Cities

Once upon a time there was a voluntary, market-driven green building rating system called LEED®. In accordance with the intent of its drafters at the U.S. Green Building Council, it allowed developers to evaluate the feasibility of pursuing a third-party green building certification for a particular project based on a standard set of prerequisites and credits and then make an informed decision about whether or not follow the green brick road and design and develop accordingly. Along comes one municipality after another that decides that a voluntary market-based incentive to build certified green buildings is not enough. While many in the building industry cringed at the thought of mandatory LEED regulations for many reasons, they had little idea that it could actually get worse. Case in point: San Francisco’s mandate of LEED on acid for redevelopment projects.

Alex Wilson, the founder and executive editor of Environmental Building News and president of BuildingGreen Inc. is making the call for a new building standard called “Passive Survivability,” which he calls “a new design criterion that helps preserve crucial life support in the post-Katrina age.” Mr. Wilson spoke at the recent Northeast Sustainable Energy Association Building Energy (”NESEA”) 2008 conference in Boston, where he noted that 94 percent of the oil consumed by the world has been since 1955- the year he was born. “In one lifetime we’ve burned through something that took all of history to create,” he said.

I spent the weekend down in southwestern Virginia with my girlfriend at her parents’ place, so I thought it would be appropriate to write about a local LEED project today. Unfortunately, green news is still bit thin in those parts, but I was able to dig up a few LEED projects in Roanoke, which is [...]

Designed by Busby Perkins + Will, the Sustainable Condo Prototype Project is the product of EcoSmart, a non-profit foundation dedicated to the development of sustainable building technologies. After eight stops across Canada at a variety of events, the Condo has landed in Toronto as part of a larger educational exhibit on green technologies co-sponsored by [...]

At least to date, and for a number of different reasons, green hotels have been relatively hard to come by. A spate of announcements about projects here in New York City during 2007 (including 53 West 53rd Street and 330 Hudson Street) continue to help the local cause, but the hospitality industry at large still [...]

On Monday, Pittsburgh’s City Council approved a new green building incentive, and entertained a second which it will vote on sometime next year. The first, and less controversial bill, will allow LEED-certified buildings to rise 20 percent higher and include 20 percent more floor area than other buildings in their zoning district. For example, the [...]

Not to be outdone by the green efforts of this year’s World Series champions, the New England Patriots have announced that they’ve signed a four-year agreement to purchase renewable energy credits to completely offset their game day electrical use at Gillette Stadium, whose regular consumption is enough to power 2,269 homes for a day. The [...]

Contessa Premium Foods will officially open the doors of its $35 million Green Cuisine™ Plant in Los Angeles sometime this fall. According to Contessa, the four million square foot plant is the world’s first and largest environment-friendly frozen food manufacturing facility, as well as the first such project to earn a LEED rating from USGBC. [...]

Cromley Lofts in Alexandria is the State of Virginia’s first LEED-certified condominium development, a three-story, eight-unit adaptive reuse project that earned a Gold rating from USGBC after completion earlier this year. Many of my friends from law school live in Northern Virginia, so this was a particularly interesting project for me to hear about from [...]

Zipcars seem to be everywhere in increasing numbers these days, so why not expand the idea to bicycles? French firm JCDecaux has installed its Cyclocity public bike sharing system in Lyon, where according to Dwell 3,000 bikes account for 20,000 trips each day. By year’s end in Paris, 20,000 bikes will be available from- and [...]