Just before the July 4 holiday, Fireman’s Fund, which launched the green building property insurance market back in 2006, released what it is calling its “next generation” of green building policy endorsements.
In Oregon, two small commercial tenants have bucked prevailing market trends and signed green leases with Unico Properties at the historic 13-story Commonwealth Building in downtown Portland.
Copyright concerns over green building amendments to Newark, Delaware’s building codes suggest some interesting questions about sovereign immunity and additional legal considerations for policymakers who may incorporate LEED into legislation.
The news that CBRE Capital Partners has originated $61 million in financing for the LEED Gold-hopeful Riverhouse condominium project also provides a bit of backdrop to the fledgling Gidumal litigation.
The owners of a condominium unit at the LEED Gold-hopeful Riverhouse development in lower Manhattan are alleging that the project’s developer breached the terms of its offering plan by failing to deliver the “green” building systems that were specified within the plan.
USGBC has denied the appeal which challenged the LEED Gold certification awarded to the Northland Pines High School in Eagle River, Wisconsin.
In light of two recent articles discussing the interplay of LEED 2009’s Minimum Program Requirements, decertification, and the ongoing Northland Pines High School certification challenge proceeding, it’s worth revisiting these topics in greater detail to clarify some misconceptions that have persisted over the past few months, particularly after remarks in response to those articles from USGBC.
Opposition to pending LEED-driven legislation in the Garden State by the New Jersey Building Materials Dealers Association suggests an increase in the level of scrutiny for state- and local-level green building regulations in 2010.
5 of the 20 largest leases signed in Manhattan in 2009 (as reported recently by the New York Observer) were inked in green buildings. GRELJ takes a closer look at each of these deals to draw some anecdotal conclusions about the current state of New York City’s green commercial real estate market.
USGBC’s LEED 2009 for Commercial Interiors rating system includes a significant number of points which tenants can earn towards their LEED-CI certification simply by choosing to lease space in qualifying base buildings; tenants can vet the available pool by properly streamlining the Request for Proposal process.
According to a recent energy study that was prompted by an inquiry from the Charlotte Observer, Charlotte, North Carolina’s ImaginOn library building is using twice as much energy as predicted by the project’s LEED Version 2.0 for New Construction energy model.
Although the costs of auditing were raised by opponents to the plan earlier this year, mandatory energy audits are now required every ten years, though buildings certified under LEED 2009 for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance or which receive EPA’s Energy Star label are exempt. It’s this exemption that’s of particular interest to us here at GRELJ.
While California’s recent adoption of a state-wide green building code once again has green building legal practitioners focused on the legal issues surrounding green building legislation, the antitrust implications of incorporating LEED or other third-party green building rating systems into state- and local-level legislation has yet to be fully explored.
In a decision with implications for owners and lenders, the Appellate Division for New York State’s Fourth Department recently upheld a preliminary injunction in favor of the Destiny USA development in Syracuse based explicitly on the project’s green features.
What were the top stories in green real estate law during 2009, but why was the most important one of all – the Northland Pines decertification proceeding – largely ignored by commentators?
According to an article that appeared last week in Eagle River, Wisconsin’s Vilas County News-Review, a group of local residents have filed a 125-page complaint with USGBC that challenges the award of LEED Gold certification to the Northland Pines High School.
USGBC’s Green Lease Guide does much more than just discuss the split incentive that’s a major barrier to implementing a truly green lease; it provides tenants with a form environmental impact questionnaire designed to assist them in vetting potential properties, as well as eleven pages of sample green lease provisions. The Guide is primarily written for commercial office tenants, but landlords will find its background information useful as well.
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.”
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.
Back in 2007, the Energy Engineering Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell completed a study of the actual energy performance of 19 green buildings across the Bay State. The study was funded by the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust and identified 13 schools which were certified under the LEED-based Massachusetts Collaborative for High Performance Schools Criteria, as well as 6 buildings that had earned LEED certification. The study compared energy consumption as predicted during the design phase and actual occupancy post-construction; buildings included in the study provided at least one year of occupancy data. The authors also interviewed individual project teams and energy modelers and conducted occupancy surveys in evaluating the effectiveness of various types of efficiency measures. All of the buildings received design or construction grants from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, which provided the prediction data that project teams had submitted in connection with their funding applications. Although the study concluded that these 19 green buildings were consuming (on average) 40 percent more energy than predicted, all of the buildings were consuming less than a building designed to Massachusetts baseline building codes. The disparity in predicted versus actual energy consumption is probably not surprising, but the study did identify a number of issues common across the buildings which resonate with many of the technical and operational provisions of documents like the Model Green Lease. I think it is therefore worthwhile to review the study both from a green leasing perspective, but also in terms of LEED, particularly because the Lowell study has not been referenced in many of the recent articles discussing the ongoing LEED performance gap.
