Top Ten Trends in Green Building

Lucia Athens, ASLA, LEED AP

Excerpted from the new book Building an Emerald City: A Guide to Creating Green Building Policies and Program, by Lucia Athens.

Lucia is Senior Sustainable Futures Strategist with CollinsWoerman. Building an Emerald City is a roadmap to help policy makers, public officials, and green building advocates develop green building programs to accelerate market adoption of green building practices in order to create more sustainable communities and cities. It is the essential guide for anyone interested in developing and implementing the practices that ensure successful green building projects. Look for Building an Emerald City in stores and online in November 2009.

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With all the changes afoot today, many from both inside and outside the green building movement may be wondering what is coming next. The question in many people’s minds might be whether the economic downturn will kill the momentum of the green building movement. Or, is green building here to stay, made stronger than ever by our need to mind the bottom line? I see ten key trends and issues that should inform the road ahead for green building.

More Price Signals and Mandatory Requirements

As the shift to a carbon economy materializes, it will create significant price signals that will reinforce increased green building adoption. The first steps toward this are already being seen based on the Seattle and King County greenhouse gas disclosure requirements for significant development projects (discussed in chapter 6). Developers will see energy efficiency and carbon offset strategies as part of their overall investment strategy, which will make them financially competitive with other investment options. Carbon pricing in the form of either a cap-and-trade approach, such as that undertaken in Europe, or a direct tax on carbon emissions will further drive innovations and increased investment in green energy, lowering prices and increasing choices. We can expect to see additional mandatory requirements emerging from the regulatory environment. Ordinances to make green building a development requirement using LEED or other standards has already been implemented by some cities. Other green building programs can be expected to follow.

Since green building is no longer a new concept and the building industry has started to adapt to it voluntarily or based on incentives, regulatory requirements will not be far behind. Mandatory construction recycling has already been adopted by some cities and can be expected to increase as the space and cost for landfilling waste reach their limits. Mandatory energy audits of existing buildings have been adopted by the cities of Berkeley, San Francisco, and Sacramento and are under consideration in Portland, Austin, Denver, and Seattle. In Boulder and Santa Monica, excessively large homes are required to provide at least half of their energy needs on site.

Responding to Greenwashing

As the green building and green consumer market have expanded, so has the jockeying for position for a piece of the pie. Everywhere you look, “green” is a label added to a multitude of purchasing choices, whether it is buildings, cars, food, clothing, furniture, or vacations. With this explosion of sometimes conflicting information, options, and definitions, the marketplace has become confused. Some green claims are true; others less so. The false claims represent what is commonly referred to as greenwashing.

What standards or criteria are being used to make the claims, and can they be compared effectively? Simple, clear, recognizable, and credible labeling or certification programs can help to address marketplace confusion and inform consumer choice. However, some labels still conflict. In the case of green building, many claim their building materials or products to be “LEED Certified,” which is not possible, and others may want to put a green label on their buildings purely as a marketing strategy without underlying substance. Recent debates between the public policy adoption of LEED versus Green Globes have been particularly intense. Behind the debate is the label used to certify lumber products as sustainable using either the FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) or SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) label. These types of debates can be expected to continue and intensify as more competing tools and certifications emerge. In the case of the lumber standards, LEED is clearly more stringent than Green Globes.

A diversity of tools in the marketplace with varying point-of-entry stringency may be healthy in that the net benefits of wider adoption of less rigorous standards may still be positive. However, clarity for consumers about exactly what it is they are buying or what the standard that government may sanction represents is crucial for the sake of clarity, transparency, and scrupulousness. The public sector is in a unique position to help address greenwashing and provide a perspective less biased by industry. Green building programs should address which standards and certifications they sanction and why. They can provide a credible source of information for those in the building industry striving to make sensible and informed choices.

Considering Urban Sustainability and Community Scale Impacts

Green building initiatives thus far have focused primarily on the parcel scale of development. With the development of LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED ND) and the up-and-coming Star Community Index (discussed in chapter 7), new tools are available to help guide the design, and benchmark the performance, of entire neighborhoods and even cities. This focus on the monumental sustainability impacts at the larger community scale is much needed. Many acknowledge that the decision about where to develop may vastly outweigh the impacts associated with how the development is done, primarily because of transportation impacts. The Urban Land Institute’s 2008 book Growing Cooler calculated that shifting 60 percent of new growth to compact development would save 79 million tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2030. Findings also showed that people living in compact green neighborhoods are contributing to fighting global climate change as much as those who buy efficient hybrid vehicles and live in car-dependent neighborhoods.1

Smart growth strategies advocate for more transit-oriented developments and new urbanist neighborhood patterns where people can walk to goods and services or commute via public transit. Richard Florida’s March 2009 article in the Atlantic foresees that the economic downturn signals the end to life as we know it in this country, not only financially but regarding our patterns of urbanization and home ownership. Florida writes: “The housing bubble was the ultimate expression, and perhaps the last gasp, of an economic system some 80 years in the making. [It] encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl and created a workforce too often stuck in place, anchored by houses that cannot be profitably sold, at a time when flexibility and mobility are of great importance.”2

He posits that the age of suburbanization is resoundingly over and recommends that government policies should encourage renting versus buying, more housing choices, growth in existing mega-regions, and efforts to make attractive urban areas more affordable to all. He also recommends “liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on roads.”3

Green building programs can build on their existing momentum to help leverage sensible changes in urban public policy and land use codes. The Federal Transit Administration changed its rules to allow transit agencies to retain profits from real estate sales or leases, removing a disincentive for such agencies to engage in urban infill development. In one instance, Trimet of Portland concluded that even if they gave away land to a developer, the cost of developing new rail lines would be ten to twenty-three times more cost effective.4 With numbers like these, joint public/private developments make both financial and environmental sense.

Another area in which green building policy can support more sustainable communities is for communities in crisis and disaster preparedness and response. Displaced populations can be expected to increase as a result of violent conflicts, resource shortages, and natural disasters. Climate change may spur abandonment of the Sun Belt due to rising temperatures and diminishing water resources, and coastal communities may be displaced by rising sea levels. Refugee populations need fast, affordable, healthy places to live. For disaster-prone regions, green building design can address what is referred to as “passive survivability,” or the ability to maintain critical life support services in the event of power outages or other disruptions. I first heard this term at a USGBC-sponsored design charrette focused on New Orleans recovery from Hurricane Katrina.5

Green building strategies that can support passive survivability include natural ventilation, operable windows, solar-powered systems, on-site battery power storage, rainfall cisterns, and on-site water treatment. Increased building functionality during extreme conditions, such as heat waves combined with power outages, may also prevent unnecessary deaths, which affect elderly people and children heavily.

Renewing Existing Buildings

Given the fact that the economic downturn has pulled the rug out from under real estate development, fewer new construction projects will be occurring in the foreseeable future. This trend allows green building programs to focus more on existing buildings. Much of the country’s existing building stock is in need of upgrades to bring it in line with current standards of health and efficiency. With a suite of design tools, such as LEED for Existing Buildings, that can be exerted in this arena, more comprehensive building upgrades will occur than those that focus on energy or water alone.

Maintaining existing buildings, as opposed to tearing them down to make way for new ones, is one of the most fundamentally sustainable strategies we can employ. The embodied energy contained in buildings is vast. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has been pursuing an initiative to address the energy efficiency of historic structures. This is a challenging area of improvement because many energy upgrades, such as replacing windows, represent an aesthetic problem for landmarked structures. An emerging partnership between the City of Seattle and the National Trust is aimed at creating a center for preservation and energy efficiency of historic buildings.

Tenant improvements are another area that will maintain an ongoing focus in spite of the downturn. With increased competition in a soft office market, new leases will be signed and others renegotiated. With these changes comes a myriad of tenant improvement projects that can have significant environmental impact. Some tenants or building owners will not want to go as far as LEED for Commercial Interiors, but they would benefit from green building education and outreach to help them understand how to make better choices. On the other hand, for those renting class A office space, some believe that LEED is the new standard that defines that tier within the marketplace.

Increase in Programs Addressing Energy Efficiency and Climate Disruption

Never has our collective awareness of the impacts of our behavior on the global environment been more keen. Popular press and media, including films such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and the short film The Story of Stuff, which went viral, have catapulted environmental awareness to the front of our national consciousness. Obama’s appointment of an Oregon State University researcher focused on oceans and global warming as the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signals that he will take this topic, and science, quite seriously--a refreshing change. Our dependence on foreign oil is increasingly being recognized as having negative impacts on both our national security and our economic stability. Investments in energy efficiency were a big part of the Economic Recovery Act, with a variety of measures totaling over $42 billion. 6

While energy efficiency is only one key aspect of green building, these funds can be leveraged to expand broader programs and to utilize green building as an umbrella that includes energy efficiency. With an infusion of resources available via grants to cities, counties, and states to increase energy efficiency, these funds could be applied to green building programs with an expanded focus on energy or carbon reduction. Funding to increase energy efficiency of housing (particularly affordable and subsidized housing) and federal buildings could also be attached to green building programs with a focus on the affordable housing market sector or for federal green building programs that have been underfunded.

Private developers will have new resources available in the form of tax credits for energy-efficiency improvements and renewable energy facilities including wind, tax credits for guaranteed energy loans, and tax cuts for businesses that use innovative strategies to transmit and distribute electricity or to sequester and capture carbon. Such additional resources make investment in green building more attractive from both an initial and a long-term cost standpoint. Green building programs should prepare to promote these new resources and programs to their customers. Finally, green building programs will have an increasing role in revising energy code requirements to reach increased levels of sustainability. Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and the State of Florida are pursuing performance-based energy codes that will meet the 2030 Challenge discussed in chapter 2.

Growing Opportunities for Green-collar Jobs

With the recent recognition that environmental benefit and economic development can be linked, the term green-collar jobs has become all the rage. New federal funding for green-collar job training was included in the Economic Recovery Act, with $500 million to train workers for careers in energy-efficiency and renewable energy fields; $2 billion for jobs related to science, engineering, and the environment; and $250 million for at-risk youth training for energy-efficiency jobs.7

Putting people to work to repair aging buildings and infrastructure with a green focus holds great promise for rebuilding a greener, more resilient country. The term green-collar job has not yet been clearly defined, but it should also include manufacturing of green products and materials, research and development of the same, and green professional and trade skills related to the green economy.

One of the gaps that continues to exist in the green building industry is workforce development of skilled construction and maintenance workers to build and manage contemporary facilities. New skills are required for this. A building may be designed to be green, but if the contractor does not understand how to build it, progress can be stopped in its tracks. Green building programs can help fill this gap by partnering in green job skills training programs, providing referrals to graduates and participating companies, and supporting the market development of such jobs (this topic was mentioned briefly in chapter 5). Partnerships with economic development programs and organizations such as Green for All can expand the focus of green building, making it more holistic and inclusive of the entire complex web of skills and relationships within the building industry.

Rebuilding Failing Infrastructure

Green building programs must prepare to assist with projects that do not include buildings. Most of the focus to date has been on buildings while using tools like LEED. However, many public works projects, such as parks and infrastructure, have not received much attention in the green building dialogue, and tools like LEED do not currently apply to them. This must change. Long an ignored problem, the challenge of repairing our country’s ailing infrastructure is finally receiving focus. Infrastructure is a term that comprises a wide array of types, including transportation, energy and water, flood control, and communications. The failures that occur as the result of infrastructure collapse can be catastrophic, as evidenced by Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath or the chaos and disruption to electric service and price stability triggered in the United States by the rolling blackouts of 2001.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $2.2 trillion is needed for infrastructure repairs.8

Infrastructure failure can have many causes, including the simple fact that much of our infrastructure is so old it is falling apart. Many cities still have combined stormwater and wastewater sewers, which often results in extreme system overloading during storms, sending raw sewage into sensitive waterways. Climate change is projected to increase not only sea levels but also flooding as a result of extreme weather events. In Canada, a publicly funded initiative led by the National Round Table on Sustainable Infrastructure has developed a protocol to assess the vulnerability of infrastructure, such as bridges and dams, to climate change.9

Green building programs should work aggressively with public works officials to ensure that green standards are being used in the process of rebuilding infrastructure. Less monolithic and more distributed approaches to infrastructure should also be pursued as a part of the rebuilding efforts. Many green infrastructure solutions occur at the site level or tie together benefits from multiple utility areas, defying the way we traditionally plan and design infrastructure systems. Andy Lipkus of the Los Angeles based nonprofit Tree People has been extremely successful in redirecting flood control funding from traditional, centralized drainage structures to site-level tree planting, rainwater collection, and asphalt removal as a much greener way to handle the problem.10 Luckily, the Economic Recovery Act has earmarked $100 billion for public works projects.11 However, the amount of funding needed vastly exceeds what has been set aside at the federal level.

Investing in Water-saving Strategies

With the burgeoning focus on climate disruption, the global water crisis has recently received short shrift. While climate change is likely to intensify water problems by raising temperatures and decreasing snowpack, shortages of water are likely to become a much more pressing and catastrophic problem in the near term. Water shortages relate not only to drinking water but also to producing our food supply. The southwestern portion of the United States is rapidly drying up and is likely to experience a water crisis of epidemic proportions in the near future. The Economic Recovery Act provided water financing for wastewater treatment and drinking water at $6 billion, for rural water and waste facilities at $1.4 billion, and for water supply to rural areas and western areas affected by drought at $1 billion.12

In Las Vegas, water supply is dependent on Lake Mead, which stores water from the Colorado River. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is currently in a race against the clock to lower the level of their intake pipes to match the dropping lake level. They hope to finish the massive reengineering project by 2012 but are looking for ways to accelerate the project and avert a possible water disaster.13 Arizona, California, and Nevada are at risk for massive water supply losses, which some say would create an apocalypse.

Regionally customized green building programs and incentives will need to increasingly focus attention on water issues. Adaptive solutions, elimination of irrigation for purely ornamental landscapes, high-efficiency technologies, and, in particular, water reuse will be front and center. Green building programs have had stronger ties to energy utilities than to any other utility thus far. In the future, water utilities will increasingly see the value of investing in green building programs to help slow water demand and encourage innovative solutions.

Integrating Social and Food Issues

Thus far, green building has focused more of its attention on the environmental and, to a lesser degree, economic aspects of the triple bottom line of sustainability. The missing third piece has to do with social issues, sometimes called human factors, which are harder to quantify but no less important. Social sustainability may include human health and disaster preparedness, fair trade and wages, equity and diversity, affordable housing, environmental and social justice, wayfinding and universal access, arts and culture, and social capital development. In 2008, the USGBC added social equity to their guiding principles and strategic plan. Some of the new goals associated with this include partnering with social justice and quality-of-life initiatives and developing and advocating “a public policy agenda that ensures that the benefits of green buildings become available to currently underserved populations.”14

The widespread lack of affordable and workforce housing (that is, built to green and healthy standards) is a key policy area where green building programs and policies can exert an influence. Another area that serves social, and also environmental, benefits of the triple bottom line is increasing urban agriculture. U.S. agricultural production has increased by more than 100 percent since 1950 but on only about three quarters of the acreage it occupied then. Land has been removed from agricultural use eight times as fast as it has been developed, and much of the land that has not been converted to suburbs has returned to forest.15 We need to use developed parcels more creatively and efficiently in order to integrate agricultural uses rather than separate them. Growing and consuming food locally benefits human physical and mental health and lowers the transportation and climate footprint of transporting food long distances.

Many public entities and NGOs now talk about “food security” in relationship to risks to food safety and supply based on massive food importation. The Slow Food and “eat local” movements have huge followings and have managed to focus more people on eating healthy, seasonal foods produced without chemicals. Green building programs can partner with local food organizations, community garden programs, community-supported agriculture, and farmer’s markets. Pushing for local food policies and encouraging integration of urban agriculture into new or infill development via a partial redirection of federal agricultural subsidies are two possible areas of action. LEED for Neighborhood Development has a credit for “local food production,” a credit that should be added to the entire LEED tool suite. Andres Duany, a Miami architect who is the evangelist of new urbanism, has begun to broadly promote urban agriculture. He notes that “agriculture is the new golf” and that “food is quite good-looking.”16 He is referring in part to a study in Loudoun County, Virginia, that found views of farmland added as much real estate value to views of golf courses. Duany has integrated an organic farm, which will be commercially operated, into a new urbanist residential development outside St. Louis, in St. Charles, Missouri. Small infill urban gardens, green roofs that produce food, and building-integrated vertical agriculture can improve the productivity of even very dense urban environments.

Advancing Research and Innovation

Preparing for innovation may seem to require a crystal ball. What will the next innovation be, and from where will it arise? While we cannot know the answers to these questions with any surety, we can help to anticipate and guide the process. The USGBC launched a multimillion-dollar green building research funding initiative in 2008 in response to an in-house study that indicated applied research and development funding availability falls far short of what is needed. At the time, the national science budget just for renewable and energy efficiency was about $1 billion annually, compared to a budget of $29 billion for the National Institutes of Health. The Economic Recovery Act provided $2 billion for science and research at the Department of Energy, $300 million for research in using renewable energy for defense and military bases, and $2.5 billion for energy-efficiency and renewable energy research grants.18

The public sector, NGOs, and research institutions are in a unique position to fill funding gaps toward serving the public good. The key is that, “to get solutions at scale, we’re going to have to find answers that are economic for all people everywhere. We’ve got to use policy to harness innovations to make sure that the right thing to do is a profitable thing to do.”19

However, the potential for business sources of innovation funding should not be underestimated, particularly in the area of venture capital. According to Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School, one dollar of venture capital is somewhat equivalent to three to four dollars of corporate research and development.20

We can expect some of the best innovations to come from unexpected areas or from young inventors who are unhampered by a “this is the way we do things” mentality. In the developing world, where self-sufficiency and off-grid technologies may be a matter of survival, innovations such as cell phone networks have flourished unfettered by the regulatory environment and the previous investments in the status quo that often hamper innovation. Student researchers and the budding graduates of design programs are coming up with some of the best ideas, and we would do well to pay attention and create more public-private and government-academic partnerships to solve real-world problems. Metropolis Magazine’s Next Generation annual competition for young designers and students is just one of the treasure troves of emerging genius.21

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A sneak peak at the Table of Contents.
Foreword by Pliny Fisk III and Gail Vittori
Preface: Setting the Stage
Chapter 1        Introduction: The Promise of Green Building
Chapter 2        Building Support for Green Building Initiatives
Chapter 3        Change and Innovation in Markets and Organizations
Chapter 4        Developing and Implementing Policy for Publicly Funded Green Building
Chapter 5        Developing Green Building Program Services
Chapter 6        Green Building Incentives and Codes
Chapter 7        Measuring Program Impacts
Chapter 8        The Road Ahead for Green Building Programs
Appendix A: Public Projects Green Building Portfolio
Appendix B: Green Building Certification Tools