New York City

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.

The ins and outs of green building and green real estate are not the hardest things in the world to learn, and my byline on this blog is a testament to that. I am, professionally, more or less a sportswriter, but simply by reading a lot and badgering the eff out of Stephen via gchat, I'm occasionally able to muster a comparatively convincing imitation of someone who actually knows what he's talking about. No, no, hold your applause until the end of the paragraph. Hold it because, despite my increasingly solid bluff game, urban planning and zoning and other macro-level green issues confronting New York (and other cities) remain something I don't totally get. So while I've enjoyed reading the mighty Streetsblog's three-part treatment of NYC's zoning issues, I will confess to being more out of my depth than usual, here.

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.

Submetering: you probably know more about it than I do. But as I continue to play myself into shape here at gbNYC, submetering -- and the constellation of companies seeking to refine it -- has emerged for me as one of the more interesting green topics. I love an ambitious new skyscraper or green condominium development as much as the next guy (and, as previously noted, my affection for insulation is intense enough to probably warrant law-enforcement attention), but I'm more into the idea of increasing efficiency. I don't know what kind of dork that makes me -- although I am sure it makes me some species of dork; I trust the reference resource at left will help me figure it out -- but it probably explains why I was so interested in Eric Wesoff's Greentech Media profile of Agilewaves, a start-up that has developed a very promising new Buidling Optimization System.