Jamestown Tapping Regional Supply Chain For Mass Timber Project in Atlanta
The firm is locally sourcing timber from forests in Georgia and Alabama.
Design-focused real estate investment and management firm Jamestown has tapped a regional supply chain for construction of a mass timber office building at Atlanta’s Ponce City Market.
The firm says its method of locally sourcing timber from sustainably managed forests in Georgia and Alabama is a first for mass timber construction in Georgia. Jamestown is also sourcing timber for the project from its own timberland. The company says the transportation required to move timber through manufacturing will be reduced by thousands of miles. Any additional manufacturing of the timber will also take place within the region.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Jamestown said the move marks “a new standard for mass timber construction that is not only more efficient and dependable, but significantly more sustainable.”
Mass timber construction results in a total carbon footprint that is up to one-third smaller than similarly sized steel and concrete buildings and enables smaller foundations and less fuel consumed during transport, since mass timber is 30 to 40% lighter than concrete.
At the ULI conference in San Diego last week, experts trumpeted mass timber as a key ESG driver for companies, noting that mass timber construction contributes to wildfire resiliency and drives financial returns for firms.
“If you haven’t walked through a building like this, you really have to,” Paul Stein of SKS Partners, said at the conference. “You can just ‘feel’ it when you do. There’s nothing like it.”
Stein referred to 1 De Haro, California’s first multistory cross-laminated timber building in San Francisco, as an example. The building is 58 feet tall with three stories of core and shell space over a concrete podium for four stories in total. It’s in a neighborhood with a strong advanced manufacturing industry.
He said the building “went up so quickly; we saved about four months in construction time and the wood helped us to limit the weight that concrete would have put on the foundation.”