By David Laprad
Adam Green was fresh out of college and building houses in Tampa, Fla. As he and his father were inspecting one of his projects, the elder Green said, “Do you know what you’re doing here?” The younger Green said yes – building a house. As fathers tend to do, the elder Green took the opportunity to pass on wisdom. “No, you’re building a home – a place where people will live their lives.”
Years later, Green is still building places where people will live, although temporarily. As the private developer of a new project called Vine 324, he will soon be offering living space to University of Chattanooga at Tennessee students who don’t want to live with mom and dad, or in the dorm. He hopes the apartments will feel like home.
“I have a saying: ‘Make it look like a country club but build it like a prison because it has to last,’” he says. Concrete countertops, solid wood doors, and sturdy furniture that can withstand the college lifestyle are all on Green’s shopping list.
The four-story complex will be raised on the corner of Vine and Lindsay, where Chad’s Records and the cafe Toast have sat. A fire ravaged the latter in February, clearing the way for something new. “Before we had a name, we called the project ‘Burnt Toast,’” Green says.
The four-story apartment complex will be the definition of efficiency. It will feature two fully furnished suites per floor, each with four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Basic cable, Internet, and utilities will be included in the cost, and the units will be equipped with a washer and a dryer, a fully loaded kitchen, and a wall-mounted television. A sprinkler system and security-based entry into the building and the individual rooms will set mom and dad at ease.
“I want students to be able to buy their clothes, buy their books, and move in,” he says. “They will literally be 1,000 feet from campus.”
Green has put a lot of thought into making living at Vine 324 convenient and comfortable. He relates a story from when his 12-year-old daughter, Rachel, was visiting from Tampa, and the two of them had gone to Good Dog to eat:
“There were five or six hip college-age girls standing in line in front of me,” he says. “I told them I’d buy their lunch if they talked with me for 15 minutes about what they wanted. They did.”
That conversation bore fruit for the future residents of Vine 324. For example, each room will have its own vanity and sink. “Girls don’t want to be leaning over each other to put on makeup,” he says. “They want privacy.”
Green encountered a few obstacles when designing Vine 324, but credits “an excellent architect,” Tom Bartoo of Method Architecture, for clearing them. One big bump involved the empty parking lot next door. “Since we don’t know what will be there in the future, we can’t put any windows on that side of the building. So we had a dark corridor, and we didn’t know where we were going to put the bedrooms.”
Like the girls at Good Dog, the solution is hip: The stairs will run up that side of the building, and a light well that opens to the sky and stretches to the ground will provide natural light there and for the adjacent bedrooms. “You’ll be able to look out your window and see rain or snow,” he says.
Green plans to base the rental fee on what living on campus would cost. He hopes to have units ready by the fourth quarter of 2014 or the first quarter of 2015.
His motivations for building Vine 324 are two-fold. One, he likes addressing needs no one else is. “As a result of adding new programs and transforming into a 24/7 university, UTC needs 1,000 beds today, and will need 3,000 beds in three years,” Green says. So, rather than compete against developers who have built plenty of other kinds of spaces, Green is aiming to help UTC solve its housing dilemma.
Green’s business philosophy goes deeper than meeting a market need; rather, he prefers to develop properties in communities that have a long-term commitment to growth. With that in mind, he says Chattanooga is one of the best places in the country to do projects like Vine 324.
“Chattanooga reminds me of Tampa. That city was still in its growing stages when I moved there. That was an exciting time. I feel the same way about Chattanooga now,” he says.
Green grew up in Long Island, New York, where he developed the accent he still carries today. “People know I’m not from around here,” he says, laughing.
After moving to Tampa, Green attended the University of Florida, where he earned a political science degree. He’d planned on going to law school, but was more drawn to the idea of starting a business, so he began building houses. After that market crashed in the late ‘80s, Green held a variety of jobs until 2002, when he got his real estate license in Tampa. “I didn’t want to work for someone else anymore,” he says, “and I wanted to be more available to my daughter.”
Things went well until August 2006, when Green says “someone pulled a huge switch to the off position.” Through personal contacts, he wound up in Cleveland, Tenn., where he built and sold a 14,000 square-foot medical office. Ocoee Commons, a professional office park, followed.
The slowdown initially worked against Ocoee Commons, but when the complex started humming 18 months ago, Green hit upon the idea of college housing, and built six rental homes close to Lee University. Vine 324, and a move to Chattanooga, followed.
Today, Green is the managing director of Green Real Estate. He uses the royal “we” when speaking, but the company and Vine 324 are all him. His life is more than work, though. In addition to keeping tabs on his two children, he’s busy making the Southside home, is on the board of directors at the Jewish Federation, and spends as much time as possible mountain biking.
“Mountain biking is all about physics,” he says, laughing again. “An object in motion tends to stay in motion, even when a root reaches up and grabs the bottom of your bike.”
Vine 324 is now fully in motion, only Green has cleared away the roots, and will be able to see the project through to completion. He hopes to follow it with another similar project.
“I like doing business in niche environments while seeing the bigger picture of what’s going on in Chattanooga,” he says. “The demands being placed on the university are going to continue, and our responsibility is to alleviate some of that.”