On Bucks brownfield, a green office center

Long an innovator in transforming brownfields, developer O'Neill is now going green.

He's banking on a half-dozen "environmentally friendly" commercial office buildings in Bucks County to translate into a greener bottom line for his King of Prussia development company.

O'Neill Properties Group broke ground yesterday on the $250 million Horizon Corporate Center, billing it as the largest green development project ever in the suburban Philadelphia office market.

All six of the center's new office buildings will be developed according to the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards. As LEED-certified buildings, they will use mostly recyclable materials, and incorporate features that will help conserve energy and reduce water consumption.

"They are green in every way," O'Neill, the company chairman and founder, said during yesterday's groundbreaking ceremony on the 100-acre site in Bensalem, which his company acquired in 2002. "They are made of green glass, green metal panels, and green windows, so the buildings will actually be green in color."

O'Neill showcased some of the green materials yesterday, including glass shards that he said would be incorporated into the flooring and a sample of synthetic carpeting made from recycled plastic soda bottles.

O'Neill said plans called for Horizon to be fully built out by late 2012 or early 2013.

Land-use and commercial real estate experts say the green movement among builders has definitely gained traction in the last five years.

"This is something that has been going on for a long time, but is now hitting the tipping point," said Kenneth Balin, chairman of the Philadelphia District Council of the Urban Land Institute, an education and research group that focuses on responsible land use and creating sustainable communities.

Balin, who is also president of AMC Delancey Group Inc., a Philadelphia real estate development and investment company, said builders were discovering it was not as expensive as they thought to install solar panels or position a building to make better use of natural light.

"All the companies now are looking at maintaining a green profile," said Dan DiLella, president and chief executive officer of BPG Properties Ltd. of Philadelphia. "When they lease space from us, they want to know what are the green elements to the building and have we done everything we could possibly do to maintain a green profile."

Earlier this year, BPG hired a senior vice president of sustainability, a new full-time position, to actively manage its green initiatives.

Liberty Property Trust of Malvern has built 24 LEED-certified buildings across the country. It is spending $500 million to build the 58-story Comcast Center in Center City, which when completed next spring will be the tallest LEED-certified building in the region, according to John Gattuso, Liberty's senior vice president of urban and national development.

In 2003, Gattuso said one tenant of Liberty's asked to lease office space in a LEED building. Four years later, such tenants are "still a minority, but among the top-tier companies that we deal with, it is a conversation we are having with all of them," he said.

O'Neill's firm owns more than 80 commercial, residential and retail properties in Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. It has developed more than 13 million square feet of office space.

He said about 99 percent of his business was redeveloping brownfield sites, which are old abandoned industrial sites that require environmental remediation. The brownfield site Horizon will occupy used to be the former Eastern State School and Hospital, which closed in 1996.

O'Neill said the new office center was reflective of where the commercial building industry was heading.

Horizon Corporate Center will offer more than 1.2 million square feet of Class A office space. The first of the six green buildings, a $50 million structure measuring 200,000 square feet, is expected to be completed in 12 months and will house up to 1,200 employees. Other buildings will range in size from 80,000 square feet to 496,000 square feet.

The construction of Horizon II represents the second of O'Neill Properties' five phases of development, and follows the completion of the 128,000-square-foot Horizon I office building nearby. Horizon I is 100 percent leased by tenants that include International SOS, Strayer University, and Stanford Brown Institute.

O'Neill said Horizon II is building on the success of Horizon I, but is taking land and energy conservation up another notch.

Tom Burkley, an executive assistant to the deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, called Horizon II an ideal project.

"This is so timely," he said at yesterday's groundbreaking. "This is really a testament to the kind of future directive thinking that we need in the state."

The development will be along the high-tech and life-sciences corporate corridor stretching from Philadelphia to Princeton. The office center, adjacent to Neshaminy Mall, is bordered by the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Route 1 and is minutes from Interstate 95.

O'Neill said he expected the demand for green buildings to only increase in the coming years.

"It's absolutely here to stay," he said. "This is just the beginning."