Madsen Engineering is proud to be part of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation (HPD's) New Infill Homeownership Opportunity Program (NIHOP). NIHOP seeks to promote mixed-income communities with affordable homeownership opportunities for moderate- and middle-income households earning up to 80-90 and up to 130 percent of Area Median Income (AMI). The program provides land and construction financing to qualified developers with the goal of building affordable condominiums for working families in low-income neighborhoods. The agency's goal is to spur neighborhood revitalization directly through infill of vacant lots and indirectly through creation of opportunities to own property in the areas where homeownership is beyond the reach of many residents.
This phase of the development program consists of 3 clusters of 7 new buildings (between 4 and seven story-high) along Herkimer Street, Rochester, and Ralph Avenues in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. One of the biggest challenges for the design team was the budget. Because of HPD funding limits, each apartment had to be built for less than $70,000. Madsen Engineering worked closely with the architects, developers and builders to find the most cost-effective solutions for structure and foundations.
The seven buildings constructed in the first phase of the project were between four and seven stories tall along Herkimer Street in Rochester and Ralph Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. These ended up being concrete panel floors on cold-formed steel joists which are supported by CMU and/or cold-formed-steel bearing walls. The building's lateral system is CMU or cold formed steel shear walls and steel moment frames where needed.
