LEED Commentary

There’s a great article in the latest issue of Building Design + Construction that provides some insight into the carrot versus stick debate with respect to municipal green building mandates. Palo Alto’s City Council is currently considering how, and if, it should institute green building requirements for private projects. (Currently, Palo Alto requires public projects [...]

One of the major aims of this blog during the past few months has been to argue in favor of increased competition among green building rating systems. Owners and municipalities should demand performance from their green buildings regardless of the rating system that the project team chose to implement prior to handing out incentives or [...]

I had the opportunity to write about Babylon’s green building legislation, which was recently incorporated into the Long Island town’s building code, as part of an editorial in today’s (Sunday) edition of New York Newsday. The piece focuses largely on LEED creep- which I’ve discussed here in prior posts- and touches on some issues that [...]

San Francisco-based New Resource Bank, founded in 2005 as the country’s first bank specifically created for green business, has launched a loan program which will provide developers with financial incentives for green building projects. The bank’s founding members include green building experts Greg Kats, Jonathan Rose, and Malcolm Lewis of CTG Energetics, and the new [...]

LEED for Existing Buildings (LEED-EB) has finally made a splash here in New York. On January 30, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) became the first building in either the City or State to receive certification under LEED-EB. Chairman of the Exchange, Richard Schaeffer, glowed that “[a]s the world’s leading energy exchange, we are firm [...]

Former USGBC board member, current chairman of Greenbuild, and author of Marketing Green Buildings and Developing Green, Jerry Yudelson, offers some 2007 green building predictions in the latest edition of Consulting-Specifying Engineer. (Image used with permission of Cristalier.com).
First, Yudelson believes that by the end of 2007, the cumulative number of LEED certifications will exceed [...]

Washington, D.C. appears to be on the verge of becoming the largest city in America to formally adopt LEED into a building code that applies to both public and private sector projects. An article in today’s Washington Post provides details about the legislation, which is contained in a bill pending before the D.C. Council.

Under the [...]

Here’s a broad overview of green building initiatives, both local and LEED, picked up by msnbc.com. Interesting, though, because it’s written about development in Cincinnati- not exactly a green building hotbed with only 1 LEED certified building to date- and the rest of the midwest starting to get on board with green building principles. It [...]

Here’s a link to an excellent article providing some fresh criticism of LEED and USGBC. It focuses on the lack of any credit categories awarding rating points for the incorporation of plants into purportedly “green” structures.