The Philadelphia Navy Yard’s master plan was developed by Ensemble/Mosaic. The plan is taking root across 1,200 acres, with more than 30 acres devoted to park space and 6.3 miles of a waterfront habitat that is home to more than 2,000 trees and wildlife.
The development is called AVE Navy Yard, and it is comprised of two buildings, AVE Normandy and AVE Constitution. Currently the development has two residential buildings going up which will be home to more than 1,000 residents, with plans upon full build out to have approximately 4,000 residential units which will be home to more than 6,000 residents
In 2023, the Navy Yard’s first speculative multi-tenant research and development lab building opened. Designed to be the most advanced building of its kind in the Philadelphia region, at four stories and 137,000 square feet, 1201 Normandy is optimized for cell and gene therapy companies and has the flexibility to accommodate a variety of life science and biotech users.
Brian Cohen, managing director, Ensemble Investments, said the company wanted to ensure that what it was doing was going to be impactful for the city of Philadelphia and the surrounding neighborhoods. The company focused on a robust strategy and thought about which firms and individuals were designing, engineering, constructing, operating and managing its projects, as well as which firms and individuals would be occupying the site.
$1 billion diversity pledge
Ensemble/Mosaic rooted its master plan in a $1 billion diversity pledge, including a promise to use minority-owned or women-owned enterprises for 20% of its equity investment.
“It was really looking at real estate as its whole lifecycle and thinking about how we could be inclusive and create opportunities for minorities, women and veterans in all aspects of our project,” Cohen said. “We committed to 40% of the companies that we engage with in the design and preprofessional services of our developments would be minority owned, woman owned, veteran owned disabled in construction.”
Ensemble/Mosaic’s goal is that 50% of those companies that are working on and constructing its buildings would be minority women and veteran owned disabled companies.
It is likely to become more challenging to put some of those requirements in place once tenants arrive, however. “What we’ve committed to is that related to our retail space on the ground floors of our building, we would reserve 25% of our retail space for retailers that are owned by minority women or veterans,” Cohen said. “And we’d offer those at subsidized lease terms so that we could provide opportunities in a prime location for companies and individuals that might not otherwise have the opportunity to locate in a new neighborhood location.”
Since Ensemble/Mosaic started that program in the middle of 2020, it has committed in contracts to approximately $100 million to minority women and veteran-owned companies.
Ensemble/Mosaic also created a foundation that has surpassed $1 million. Met Foundation is dedicated to the education and empowerment of minorities, women and veterans. “Two percent of the net cash flow of everything we develop at the Navy Yard gets donated to that foundation,” Cohen said. “It has an ongoing sustainable source of revenue for everything from workforce training to low-interest loans, grants for minority women and veterans that either live, work, locate at or work on projects at the Navy Yard.”
Ensemble/Mosaic extended that into ownership as well. Mosaic is a minority- and woman-owned company. “When we look to our investors and how we capitalize and finance projects, we are taking that into account,” Cohen said. “On our residential project—a $285 million project—we had $110 million of that that was a minority-led investment by Basis out of New York, a minority- and woman-owned firm. They both invested in the project and then identified and led the rest of that investment for $110 million.”
Sustainability and DEI
All this is being done with a foundational value of sustainability and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) that the developers hope will serve as a model for other large-scale developments.
Nine Ensemble/Mosaic buildings at the Navy Yard are Silver-Platinum LEED Certified and the developers intend to create Philadelphia’s first LEED-certified neighborhood, with every building being LEED Silver or above. In addition, Ensemble/Mosaic has pledged that its $2.6 billion investment in the Navy Yard is committed to environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles.
“The environment contributes more greenhouse gases than any other industry that exists, more than the automobile industry,” Cohen said. “We thought about how we have as much positive impact as possible; developing sustainably was really important,” Cohen said. “We also know that it’s important to our customers and our various stakeholders and so we committed to utilizing LEED.”
Every building the company develops has a minimum of LEED Silver, with most of its buildings having achieved LEED Gold or LEED Platinum certification. “Most recently, we’ve embarked on going through LEED neighborhood development and certifying the Navy Yard as a LEED MD project, which looks beyond the building and to the community,” Cohen said. “It looks to infrastructure, public space, and it looks to health and wellness and making sure that we’re developing responsibly; that we’re thinking about the health and wellness of our occupants, and we’re trying to minimize the impact that we have on the environment and reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible.”
