In early 2007 Rackspace, a major hosting and cloud-computing company, had hit its stride and was expanding exponentially. According to Randy Smith, Rackspace's director of real estate, the company was hiring between 80 and 100 employees per month and its space needs were getting serious. The company embarked with two guiding criteria for a new space:
- The site had to create a competitive advantage; and
- It had to foster the Rackspace culture rather than frustrate it.
"We could not afford to do the big company thing," Smith jokes. "Go up I-35, buy 20 acres and build a monument to ourselves. " This led to searches in North Carolina and Austin, but the solution was closer to home.
"The city, county and state officials put together a phenomenal effort to keep us here in terms of tax incentives, and that played a huge role in the affordability of this project," Smith explains. "Mostly we felt like San Antonio, for our first nine years of our corporate existence, had really invested a lot in us and we felt like we wanted to stay and that we owed the city." The old Windsor Park Mall, at 1.2 million square feet on 70 acres, was the only space that matched their size requirements.
[IMGCAP(2)]Giving their employees a direct hand in designing the new space, the number one request was to make it sustainable. Breaking up the project into two phases of 90,000 square feet and 150,000 square feet, respectively, Rackspace began redeveloping the mall into a sprawling green office.
"The way to be sustainable is to start with the right property," Smith says. "We weren't taking someone's beautiful hill country ranch and knocking over all the heritage oaks and paving a parking lot, then building a LEED gold efficient building." The idea was to take an infill location, considered gray space, and revitalize it.
During the process, Rackspace recycled 1,600 to 1,900 tons of materials from the inside, which otherwise would have gone to a landfill, donated much of the steel to the local Habitat for Humanity. There was a 40% reduction in water usage, mostly by using automatic fixtures and low-flow fixtures throughout the entire structure, as well as drought-resistant landscaping. However, the big addition was the 15,000-gallon cistern out front."We collect our condensate and pump it to that cistern," he explains. "Condensate is free water that most buildings discharge to a sewer every day." At a site the size of Rackspace's, this adds up to what their engineers estimated as 4,000 gallons per day.
"It literally comes from the hot air of employees," he explains. "It is the humidity within the space. The air handlers control the humidity within the building and that creates a lot of condensate and in almost all legacy mechanical systems and in most new mechanical systems, there's a little pipe near the air handler, or a little subdrain, and it goes right to a storm sewer." But instead, Rackspace funnels this water to the cistern out front. This cistern is a community asset as well. The company ran a line from it, so water trucks, little old ladies and anyone else in the city in need of water during San Antonio's frequent droughts are allowed to take the water as needed.
As far as cost goes, Smith didn't want to give a solid number without running the operation for a year, but estimates that operating expenses should save somewhere around 20%, compared to the rest of their portfolio. And as for future plans, more cisterns will be added and eventually used for recycled rainwater, as well. Solar panels are planned for the copious roof space, but difficulties in penetration will have to be worked out over time. A public park is also planned, which already has a nursery of trees waiting for it out front of the property.
There are certainly a lot of malls reaching the end of their lifespan and will find themselves as antiquated as Windsor Park. The country will have to find a way to revitalize these sites or suffer urban blight on a mass scale. "We hope that this will become a case study of how to not demolish things and put them into a landfill," Smith says.
Want to continue reading?
Become a Free ALM Digital Reader.
Once you are an ALM Digital Member, you’ll receive:
- Breaking commercial real estate news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical coverage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
*May exclude premium content© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
