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!

California’s Green Building Codes: Tahoe or Prius?

Photocredit: labadieautoGood news!

As of Thursday, we have Green Building Codes in California — on a voluntary basis till 2010, when they become mandatory.

The two step-process to mandatory green building codes probably looks like a politically necessity today. Many would say that we should be happy to have any green building codes at all.  Plus California still maintains its image as a leader in sustainability.

But could the attachment to our shiny green image cause us to shy away from policy that addresses the public’s best interest in energy security and climate change?

Too much more brinksmanship and California’s green building codes risk being called a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid, voted “the green car of the year” and “the most fuel efficient car in its class”**.  The codes might look good when compared to other “SUV”-codes around the US, as long as you accept SUV’s as a benchmark. But we fool ourselves if we keep quietly ignoring the Prius’s out there:  Germany and Japan have been proving for years that construction of buildings with much lower energy usage is a feasible, achievable goal. And they’ve got the numbers to prove it.

Of course, I could be wrong. By 2010, we could be so far down the road to better resource use and energy independence that we will look upon the passage of these voluntary codes as being a milestone moment of courage.

And if that’s how things shape up, then I don’t mind being wrong at all.

San Francisco Once Step Closer to Mandatory LEED

Mandatory LEED in San Francisco is a critical step closer to being fully approved, according to yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. The Building Inspection Commission signed off on it last night. Its now at the Board of Supervisors for approval.

Bare Bones Overview
Under the proposed addition to the building codes, the following  construction must be LEED-certified:

• new residential high-rise buildings taller than 75 feet
• new commercial buildings larger than 5,000 sf
• renovations on commercial buildings larger than 25,000

Additionally, new residential construction will have to comply with Build It Green’s GreenPoint Rated system.

The article also indicates that complying with the legislation will cost developers an additional 5% on their project budgets, but does not provide a source for this particular information.

No Incentives on Tap
Interestingly, a city official is quoted as saying that city officials had hoped to offer incentives to builders whose projects obtained highest levels of environmental performance, but they scrapped the idea because they feared “it could lead to developers unnecessarily tearing down buildings or remodeling structures in order to take advantage of incentives”.

Hmmm…. so exactly how much in incentive fundings did the City think it would have to shell out? I’m sure they could have devised some sort of method to reduce this particular concern, (if this was truly the main concern).

The quote:

“What we now have is legislation that says if you’re going to build, you have to build to this standard. But it doesn’t encourage you to build a green building in lieu of keeping an existing building.”

Read the article for yourself and decide.