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.
Green building consultant Jerry Yudelson delivered two keynote addresses earlier this month at an event sponsored by the Central Texas Green Building Council. According to a press release, during the course of his remarks Yudelson “presented clear evidence that high-level green outcomes add significant value to buildings. ‘What part of a 30 percent increase in value from LEED certification is hard to communicate?’ He challenged architects and engineers to do a better job of advocating for green building with their clients. ‘You are doing your clients a disservice by letting them build projects without LEED certification,’ he said. ‘It almost amounts to dereliction of your duty as professionals.’” As you likely know, this latter remark about the design professional’s responsibilities in the green building space is exactly the opposite of what many construction attorneys have been preaching over the past few years as best practices for architects and engineers. Putting aside for purposes of this article any analysis of Mr. Yudelson’s claims of 30 percent increases in value for LEED-certified buildings, I think his remarks provide a good opportunity to review the risk management implications of the design professional’s representations to his or her clients about the possibilities and potential pitfalls of green building, including the LEED certification process.
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.
Mireya Navarro’s recent piece in the New York Times about the energy performance of LEED buildings does not really shed much new light on a topic that many of us have been paying close attention to for the past two years, particularly in the aftermath of the controversial New Buildings Institute study that claimed LEED buildings performed, on average, 25 percent better than the CBECS database. Nevertheless, Navarro’s piece seems timed to coincide with USGBC’s press release of August 25 that announced a new Building Performance Initiative which will complement the LEED Version 3.0 Minimum Program Requirements’ ongoing performance data reporting obligations in order for projects to maintain their LEED rating and avoid the unsavory potential consequences of decertification. Any commentary on this press release – at least in the blogosphere – appears to have been lost in the August doldrums, but I think it is worthwhile to consider an effort which could ultimately have major repercussions for the underpinnings of the LEED system itself. However, many building scientists will tell you that simply collecting more data does not necessarily translate into improved performance. Consider (after the jump) the following letter that was submitted to the New York Times by ASHRAE Fellow and Distinguished Lecturer Larry Spielvogel, P.E., in response to the USGBC press release announcing the Building Performance Initiative, which Mr. Spielvogel was kind enough to allow us to reprint here at GRELJ.
