LIGHTENING THE LOAD: Many nonprofit groups are looking for cheaper offices to provide services to the elderly. Picture: Kathrine Muick-Mere
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‘There’s a sense of
community that doesn’t exist
in a normal building’
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Cities create quality spaces for use by nonprofit organisations
NEW YORK (New York Times), April 20, 2008:
Boston Senior Home Care, which provides services for the elderly and disabled, got a rude awakening when it began searching for new office space last year.
The nonprofit group wanted to stay near its urban constituents and public transportation.
But with the city’s commercial real estate market at a historic high, affordable rental property was difficult to find and the spaces it could afford were often sub-standard.
“Some of the buildings would have been just terrible for our staff, and price was absolutely an issue,” said executive director Linda George.
Instead, Boston Senior Home Care moved in January to attractive, contemporary, high-quality offices in the city’s financial district, at a rate George considers “a very fair deal”.
The recently renovated space is part of a building called the Nonprofit Centre, which exclusively houses “progressive social change” organisations that work to correct societal problems.
It is one of about 150 such centres nationwide: multi-tenant, incubator-like spaces operated primarily for nonprofit organisations (NPOs), which benefit from affordable rents, secure leases, a collaborative environment and increased visibility.
Many of the centres are in modern buildings in prime downtown areas, and some offer shared equipment such as photocopiers and printers, as well as programmes like yoga and lunch-time seminars.
And in hot real estate markets they are helping to solve a common lament of many NPOs: that the cost of commercial real estate is driving them out of the cities and communities they serve.
“The market for commercial real estate and rentals in the last two years has been skyrocketing, which means that for nonprofit groups that negotiated favourable leases five or six years ago, it’s going to cost them significantly more to stay put when those leases come up for renewal,” said Jonathan Spack, who operates the Nonprofit Centre.
“Our tenants know the rent is not going to be jacked up wildly at the end of the lease if the market happens to be hot,” Spack said, “and there’s a sense of community that doesn’t exist in a normal building.”
Volatile rents are a perennial concern for NPOs, which are sometimes forced to vacate office space during real estate booms. As a result, many nonprofit groups are looking for cheaper offices.
By moving to the Nonprofit Centre on South Street, which rents for 5 to 10 less per square foot than similar commercial properties, the organisation still has easy access to those communities. The Nonprofit Centre is one of two buildings in Massachusetts that are dedicated to providing shared space for NPOs. The other is Boston TeamWorks in Dorchester, which houses multiple youth-sports organisations.
Three more centres are in development statewide — in Northampton, Truro and Lynn.
The nine-floor building has many of the same amenities as pricier commercial spaces, such as a meeting room with video-conferencing facilities, a landscaped courtyard and round-the-clock security. Because most of the building is tax-exempt, its roughly two dozen tenants — they range from the Centre for Legal Aid Education to the Green Restaurant Association to Easter Seals Massachusetts to the World Society for the Protection of Animals — don’t face escalating lease costs as real estate taxes increase.
It’s also a “green building” with high-efficiency heating, cooling and lighting systems, environmentally friendly paint and carpeting, and amenities such as indoor bike racks and showers.
Tenants don’t sacrifice aesthetics either: the architecturally distinctive brick building — built in 1899 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places — has lots of natural light, funky paint colours and even a grandfather clock chiming in the marble lobby.
Roughly 10% of the building is shared space in which very small or start-up groups can pay a flat monthly fee ranging from 400 to 900 to rent as little as a desk.
Instead of having to commit to multi-year leases, shared tenants sign one-year licence agreements that include Internet access, electricity, access to hi-tech meeting space and a shared photocopier, printer and fax machine.
“We looked at a lot of buildings and this one was by far the superior building for the rent,” said George of Boston Senior Home Care. “And we loved the atmosphere of a whole family of NPOs, with everybody having similar goals and missions.”
© 2008 The New York Times
