The Rapid Growth of Green Building Ordinances

 

I was teaching a workshop a couple of weeks ago, and a participant who was also a municipal employee raised his hand and asked if anybody knew of a website where he could download green building ordinances. He wasn’t kidding.

We gave him a long-winded answer about why he wouldn’t want to skip too many steps when enacting new green building ordinances (community input, developer input, that sort of thing…). His reasoning was pretty clear: “Heck, everybody’s doin’ it, so we thought there oughta be some place on the web where you can just download a template”.

Yes, times have changed.

At the beginning of this year, I posted about how municipalities are becoming sustainability’s cowboy’s  in 2008. And we’ve arrived at a great point in the year for an update that underscores the assertion.

Over the past few days, the AIA’s put out a a new report detailing the state of green building ordinances in the US, called “Local Leaders in Sustainability”. You can download the study findings here.

While  many of us active in sustainability warmly welcome the increased acceptance of green building by private investors, not many people up to now have a clear sense of the velocity happening at the “structural” level — via codes, regulations, etc. Here are three factoids showing warp speed adoption of green building ordinances:

• In 1997, study statistics show that barely one million US residents lived in green cities. Ten years later, in 2007, that number has increased to nearly 45 million.

• The majority of green building ordinances have been passed after 2003. Wow!

• At the time of sampling, the study identified 96 cities across the US, which had enacted some form of green building ordinance. At the same time, researchers had identified an additional 36 cities which were on the way to passing green building ordinances. So you have a potential 37% increase in the number of green cities was in th pipeline even as the study was being conducted.

Green Building Incentives

With all that growth, how are cities getting developer buy-in? I’ve posted before about trade associations making continuing efforts to lobby governments about keeping and/or increasing monetary incentives for developers to further promote green building. Here’s the study’s list of municipalities all-time favorites for promoting private green building development (the study does not supply any ranking):

• Expedited Permitting
• Green Loan Fund
• Density Bonuses
• Permit Fee Waivers
• Subsidized LEED Fees
• Property Tax Abatement
• Discounted Energy Star Appliances
• Subsidized Green Premium

I left out two items - “green building awards” and “training of public officials” because many people would not put these types of incentives in the same category as the above list. They do not put cash in developers pockets.

We would have liked to see the study comment on any specific trends related to how the incentives were being utilized — some measurement of the efficacy of any particular incentive listed beyond the others presented. However, I think we’ll all have to glean that understanding from other work being done.

In the meantime, there is still enough trend evidence on green building ordinances within the study to make it a worthwhile read.

Enjoy!