam, swaddled in a polar fleece wrap on the sofa of a dimly lit room, in reality I learned he was sitting upright at his desk, multitasking, computer humming, lights blazing, as though it was just another day (or night) at the office.

True to his deep sense of humanity and character, something revealed to me not so much by his robust bio and hard-won list of achievements but rather by the unrelenting credit and opportunity he gave to everyone else, Hughes was a quiet revolutionary. Cuirassed in earth-friendly prose and practices, he soldiered on, in fact early on, long before concepts like “renewable” and “sustainable” became as commonplace and easy to swallow as butter and toast.

Though legions of green crusaders roamed the planet, a fierce dedication to recycling, repurposing and renewing people’s lives—maybe even more so than the old lumber he pulled out of deconstructed homes through his Fairfax, Virginia-based DeConstruction Services, LLC—was what distinguished Paul Hughes.

In addition to harvesting old materials and making them available at supremely reduced rates to the public through his 501(c)(3) organization ReBuild Warehouse, the former nonprofit grant and environmental services consultant gave dozens of nonviolent ex-offenders a chance to turn their lives around. With valuable training and full-time employment offered through his businesses, Hughes invested in human dignity as much as anything else.

“It’s going 180 degrees against the trend,” he’d said in that 2010 interview: http://www.dcmud.blogspot.com/2011/01/recycling-lumber-and-lives.html. “Most contractors are trying to get away from employing a lot of people…so they can offload liability costs, worker’s comp and matching social security. They contract everything out to subcontractors and let them worry about where to get laborers—often just day laborers to whom fewer laws apply, and who have little hope of pulling themselves up.”

His life

Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, and marrying his University of Toledo sweetheart, Linda, Paul Hughes “…had his fingers in so many pies—he just had so many different interests,” according to his wife. Following their 1967 marriage, Hughes was instrumental in setting up Hospice of Northern Virginia in a former school building—the region’s first hospice. With an eye to environmental issues, he also vehemently resisted the Lorton incinerator project, though sadly lost the battle.

When ReBuild Warehouse, established in Springfield, Virginia 2008, suddenly lost its lease three years later, in typical fashion and wasting no time, Hughes diligently acquired a smaller space as an interim measure to continue to serve and educate the community. Staff (largely volunteer), hours and convenience were cut back, but he kept moving forward.

Hughes’ good friend Hank Blakely called him “a force of nature.” A lay minister at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax in which Hughes was also active, Blakely is also on the board of directors of the Reston Citizen’s Association, vice president of Sustainability Reston and also of parent company the Fairfax Coalition for Smarter Growth—an organization started by  the visionary Hughes.

In his spare time, Hughes spent weekends canvassing flea markets and farmer’s markets, handing out brochures about the environment. “He was so far ahead of everyone else in his environmental thinking—particularly in the beginning— it could be frustrating when people couldn’t comprehend his vision and sense of urgency,” Linda Hughes said.

According to Blakely, Hughes was the "Johnny Appleseed of nonprofit organizations in Northern Virginia. He put his heart and his money where his voice was on these issues. He absolutely backed the things that he believed in,” he said about his friend, who was also Northern Virginia Green Party chairperson.

Toward the end of our phone interview on that pre-holiday evening, I recall making a note to myself to meet Paul Hughes, but like many of us I simply put it off, content to keep myself updated through ReBuild Warehouse’s e-newsletters about their many challenges and achievements. He died on September 15 from cardiac arrest following a bicycle ride with his wife.

With all he had accomplished, Linda said there were many more things he wanted to do. He could still see ahead. The economy was changing and things were opening up again.

Said Blakely, “It never struck us that Paul would go away. It just felt like he would always be here.”

Your Next Place

This 1920 modified Dutch Colonial sports a superlative front porch that's bigger than each of my first three apartments.  A big front porch is a must if you have adolescent children; it provides a place for them to go to get away from you, but keeps them close enough that you can still peek out the window during commercial breaks to make sure they aren't doing hard drugs or groping on the porch swing.  (I should know, I was caught attempting both on the porch during my teen years.)

Though it's over a century old, this house is extremely roomy, with sprawling, open rooms and an open-ish floor plan.  It's actually sort of eerie how accurately the original builders' aesthetic anticipated our contemporary tastes, sort of like if you found an old black and white photo of your grandparents and they had tattoo sleeves and lip piercings.  (Pause to imagine what your grandchildren are going to think when they look at your Facebook.)  With over 4200 square feet of space over four levels, you are guaranteed to never feel small and insignificant while between these four walls, except when your mother yet again casually mentions in an email how similar your childhood circumstances were to Barack Obama's.  The formal living room and dining room are huge and bright, and the massive kitchen was made for hosting dinner parties.  There are beautiful and authentic aged hardwood floors throughout; new hardwood is nice, but you really can't beat well-maintained old hardwood.

There's a beautifully rough-around-the-edges attic, with exposed rafters and unfinished wood floors, that would make a picture-perfect artist's garret, if you're into Les Miz reenactments. Way down below is a huge semi-finished concrete-floored basement that's perfect for storage, or using as a dungeon, if you're a pervert.  (I mean that in a good way, I don't trust anyone who's not a little perverted.)  Out back is a two-car garage, for your two cars, or your one sloppily diagonally parked car because why not, in a hundred years we'll all be dead.

3717 Ingomar Street NW
5 Bedrooms, 2.5 Baths
$999,999

Populist Real Estate: Crowdfunding and Planning in DC

District Architecture Center, photo courtesy AIA, DC chapter

With DC growing by nearly 1,100 residents per month, according to the Office of Planning (OP), some residents might feel swept up in change.  But one OP initiative aims to frame DC residents as more than just "passive recipients" of planning and urban development.  The city is not alone; several groups - even a young DC company - are headed in that direction.

A "Citizen Planner Forum" was held Thursday night at the District Architecture Center, which opened last year at 421 7th St. NW.  The event marked the culmination in a months-long joint initiative of the DC Office of Planning (OP) and the Washington, DC chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to get input on place-making from people other than experts.

Real Estate and Crowdfunding

Before: Fundrise 1351 H St. NE, image courtesy Fundrise

Another example of projects built on the concept of collaborating with neighbors on development: Fundrise.  The new project in DC is based on using crowd-funding to buy properties, and the message "build the city you want to live in." Through Fundrise, the entity 1351 H Street has already gotten $215,000 in local investments to renovate a property on H Street, according to its web site.  The architect for the renovation is Michael Francis at Queue, LLC.

Daniel Miller is a principal at WestMill Capital Partners real estate development company and co-founder of Fundrise.  He spoke to the group Thursday.  Miller said Fundrise, which Launched just six weeks ago, is based on the concept that any resident of DC or Virginia can buy a $100 stake in a property and help jump-start a small business.  Miller said investors could also get returns.

Fundrise follows on the heels of WestMill's web site Popularise, a crowd-sourcing web site that allows property owners to survey citizens about what they want a property to become.  WestMill has used it to crowdsource ideas for its own property, but other real estate groups have used Popularise too.

Residents Re-framing Development Discourse

Offering another example of the way residents DC are already re-framing the discourse, Anacostia resident Veronica Davis talked about her experience as a co-founder of "Black Women Bike DC". 
Davis noted that growth can trigger tensions surrounding race and fears of being "priced out". An unexpected symbol of that tension, panelists said: bike lanes.

After: 1351 H St. NE.  Rendering courtesy Fundrise

Davis explained that for some residents of DC, bike lanes seem like harbingers of change, even omens of higher rent.  "We founded Black Women Bike to say – we do bike," Davis told the group. "And we needed infrastructure. Part of that is being visible."
 
That kind of citizen action is what the OP wants to encourage.  The aim is to "work together and not just talk at each other," OP director Harriet Tregoning told DCMud. "Our neighborhoods are going to be better-functioning if people feel they have a stake in their neighborhoods."

Carolyn Sponza of AIA DC, also an architect at Gensler, said the main themes that emerged from four earlier focus groups were: a desire for more education about the way planning works, an idea for a planning network that would connect neighbors across wards,  the need for public spaces and "somewhere to sit", and a need for new modes of participation in planning. 

Washington D.C. real estate development news

Morning Real Estate Fix

Redfin study knocks Trulia, Zillow accuracy (Inman News)  A study by a consulting firm for Redfin says that Trulia and Zillow are less accurate and less updated than real estate brokerage sites (like Redfin).

Capital City real estate opens condos near CityMarket at O The developer's is opening marketing today for the 12 new condos going up next to Jefferson at Market Place.  Deliver is estimated at early January.

DC's Woodridge Library revealed (Architect's Newspaper) Actually they were unveiled in August, but some are just now noticing, i.e. national press.

List of improving housing markets tops 100 (NAHB)  103 residential markets (including DC) were listed on NAHB's improving markets list

Trulia:  home prices rise in swing states (Housing Wire)  Swing states, like other states, continue to see steady(ish) growth in the price homes.

Another Neighborhood Changer for JBG: NoMa's Capitol Square Breaking Ground Within Days

You’ve got to hand it to the Chevy Chase-based JBG Companies. The development group has a hand in a number of major projects around the region, yet seems undaunted about adding yet another game-changer to the list, and their latest may break ground within a few weeks.

That project would be NoMa’s Capitol Square project, an almost two-block-square site located a block away from the NoMa-Gallaudet U Metro station that will eventually include a hotel, office space and residential units.  The first phase—a Hyatt Place hotel—is just starting up, but the rest is all “phaseable,” the developers explain. That is, the developers will build in stages, waiting to move forward on office space, for example, until they have tenants in hand.

Still, it’s a major undertaking. Sited on two parcels—the first a triangle with New York Avenue, 1st Street, and N street as its borders; the second a rectangle on the south side of N Street (see map above), the project will add almost two million square feet of property to the area. Specifically, that will include 200 hotel rooms, 300-350 residential units, and 60,000 s.f. of ground floor retail space, all wrapped into what JBG is describing as a very pedestrian-friendly streetscape. “It might be like a Bethesda Row/Woodmont Avenue experience,” explained Dean Cinkala, a JBG partner.

But first things first. The starting project is Hyatt Place, a 14-story hotel with a fairly small footprint that’s been designed by local architecture firm Cooper Carry. “We literally just closed on financing and acquisition of the land,” said Cinkala. The company plans to begin demolition and abatement immediately, and expects to be finished by early 2014.

That’s at the western end of the triangular plot of land, where the nightclub Mirrors currently sits. The company also owns land on the eastern side of the block. That Smithsonian-worthy McDonalds at the corner of 1st and New York Ave. will also be gone, transformed into an 800,000 s.f. office building designed by the New Haven, Ct.-based architect Pickard Chilton, which has burst onto the DC architectural scene recently.

There will be more office space on the south block, which isn’t wholly owned by JBG (a nightclub at 1st and Patterson streets will remain, as will another section abutting North Capitol Street). Perkins and Will, a nationally-known architecture firm with a Washington office, will be designing a second office building of roughly 575,000 s.f. there, which may be completed in two phases.

JBG properties include 5a and 5b within the red box

Schematic design drawings are complete for both buildings, which will include ground floor retail, but JBG isn’t moving forward on building either one anytime soon. “We don’t plan on building speculatively, given current market conditions,” said Cinkala. “We’ll submit the building[s] if and when the GSA [General Services Administration] puts out a solicitation.” The company has apparently targeted NoMa as an emerging home for the federal government, but Cinkala said he isn’t ruling out the private market—especially if financing for office buildings becomes easier to come by in the next few years.

The final piece of the pie is 33 N Street, a spot on the southern parcel. The current lease expires in November 2013, and Cinkala says the company is currently hiring residential architects to design a 300-350 unit building directly across from the hotel that will be ready to deploy next November. 

That’s a lot of building on the drawing board. To tie it all together, JBG is working with local landscape architects Lee and Associates to create an urban streetscape that draws pedestrians onto the side streets of N and Patterson streets.

It’s all about boosting the neighborhood’s dynamism, said Cinkala. “NoMa is clearly evolving into a mixed-use area. All this development will help the market mature, and create that live-work-play environment that’s so attractive.”

Washington, D.C., real estate development news

Brilliantly Big and Ingeniously Small

Q&A with Paul Sicari of McDermott Will & Emery LLP

and Terri Barnhart of Gensler

By Beth Herman

In a ribbon-cutting, red letter day kind of move from 600 13^th Street NW, international law firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP officially took up residence on Monday in the shadow of the Capitol -- 500 North Capitol Street NW. Surely a view from the top.

Jettisoning a 205,000 s.f. former floorplate with superfluous aspects—in light of current video-conferencing technology—such as outmoded two-to-six-person conference rooms for out of town visitors, the decision to relocate the 450-member firm to 185,000 s.f. in an aging 1966 structure was a two-year (ad)venture in the making. An aggressive renovation process took around six months. DCMud spoke with McDermott Will & Emery LLP office administrator Paul Sicari and Terri Barnhart, a design director in the D.C. office of architecture firm Gensler, both of whom, along with MWE’s design committee, imagined and executed the renovation.

DCMud: What can you tell us about the site?

Barnhart: When it was offered by Boston Properties and Clark Enterprises, it was a building on the boards for a renovation for a B-class upgrade. We ended up doing a much more extensive renovation than was originally intended.

Sicari: It was the first home of the SEC, and when they moved out, a division of the IRS moved in and had been there for years.

DCMud: So we’re talking about everything: mechanical, plumbing and electrical systems, elevators, a labyrinth of safety and security systems, aesthetics—a total gutting.

Sicari: On the dozens of hard hat tours I gave, I’d tell people the only thing that stayed was the concrete, but to that we made changes too. In fact we took the roof off the building and added a 9th floor with a roof terrace, (affectionately) called the 10^th floor.

DCMud: Explain the program.

Barnhart: MWE put together a design committee, and we did a visioning session with them to see how to transform the building. We came up with the catch phrase ‘brilliantly big and ingeniously small.’ It represented how a global firm—there’s something very unique about them—how they hold their relationship with their clients, and they wanted to represent that. There’s a lot of client focus and community service built into the firm’s culture as well.

DCMud: So how did this manifest in the design?

Barnhart: We translated the culture into finishes and materials where we have this very large space for the conference center, and certain collaboration areas, but then we tried to focus it down into patterns and materials with different scales throughout. The artwork responds to that as well.

Sicari: The visioning session Gensler conducted with the committee was a virtual tipping point for me in setting the tone and design of the space. The catch phrase really helped define us: We’re an Am Law top 20 law firm, but what differentiates us from our competitors is we have a lot more of these customized smaller practice groups. Our competitors probably don’t have an alcohol/ beverage group. You almost never find a substantial IP prosecution group. We want clients to feel like it’s a boutique firm, even though we’re a giant footprint. ‘Brilliantly big and ingeniously small’ became the lens through which we looked to design our spaces.

DCMud: How did you define spaces?

Sicari: With a firm made up of a lot of small practices, it’s easy for people to get into their silos so they don’t get to know the person down the hall. Even though it’s still a law firm with a lot of walls, we talked about taking a space and making it more of an open concept. We used a lot of glass in the design. We created zones where people are forced to interact. Law firms in the past tended to create three or four copy areas— a copy area on each floor in the name of convenience. We said we don’t want that—we want to create one giant space where people might bump into one another and get to know each other.

DCMud: Doesn’t that mitigate productivity?

Sicari: We created spaces where people can grab coffee, or put their lunch, or pick up a color print job, and thereby interact with their colleagues. Knowing your neighbor is just as important to us as is someone being fast at picking up copies.

DCMud: Are there examples of how the firm may have increased productivity through design?

Sicari: A ‘team room’ is a great example of a concept that we had. It wasn’t about a room; it was about workflow and providing better support not just for our lawyers but for our clients in this more technological 24/7 age that we live in. A team room is a space for a collection of three or four secretaries working staggered shifts and hours, so that we can provide uninterrupted coverage 12 hours a day, five days a week. This kind of thing used to be called a secretarial pool, but that implies anonymity.

DCMud: We understand you are seeking LEED Gold for this reconditioned space. Can you talk about the materials used?

Barnhart: Veneers and substrates are FSC-certified. We used low-VOC paints, glues and sealants, and low-flow plumbing as well as higher efficiency VAV’s. Because of the building’s location and repurposing in an urban setting, we were able to obtain points as well. Occupancy sensors are in place and a lot of glass brings in natural light. There is a fitness center and bike racks.

Sicari: The building is now known as the McDermott building and is within eye shot of everyone who passes through Union Station. That was an exciting element for this location as well. We are really proud to be here.

Washington D.C. design news

Morning Real Estate Fix

Cushman releases DC area commercial - Cushman Wakefield released its 3rd quarter survey of the office market in the DC area, revealing a sluggish commercial market and rising vacancy rates.

Viewpoints on the election's effect on real estate (National Real Estate Investor) A group of experts ads their bit on how the outcome of the election will affect the real estate market.

Mortgage rates hold steady as unemployment report looms (Mortgage News Daily) Mortgage rates stay the same - historically low - as analysts prepare for Friday's unemployment report looms.  In advance, ADP says hiring is down in September for yet another lackluster month.

Homebuilder stocks rise on homebuilding news (Businessweek)  Shares of homebuilders have been rising as the housing market continues at a slow but steady pace.

If you must live in the suburbs, here's where (Coldwell Banker) The real estate agency puts out another completely arbitrary list of suburbs, ranked by people that have never been there, as a "best places to live" - if you're going to be in the suburbs.  Wolf Trap Virginia takes number 5.

PG considers new rules for developments (GreaterGreaterWashington) Bills that would make it easier to develop around metro stations are running into heat from interest groups that don't like the loosening of oversight.