Madison developer poised to break ground on unconventional apartment project Downtown (2024)

As it finishes building a 14-story high-rise Downtown, a Madison developer is piloting a new approach to the city’s housing crisis.

It will begin with an unusual, if unassuming, apartment building on the 500 block of West Main Street, where Neutral — formerly The Neutral Project — plans to officially break ground in October.

Like Baker’s Place, the building it is constructing Downtown, the four-story development will use mass timber — a structural material made from layers of glued-together wood — to support the floors, reducing the building’s carbon footprint. (The walls will be held up by steel, a more traditional building material that is also responsible for more carbon emissions.)

But sustainability isn’t the only thing that sets the building apart. Every part of its design comes back to a 12-by-12-foot grid created by Neutral’s architectural team. The dimensions of the building are all based on multiples of 12 feet.

Nate Helbach, Neutral’s founder and CEO, hopes many more such buildings will follow.

“We’re using the same structural system and the same componentized system for these buildings,” Helbach said.

The company can change up the buildings’ structural elements however it wants, “as long as we’re staying within those 12-by-12 parameters,” Helbach said. “It’s literally like Legos.”

Neutral’s future projects would have four to 50 units, consisting of some combination of studios, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments and townhouses, Helbach said. He wants to provide “missing middle” housing — residences that fall between single-family homes and large apartment buildings.

If the later developments go according to plan, they will be less expensive to build than the first as the company cuts down on the projects’ design and manufacturing costs.

“The goal is, every time we do it, we get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper,” Helbach said.

Neutral aims to construct two to four of these buildings in Madison per year. Its target rent is “the lower end of market rate,” he said.

Helbach expects the project on West Main Street to be affordable for people making about 100% to 120% of the area’s median income. He wants later Neutral developments to be realistic for people earning around 60% to 100% of the median.

And while the interiors will all look alike, the facades won’t have to, he said. “Whatever we want, we can do on the outside.”

The first of many

Neutral secured permission from the city earlier this year to demolish the houses at 519 and 521 W. Main St. and replace them with about 30 apartments and enough commercial space for a coffee shop or similar business.

The project is the area’s “first small infill redevelopment” in its zoning district, Peter Ostlind of the Bassett District of Capitol Neighborhoods, Inc., the local neighborhood association, told the city Plan Commission in May. “As such, it is a prototype which others are likely to follow.”

In an interview, Ostlind said he supports the scale of the apartment building but has sought to ensure it’s done in a way that will suit the neighborhood.

Neutral and city staff have since worked through some aesthetic concerns raised by the Urban Design Commission and the neighborhood association, such as the appearance of the garage door and the placement of brick fencing. They’re still finalizing the project’s last details.

The developer has been receptive to what the neighborhood has asked of it, Ostlind said.

“Overall, what Neutral is proposing has been, I think, embraced by the neighborhood and City Hall,” said Ald. Mike Verveer, 4th District, who represents the area.

“I would be more excited if we could really call this affordable housing, but that’s not what this is,” Verveer said. “With that said, there’s a lot to like about this project, both at this site and … what very likely will be many other locations down the road or in the future.”

A new material for Madison

In recent years, mass timber has made inroads in new construction all over the country. Wisconsin is no exception. When Milwaukee’s 25-story Ascent building was completed in 2022, it became the tallest mass timber building in the world.

“The construction industry, especially in the United States, tends to be a very slow adopter of new technologies,” said Marco Lo Ricco, a research general engineer at the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory in Madison. “So the pace at which mass timber and the pace at which building codes have been keeping up and adapting to the market needs … is actually quite remarkable.”

Neutral is pioneering the use of mass timber in Madison with its projects on East Washington Avenue and West Main Street. It’s on track to finish construction of the 14-story building at 849 E. Washington Ave. next spring.

The company is reaching even higher in Milwaukee, where it’s set to start construction late this year on The Edison, a 32-story mass timber building that could take over the title of tallest in the world. Milwaukee has also chosen Neutral to redevelop the Marcus Center parking garage — with a proposal that includes a 55-story mass timber building.

Helbach said some of Neutral’s investors have been drawn to the company because of its focus on sustainability. Others, he said, just like that it’s something different.

Striking a balance with timber

Incorporating mass timber into a structure is more expensive than sticking with the tried-and-true but high carbon-emitting combo of concrete and steel. Neutral worked with the Forest Products Laboratory to evaluate the costs of building with each material.

The company concluded that using a mix of all three is “the most cost-effective if you want to try to curb your environmental impact,” Helbach said.

Studies done by the Forest Products Laboratory have shown that “just having the mass timber at the horizontal level, so meaning the floor and roof decks, that is a significant benefit, because that’s where most of the volume in a structure goes,” Lo Ricco said.

The amount of mass timber in Neutral’s projects ranges from approximately 40% to 60% of the structure, Helbach said. He declined to say how much any of the buildings would cost.

Neutral has already picked out a location in Madison for the next building that will use both mass timber and the 12-by-12 design methodology. The company will likely announce that project by the end of the year, Helbach said.

With the first building, Helbach said he wants to create missing middle housing that has a reduced impact on the climate. With the second, he wants to achieve lower rents.

“And then future buildings,” he said, “we’ll combine the two of them.”