Wild Hogs: Bloomberg Backs Down On "Greener, Greater Buildings" Under Pressure From Big Real Estate

Michael Bloomberg (left) is like a little, orange, unimaginably wealthy litmus test. Or... well, really, he's more like a little, orange, unimaginably wealthy politician. Not just in the strictly literal sense -- for those just joining us, Michael Bloomberg is the mayor of New York City -- but in the sense that, despite his cosmos-altering personal wealth, he is also a prisoner to the rich-dude biases and interest group influence that have traditionally made politics so sclerotic and annoying, and have made "politician" something of a pejorative term. The "litmus test" part is this -- when you heard that Michael Bloomberg was rolling back the most ambitious (and, not coincidentally, onerous) element of his Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, did you feel surprised? Confirmed in your suspicions? It's relative, of course -- I personally felt a little of both -- but "disappointed" is a very acceptable answer. Probably the most common one among gbNYC readers, I suspect. Here's what happened:

One of the more promising elements of the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan (I'm just going to call it GGBP) was the fact that it did more than set strong standards on new construction projects, and held older buildings to a true green standard. To be specific, it did so by mandating "energy audits" on all buildings of 50,000 square feet or more and required the owners of buildings that did not meet GGBP's standards to pay for retrofits to bring them up to snuff. The good news is that the energy audits are still in place -- and, credit where it's due, big real estate lobbyists lobbied hard against this as well. The less-good news is that the retrofits will now be voluntary. (To his credit, Stephen saw conflict on this point coming back when the plan was first announced) The proposed job-creation windfall that Bloomberg promised -- 19,000 construction jobs created, as the expected $2.5 billion in upgrades were undertaken at 22,000 buildings citywide -- has shrunken by roughly three-fourths, and the real estate big dogs who lobbied against the provision are serving up defiant quotes to the New York Times."This is just not the time for it," Stuart Saft of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums says. "Come back in five years when we’re past this recession. At this point it’s just a slap in the face." Sorry about your face, dude; I wonder how the collective faces (metaphors!) of all the unions that endorsed Bloomberg earlier this year, on the promise of those 19,000 new jobs, feel.

Of course, the argument can be made that a recession is exactly the time for this sort of thing. In a column in the Times today discussing the possible positive economic outcomes of climate change legislation, Paul Krugman does just that, on the grounds that materials and labor are cheaper now than they've been in a long while and that such changes will eventually be beneficial for everyone. But the numbers in this bit of legislation, finally, were not close enough for Bloomberg's comfort. You can argue that this is another example of him capitulating to the city's mega-developers -- the Village Voice does so here -- but the difference between that $2.5 billion price tag and the $16 million in federal stimulus funds that the city has on hand for retrofit-related loans is indeed pretty glaring. The new voluntariness of these upgrades, too, doesn't significantly mitigate the fact that GGBP is still the most ambitious and impressive piece of municipal green building legislation in the United States. (That's not me saying it, it's the National Resources Defense Council, in the above-linked NYT piece)

But the biggest issue now was also the biggest issue going in, and is not notably closer to resolution: buildings account for 80% of New York City's emmissions, and older, bigger buildings emit more than newer and/or smaller ones. The audits will identify which buildings are the biggest offenders, which is good. But with mega-developers still wary of the well-demonstrated benefits a good green retrofit can provide -- in terms of operating costs, most notably -- and neither legal coercion nor financial incentives around to overcome the prejudices of the luddite multi-millionaires we're talking about here, we're more or less where we started. The bill will be voted on in the City Council on Wednesday; if what comes out of it then looks like what we have now -- a GGBP without this particular row of teeth -- New York will still be better off for its passage. But this particular bit of (actually very prosaic and unsurprising) political compromise probably isn't going to improve the standing of His Honor the Little Orange Billionaire Litmus Test in Gotham's green community.