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  • "The Green Tragedy: LEED's Lost Decade" Now in Print

    “The Green Tragedy: LEED’s Lost Decade” Now in Print

    The Green Tragedy: LEED’s Lost Decade was released while I was away last month. Author and Community Solutions executive director Pat Murphy traces the historical argument promoting minimal green building cost premiums, reviews the ongoing marketing effort behind LEED, and concludes that policy makers should demand energy efficiency standards more akin to the German Passive House rather than “cheap quick ‘green’ solutions.”

    Dec 04, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

  • Atlanta Restauranteurs Resisting Push for Green Building Legislation

    Atlanta Restauranteurs Resisting Push for Green Building Legislation

    Recent efforts by Atlanta’s restaurant industry to resist proposed green building legislation implicate the conclusions of NIBS’ report about state- and local-level green building policy which we noted last month here at GRELJ. The Atlanta Sustainable Building Draft Ordinance would require the city’s commercial buildings and residential dwellings three stories or higher to comply with either LEED or specifications drafted by the Sustainable Atlanta committee. What’s particularly interesting about the pushback is the extent to which it reflects the conclusions in the NIBS report; for example, Keisha Carter, director of public affairs of the Georgia Restaurant Association, stated in a recent piece in Nation’s Restaurant News that “[t]here needs to be more due diligence on this before the city council can even consider passing it. There is a lot of political play going on with this thing, but we’re trying to stay on top of it and be heard. There is major concern that it will pass, but the members of the city council must come to realize it’s not in any shape to be passed just yet.” This comment reminded me of language in the NIBS report which noted that “[a]t an increasing rate, state and local governments and their code/regulatory agencies are adopting building rating / certification systems, intended as voluntary systems, to be their code or regulatory requirements, often without fully understanding their benefits, tradeoffs, and costs.”

    Nov 05, 2009 | 1 comment | View Post

  • Winnipeg Developer Requiring Commercial Tenants to Sign Green Lease

    Winnipeg Developer Requiring Commercial Tenants to Sign Green Lease

    Back in June, a Winnipeg developer unveiled 1735 Corydon Avenue, a 2-story, 12,800-square-foot office building which is the first in Canada’s Manitoba province to require all potential tenants to sign a green lease.

    Oct 21, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

  • National Institute of Building Sciences Identifies Risk & Policy Problems Flowing from Green Building Rating Systems

    National Institute of Building Sciences Identifies Risk & Policy Problems Flowing from Green Building Rating Systems

    In September of 2008, the Board of Directors of the National Institute of Building Sciences (“NIBS”) assembled a Task Group of design professionals, builders, and its own staff members to review third-party building performance rating systems and associated individual accreditation programs currently in use across the United States. The Task Group identified twenty systems and programs and interviewed representatives from AIA, ASHRAE, BOMA, GBI, NAHB, EPA, USGBC, and Victor O. Schinnerer & Co.. among others, in compiling its “Report on Building Rating and Certification in the U.S. Building Community,” which was released last month.

    Oct 08, 2009 | 1 comment | View Post

  • Model Green Lease Lands in New York City at Urban Green Expo

    Model Green Lease Lands in New York City at Urban Green Expo

    Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to join a panel discussion on green leasing at the Urban Green Expo here in New York City. The session, which was titled “Green Leases: Aligning the Incentives of Landlord and Tenant,” presented the results of four projects which aim to provide brokers, landlords, tenants, and their attorneys with guidance towards creating more sustainable leasing structures. The projects, which may be familiar to you, were the Real Property Association of Canada’s (REALpac) Green Office Lease, the BOMA Green Lease Guide, and the NRDC’s Green Lease Forum, which aimed to create a set of principles for lease negotiations and other recommendations for making existing leases more energy efficient. I presented the Model Green Lease Task Force’s Model Green Lease- an effort which, as you may know, was spearheaded by green leasing guru Alan Whitson (who has contributed here at GRELJ previously in an insightful response to an article that we wrote on environmental performance objective clauses). Unlike the BOMA Green Lease Guide (created by Jones Day partner Steve Teitelbaum, who also participated on the panel), the Model Green Lease is an extremely compact document, drafted from scratch, which is fundamentally based on the theory that, in order to make a more compelling business case for green buildings, leases must be crafted as gross (i.e., the landlord is responsible for building operating expenses, unlike in a net lease, where the tenant pays for its own share of those costs). The document, which also includes a corresponding reference guide, comprises just 17 pages plus exhibits and incorporates ten essential elements that aim to support a specific definition of a green building created by the Task Force for purposes of the project: “[a] building that is environmentally responsible, profitable and a healthy place to live or work.”

    Sep 29, 2009 | 2 comments | View Post

  • Is San Francisco Reconsidering Its Green Building Legislation in Light of the LEED Performance Debate?

    Is San Francisco Reconsidering Its Green Building Legislation in Light of the LEED Performance Debate?

    The San Francisco Chronicle has picked up on the recent flurry of commentary generated by Mireya Navarro’s piece in the New York Times about the LEED building performance gap. The article opens up by stating “[r]evelations that many buildings certified as green under a broadly accepted national standard for energy savings are not performing as well as predicted recently prompted changes to the [LEED] program and are forcing San Francisco officials to consider amending city rules that are tied to the older guidelines.” However, a closer look at the substance of the article suggests that city officials may actually be trying to expedite the application of the LEED 2009 system and its corresponding Minimum Program Requirements (“MPRs”) to large, private construction projects. (As you will recall, the new MPRs require that projects which pursue LEED certification to “commit to allow USGBC to access all available actual whole-project energy and water usage data in the future for research purpose” or risk decertification.) I also think the piece is noteworthy because it suggests an inextricable link between increased data reporting and increased building performance.

    Sep 11, 2009 | 2 comments | View Post