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User-friendly is a term usually reserved for technological equipment, but John Moriarty and Associates tries to epitomize it in the firm’s construction management projects. “We’re client-driven construction management,” Project Manager John Viola declares. “We look out for our clients’ best interests. That’s why we get repeat business from clients.”

One of those clients is The Commu­nity Builders, for whom John Moriarty and Associ­ates is managing construction of the first phase of the Charlesview Residences at Brighton Mills, 240 units of affordable and mixed-income rental housing on 8 acres. Construction of the project started in June 2011 and is scheduled for completion in September 2013. It is being financed through an innovative arrangement with Harvard University, MassHousing, the Massachusetts housing agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Google Inc.

Brighton Mills is a strip shopping center that is being partially demolished for the Charles­view residences. “We took more than half the stores down,” Viola says, including a big-box general merchandiser, an office supply store, a discount women’s clothing store and the side of a grocery store that is remaining. The grocery store wall was shared with a store that was torn down, so a new wall had to be built for the grocery store while it remained open.

First Phase Begins

Once the 8-acre, 350,000-square-foot site was cleared, construction of the 478,000-square-foot first phase of Charlesview could begin. It consists of all the infrastructure, underground parking and 15,000 square feet of retail space along with the 240 units of rental housing.

Designed by CBT Architects, Boston, Charlesview’s midrise buildings of structural steel with masonry and metal panel cladding will be built over the underground parking garage. Two of these four- and five-story buildings will have public uses on their ground floors. Elevator and stair shafts will be concrete masonry units, and curtain wall glazing will be used on some of the retail and residential exteriors. Interior walls will have metal studs.

Charlesview is designed for LEED ND (neighborhood development) certifiability. The two steel buildings will aim for LEED Silver certifiability by using high-efficiency central boilers, air handling systems and lighting controls, and low-flow plumbing fixtures.

The commercial buildings most likely will include retailers to serve the neighborhood, such as cleaners, coffee shops and small restaurants. A full-service grocery store, pet supply store, fast-food outlet and several restaurants already are within walking distance. A total of 20 homeownership units will be in an adjacent $7 million phase 2, followed by an additional 80 ownership units that will be targeted for moderate and market-rate buyers. 

“On this one, there’s nothing really crazy – it’s very conventional,” Viola says. “We’re building three midrise buildings on top of the garage, and those are conventional construction – steel and concrete. The remaining buildings – which equal about half of the units – are conventional wood frame construction. There’s nothing out of the ordinary or unique about it or new.”

A four-story, wood multifamily building will be purely residential, and 19 more buildings will be wood walkup, two-, four- and eight-unit town houses with shingle roofs and fiber cement board cladding. The buildings have no basements but are built a few feet below grade to reduce the number of stairs on the entry-level stoops.

Foundations in the silty soil are slab-on-grade, with spread pad footings for the larger multifamily buildings. “The foundation is just standard spread footings and supportive excavation sheet piles – it’s really basic stuff,” Viola maintains. The clapboard is a traditional mix of historic colors in a lighter palette, while the masonry is red, brown and cream-colored. The metal panels are a reflective silver metal or a matte charcoal.

So far, building the infrastructure, moving existing utilities and laying the foundation for the underground parking is underway. “It’s a 28-month project, and we’re probably six months into it,” Viola calculates. At press time, he estimated the project was 15 to 20 percent complete. “Right now, we’re starting a foundation and digging the hole,” he says. “Half the site is a one-story underground parking garage, and that’s what we’re excavating for now.”

Viola considers it challenging to build such a substantial project in the middle of a middle-class residential neighborhood with single- and multifamily buildings. “It’s a very densely populated, urban residential community,” Viola notes. “Along with that, there’s some major stores that we took down, and the stores that were to remain open are still here, while we’re trying to maneuver construction activities, as well as install utilities for the infrastructure of the 240 apartment units that we’re building here, which is quite a bit.”

Subcontractor Assistance 

Up to 30 subcontractors are expected to work on the project by the time it is completed, Viola estimates. John Moriarty and Associates is providing cleanup of the site and taking care of safety issues. “We subcontract most everything,” Viola says. “We usually keep a few carpenters on staff to make sure the safety is what it should be and laborers for clean-up. We have engineering people out there who check line and grade and do some control and layout.”

Some of the subcontractors – such as mechanical, plumbing, electrical, glass curtain wall and metal panels – participated in the design phase of the project. “We may call the subcontractors in for design assist participation,” Viola reports. “On mechanical, plumbing, and electrical, the subcontractors can help the team evaluate power distribution, lighting systems or what kind of heating/air conditioning systems could be used or have been used on similar projects in the past.”

For glass curtain wall and metal panel subcontractors, “We’ll get them in there and discuss details with the architect/structural engineer and talk about the differences between one type of system vs. another,” Viola explains. “They will show them different colors – standard vs. custom colors. Being affordable housing, they may not want to pick custom colors and pay a premium for them.” 

Although not a design/build project, “We do this type of work quite a bit, so we’re in very early with the design team, giving them ideas as to what we’ve done on past jobs, and we do value-engineering and design/assist for the owner and the architect,” he continues. “It’s not a design/build project, but we partake in the design phase of most projects that we do as if it were a design/build. We try to test a budget early on and design to that budget, which is the basic concept of design/build. We try to protect the owner’s interest monetarily.”

John Moriarty and Associates frequently works with repeat subcontractors. “Most of our subcontractors are ones we dealt with in the past,” Viola declares. “On this particular job, there’s a couple – like a cabinet supplier that’s new and a window supplier we haven’t dealt with before – but other than that, all the major subcontractors are people we generally deal with.”

Negotiated Work

A lot of John Moriarty and Associates’ construction management jobs are negotiated rather than bid. “This type of construction management is not a plans and specs bid process,” Viola emphasizes. “JMA will often bid on construction management (CM) deals where the management portion of the project has to be defined with a dollar value and given at bid time, then the construction cost or a GMP (guaranteed maximum price) is later established after the CM is chosen and design is further along.”

The company works mostly in New England but has an office in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area of Florida, and is doing a project in North Carolina out of the Alexandria, Va., office. “Because of the way we operate, we tend to give our clients more services than other companies would. We tend to save our customers money by paying attention to the project, getting it done on time and giving them value-engineering/design assist services, which is a good return on the personnel we put on a project.”

Innovative Financing

A bit of history is needed to understand how the new Charlesview is being financed. Charlesview was founded in 1969 by five religious institutions and built in the early 1970s in the Allston-Brighton neighborhood, approximately a half-mile from the new location being built for it at Brighton Mills.

Today, Charlesview’s original 4.5-acre location is next to Harvard Business School, which needed to obtain the development’s land for its expansion. So a plan was devised to move the 213 families in the old Charlesview housing complex to a new one. Charlesview Inc. consists of St. Anthony’s Church, Kadimah Toras-Moshe and Community United Methodist Church.

The solution was to engineer a land swap – Harvard University acquired the site at Brighton Mills and donated it to Charlesview Inc. along with making a major investment in return for its obtaining the old site for its expansion. Additionally, Google Inc. invested $27 million in Charlesview in return for valuable low-income housing tax credits. 

The other major financing component is a $46 million first mortgage loan, which is sized based on the income from the residents’ rent.