Green Commercial Buildings

There are hardcore real estate heads out there, probably, who are very aware of German commercial real estate company Jamestown Properties. All I can do is salute those people. For me, the Jamestown Properties of the world -- which the New York Times identifies as "an acquisition and management firm based in Cologne, Germany, and Atlanta, has invested $12 billion in commercial properties in the United States since 1983 through private equity funds for German investors" -- are shadowy entities. (I can never quite tell what Britt Daniel is writing about, but the Spoon song "Who Makes Your Money" came to mind during my reading about Jamestown) In one of their rare turns in the gbNYC spotlight, though, Jamestown is acquitting itself well. Jamestown recently announced a commitment to do up to $10 million worth of green retrofits on its entire U.S. building portfolio. Given the size of Jamestown's $4 billion portfolio, that's a lot of buildings, with such major New York City properties as LEED Gold-hopeful 1250 Broadway and Chelsea Market among them.

Ah, The Hamptons: decadent and expensive and and materialistic and full of nightmarish reality show types screaming wine-breath 'I'm not here to make friends'-type stuff at each other over sodden $40 lunches. And yet also... The Hamptons: beautiful and still comparatively unspoiled in parts and near enough to Amagansett's "Lunch" restaurant and the great St. Peter's Catch Fish Store and Channing Daughters winery and a bunch of other cool things that it's hard not to like it.

It was different in Martin Luther's day. Back in the 16th century, a monk could nail 95 theses to a church door and count on every one of them being read and discussed. Well, at least on them being read and discussed by the small percentage of people who could actually read in the 16th century. In the 21st century, when a 200-member blue-ribbon task force convened by the Mayor of New York City issues a 111-point report on greening the city's building codes, it doesn't even show up on gbNYC until a few days later. Which I guess is more my fault than the fault of the hyperspeed effects of 500 years of technological and cultural change. But even in the coverage I've read of the report, the report itself (download the summary here, full thing here) gets only the vaguest gloss. Yes, 111 recommendations is a lot.

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.