Making of a LEEDer

Builders dedicating green structures will reap rewards while minimum-effort developers will pay the price in Portland, Ore., under a new sustainable building proposal.
Officials in the West Coast metropolis (formerly nicknamed as Stumptown for its active timber sector) want to green new large-scale developments through a system of fees and rebates based on attainment of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, also known as LEED, according to sustainablebusiness.com
Developers working on sizable commercial projects could, under this proposal, put up new structures to merely satisfy the minimum Oregon building code, the article states. But those who only meet minimums like that would have to pay a fee to the city of up to $3.46 per square foot in the building.
As this so-called "feebate" structure would apply to commercial buildings of more than 20,000 square feet, the costs of those bare minimum improvements would prove a significant financial penalty for the developer.
A commercial building at 20,000 square feet would tack another $69,200 to the project under this program.
However, developers that go the extra mile and get levels of LEED certification on their buildings could have the fees waived or even get a rebate for earning the highest efficiency ratings for the facilities, the article says.
Those that install enough features like on-site renewable energy generation, water-efficient landscaping, controls on the heat-island effect or light pollution, use certified renewable lumber, choose suitable land and earn enough points on the LEED scorecard to reach the second tier of certification, or silver, won't have to pay extra fees.
And those developers who earn the gold or platinum LEED certification would get a financial reward from Portland, described as rebates ranging from $1.73 to $17.30 per square foot.
Multifamily residential developments would face similar disincentives for taking the easy route in construction and similar incentives for building better than required.
There rebates could range from 51 cents to $5.15 per square foot, depending on LEED ratings.
Portland officials would like to see a green revolution in single-family homes too.
The proposal states the city would set a goal of 20 percent of new home construction that earn LEED certifications in 2009.
If that goal isn't met — and if the number of new homes with LEED ratings doesn't jump again to 40 percent in 2011 — the city will apply the same feebate system as on commercial structures to residential homes.
Officials from Portland, which has adopted the motto "The City that Works," told Sustainable Business they expected the fees gathered from underperforming buildings would pay for the rebates to the certified LEED buildings.
Still in public hearing mode on the proposals, the reactions have been overwhelmingly supportive, the article says.
"About half the respondents in a public comment period think the policy is appropriate for the city," it quotes an official from the city's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. "Another 40 percent say it's not stringent enough, and about 10 percent don't support the policy. "
The motivation to implement the incentives comes from the fact that Portland cannot enforce building codes more stringent that Oregon's.
LEED ratings come from the U.S. Green Building Council, and participation is voluntary.
The council calls LEED standards "the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green building."
LEED, they say, "promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality."
Making LEED certification more attractive to the mainstream not just the "greenies" through incentives serves as Portland's real innovation here.
Earning rebates or avoiding fees will make more developers cognizant of LEED building practices and increase the program's everyday relevance.
That's makes Portland a real leader in terms of sustainable development.
More cities should consider following the feebate path that Portland has blazed.

Softening the urban fabric

Cities are hard places.
While Destiny, Fla., Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and to an extent tornado ravaged Greensburg, Kan., are about designing green communities from scratch, the larger challenge for the globe is making the existing metropolises environmentally friendly.
After all, if we make every new development from now on greenhouse gas-neutral, the pollution causing and energy intensive urban jungles will still continue to generate their Industrial Age problems.
It's not enough to just build communities correctly from here out — the environmental degradation created by all those hard surfaces in cities will continue unabated unless people start addressing them right away.
As cities built up and suburbs annexed farms and forests, planners and developers merely repeated a pattern that worked.
But now the diminishing returns are becoming more and more apparent.
Look at the building blocks of development: Concrete, steel, glass, asphalt.
To make a city block, architects, engineers, planners, developers, investors and laborers collaborate to — with various degrees of exigency — slather the place with tons of these impervious materials.
And the result is heat islands, unclean waters, unproductive earth, tense people and a general hostility to the natural order of things.
The key to solving the environmental pressures of the world is not abandoning our existing cities, giving them up as lost, shaking our heads, bowing out, humiliated by the short-sightedness, moving out and never looking back.
The key is softening the concrete and glass landscape, reversing their detrimental effects, taking better advantage of the untapped possibilities.
Fortunately, that also gives humanity plenty of opportunities to improve our cities, because practically every factor of development has been used and abused.
So I, a thoroughly unqualified but enthusiastic and curious civilian, will state a number of simple ideas whenever they occur to me to try and reverse the trend and reclaim the cities in terms of sensible and sustainable development.