Project Profile: Perkins Square

Redeveloping an entire neighborhood was bound to be an exceptionally complex undertaking.

For companies involved in the Perkins Square project those complexities have included demolishing the 12-block site of the 1940s Perkins Homes development and executing a masterplan that includes 1,346 affordable apartments and townhomes, 500 market-rate residential units, small-scale retail, a large public park and a new public school.

The plan also requires builders to deliver a high-quality product: apartment buildings and townhouse clusters that each have distinctive designs and attractive streets with heightened visibility so that Perkins Square could blend well with the adjacent neighborhood of Harbor East.

Harkins Builders embraced those challenges for two portions of the multi-phased projects.

For Phase 2, Harkins constructed four blocks of townhouses containing a total of 28 homes; a four-story, slab-on-grade apartment building containing 61 units; and another 67-unit, podium-style apartment building that includes parking beneath the building and in a covered garage. All the residential units were affordable housing, tailored to several different income levels.

The apartments and townhomes included “a lot of brick façade, solid-surface countertops and some nice finishes that are more reminiscent of market-rate homes than what you might expect in affordable housing,” said Greg Pearson, who served as Senior Project Manager for Harkins on the Perkins project.

The buildings were also highly efficient and Energy Star rated.

For the Developers Agreement work (i.e. the city infrastructure improvements that developers agreed to make in the course of the project), Harkins completed some site prep and utility work, and installed curb and gutter, bus lanes, tree planters and pavers along two streets.

For Harkins which has a long history in building high-quality affordable housing, meeting the design and quality requirements of the project was not a challenge, Mark Kelehan, Vice President in charge of affordable housing projects.

The complexity of the Perkins Square project, however, did present some challenges. Complex phasing meant Harkins had to frequently coordinate work with project teams from other phases to avoid any obstacles to everyone’s progress and to ensure that different phases of buildings which butt up against each other in some cases, were perfectly aligned.

The developments’ large stakeholder group – which includes the Housing Authority of Baltimore City, the City of Baltimore, Beatty Development and Missouri-based McCormack Barron Salzaar – also made coordination with stakeholders more complicated and required contractors to master new processes of billing work.

But Kelehan, who has worked construction projects for Harkins for 37 years, said the result is proving to be remarkable.

“There was a lot of thought and detail put into the plan for this property,” he said. “It has been a tough section of town, called the donut hole, that’s surrounded by major things, like Johns Hopkins, Little Italy and Harbor East. So, they really wanted to make sure this development would stand out and stand the test of time.”