For many years folks in green building and sustainable development circles have questioned the logic of developing in coastal areas and flood plains.  As the New York City region now knows firsthand, coastal areas are susceptible to harm and when development is pursued a loss of habitat (like wetlands) inevitably follows, directly or indirectly.  LEED, for instance, provides credit to projects that avoid areas like wetlands, water bodies and habitat of endangered species.  Notably, this is not a prerequisite to achieve LEED, but a voluntary credit (though making this a pre-req has been proposed in LEED v4, slated for 2013 rollout.)

Typically this issue is raised only when new developments are under consideration.  Very few people in the mainstream conversation have advocated for retrenchment from established communities, no matter how vulnerable.  Exceptions that come to mind include regions like the Mississippi River flood plain, where recurring floods have required an almost annual outlay of significant funds to reconstruct devastated communities, and post Katrina New Orleans- when many questioned whether there should be a city in that location at all (though presumably those people have never been to Mardi Gras.)  After Katrina and the BP spill in the gulf there were spikes in conversation about the impacts of human development and how we had managed to remove 34 square miles of wetland habitat from Southern Louisiana EACH YEAR for five decades- habitat that might have softened the blow of Katrina and helped clean crude oil and other toxins out of the ecosystem.   A similar discussion point has been heard after Sandy, with people pointing out that wetlands and oyster habitat used to be extensive in New York Harbor (and around Staten Island and the Rockaways) with lots of speculation about how the presence of these ecosystems might have mitigated the impact of the storm.

Credit: ARO, dLand Studio

Among the most reproduced images post-Sandy was this rendering, by the design firms Architectural Research Office and dLand Studio, of New York Harbor redesigned to withstand dramatic sea level rise, for the Rising Currents exhibit at MoMA- a prescient examination of the impacts of sea level rise on the NYC waterfront in 2010.

But for the most part, no one questions the right of cities and towns to exist much as they are- mostly folks wonder what can be done to make our communities more resilient in the face of dramatic events, whether it be storm surges or heat waves.

But we may be witnessing a turn in this conversation.

Last week it was reported that City Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn asked Lightstone Development to withdraw their application to build a 700-unit housing complex alongside the Gowanus canal.  For those not familiar, the Gowanus canal penetrates almost two miles into Brooklyn from New York Harbor and it suffered severe flooding during Sandy.  Exacerbating the situation, the canal is a Superfund site–laden with myriad toxins and other nasties left over from its industrial past. The Gowanus is also an active outfall for our combined sewer system (in New York City, and most northeast cities of the same age, the sewer and stormwater systems are combined and when it rains the system can be quickly overwhelmed, resulting in raw sewage being diverted to surrounding waterways.)  All of which makes the Gowanus quite a noxious body of water (sarcastically nicknamed Lavender Lake by the locals) but, property values being what they are in New York, there is significant pressure to develop around it.  And Lightstone has responded that they intend to move forward with the project.

Credit: Lightstone

New York City is a place that revolves around, and is largely defined by, real estate. Property ownership is sacrosanct, in some circles probably considered more fundamental than access to oxygen.  The Lightstone proposal is essentially “as of right”- meaning they are not requesting any variances to zoning or codes like more bulk or more square footage than allowed by the baseline codes, and therefore will not have to go through extensive environmental reviews.  Whether you agree or disagree with a new housing complex being located alongside the Gowanus, it is a significant change in the conversation for a public figure to openly request that the developer withdraw their proposal.  Will Lander be suggesting a wholesale review of the zoning around the Gowanus?  Or will the city be reviewing proposals near water bodies with a renewed scrutiny?  The former seems complicated and the latter seems a little vague, and probably unfair.  That said, Lander raises good questions about the ability of the project to withstand storm events.  There are not easy answers to these questions, and I’m certainly not suggesting solutions here.  But the conversation has started.  We should all take note.

The following was blogged live from our Fall Conference on September 18, 2012 – “Cooling on Climate Change: Designing the Message.” Panelist Dan Probst, Chairman of Energy and Sustainability Services at Jones Lang LaSalle, discusses the role of the green building industry in addressing global climate change.

Any building in New York City should be allowed to generate solar energy on its rooftop. Buildings should be rewarded, not penalized, for adding insulation to reduce their energy use and carbon emissions. It’s a great addition to the urban landscape when green roofs and urban farms sprout on top of our buildings.

No-brainers, right? Well, until yesterday, New York City’s zoning inadvertently discouraged or prevented all these green building strategies. But now, our zoning has gone green.

At the Department of City Planning, we learned from building owners, developers, architects, and engineers that zoning regulations written in the mid-20^th century were preventing our buildings from joining us in the 21^st century. Buildings could add air conditioning equipment on their rooftops, but not photovoltaic panels to generate clean, renewable energy, or the planting bed for a green roof. An old-fashioned awning could be used to shade a window, but modern sun control devices couldn’t hang over a yard. Adding continuous external insulation to dramatically improve energy efficiency could push a building over limits on floor area.

So the Department, under the leadership of Commissioner Amanda Burden, embarked upon the most comprehensive effort in any U.S. city to sweep aside zoning impediments to green buildings. The product of this effort, the Zone Green text amendment, was approved yesterday by the City Council. Developers and building owners now have more choices for the investments they can make to save energy, save money and improve the quality of our environment.

Before Zone Green, developers were confronted with a tradeoff between thicker, energy-efficient walls and usable interior space, because floor area was always measured to the outer edge of the exterior wall. Now, new buildings that exceed the requirements of the New York City Energy Conservation Code can deduct a portion of the thickness of exterior walls from floor area, leveling the playing field for highly energy-efficient construction.

The zoning changes promote not only new green buildings, but also retrofits of existing buildings. Existing buildings can add up to eight inches of wall thickness for the purposes of external insulation, without violating limitations on floor area or requirements for yards or other open areas. Features like solar panels, recreational decks, and sun control devices can be added to new or existing buildings. Complete information about the zoning changes is available on DCP’s website.

Additional legislation at the City and State level will extend the reach and effectiveness of Zone Green. On Monday, the Council also approved legislation enabling sun control devices to project over streets and sidewalks to the same 2-foot-6-inch dimension permitted for these devices within the property line under the zoning. In addition, the State Senate has approved legislation that would modify the Multiple Dwelling Law to enable pre-1961 buildings to make use of the external insulation allowances of Zone Green, and a companion bill has been introduced in the Assembly.

Thanks are due to Urban Green Council and members of the Green Codes Task Force, whose expertise and support have been indispensable to the Zone Green project from its early development through public review. This collaborative effort will yield benefits for years to come, helping make New York a greener, healthier city.

For more details on Zone Green, hear Howard Slatkin speak on June 12th.

Yesterday the City Planning Commission unanimously approved Zone Green. The City Council now has 50 days to hold a hearing and vote on the resolution.

To remind readers, Zone Green removes a series of zoning barriers to renewable energy, increases allowances for solar shades, and will encourage better-insulated exterior walls – all in furtherance of recommendations from the Green Codes Task Force. City Planning Commission Director and Urban Green Board Member Amanda Burden recently summarized the Zone Green changes on our blog.

We eagerly await the passage of these changes, the most comprehensive effort by any city to update its zoning rules for today’s greener buildings.

You probably know the drill. Spend money on any number of energy efficiency upgrades and you’ll make it back through reduced operating costs for the life of the retrofit. That’s not to mention improved occupant comfort, an increase in jobs to do the retrofits, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and other benefits.

A no-brainer, right? Well, there’s been a long-standing excuse for not doing upgrades in a lot of commercial buildings, and admittedly it’s a good one. Under a commonly used modified gross lease, building owners pay the upfront costs of energy improvements on base building systems, while the tenants reap the cost savings from reduced energy consumption.  Because of this “misaligned incentive,” building owners resist investing in energy upgrades.

Mayor Bloomberg overseeing the signing agreement between Silverstein Properties and WilmerHale, the first lease to use the energy-aligned lease language

So the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability brought together a task force to develop new commercial lease language that allows tenants and owners to share in both the costs and benefits of energy efficiency improvements.  Part of the City’s broader sustainability program, PlaNYC, the language is called the PlaNYC Energy Aligned Clause, and it makes good sense.

Problem solved! Well, almost. Actually, not enough people in the commercial real estate industry know enough about it yet, but we’re not going to let that stop us.

At the request of the Mayor’s Office, Urban Green is working hard to get this information out to as many people as possible, with support from the City of New York, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council,  the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and the Real Estate Board of New York.

Going forward, I’ll personally execute the outreach program as Special Consultant with Urban Green. I’ll present the concept to targeted audiences and spearhead a handful of supporting objectives such as introducing the use of the Clause as a pilot credit for LEED certification.

The Energy Aligned Clause is a solid solution, and I’m only too happy to be talking it up. On Thursday March 15^th at Knoll, Urban Green Council kicked off the outreach with a Salon on green leasing. The take-away? Using this language makes good business sense.

Get involved. Reach out to me. And watch the uptake as the oft-used “misaligned incentive” excuse goes by the wayside!

I was recently part of a discussion about the pros and cons of legislating energy code changes versus incentivizing the market and was reminded of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Top Ten Reasons for Building Energy Codes. It’s a great quick list of the benefits of green codes and how they can encourage innovation while also bringing up the industry overall. With buildings consuming 39% of the country’s energy, code improvement is a cost-effective and extremely important step in moving towards energy independence and reducing our CO2 emissions.

10. PROVIDE a common foundation for evaluating, regulating, and incentivizing building design, construc­tion, technologies, and performance.
9. SUPPORT energy conservation and efficiency actions beyond minimum code levels.
8. HELP drive the development and deployment of new building technologies and design strategies.
7. PROVIDE a cost­effective step toward mitigating problems associated with growing demand for energy and power resources.
6. INCREASE the use of energy efficient technologies proven through incentive programs, freeing up resources to focus on new, more efficient additional technologies.
5. PROVIDE a common basis upon which to educate the building design and construction community in energy efficiency.
4. SAFEGUARD owners and tenants from long­ term financial burdens that can result from short­term design and construction decisions.
3. CONTINUE to progress in terms of stringency, scope, and enforcement emphasis—all of which provide new jobs or opportunities to enhance the skills of the current workforce.
2. HELP protect the natural environment from unnecessary emissions.
1. ENERGY CODES not only save money, but also help to reduce needless consumption of energy to heat, cool, light, ventilate and provide hot water for newly built residential and commercial buildings constructed without adequate energy efficiency features.

The 2010 Energy Conservation Construction Code of New York State (ECCCNYS-2010), became effective December 28, 2010, and promises to have a major impact on the state’s energy use. We think this is a significant improvement from the 2007 code; it’s rigorous but allows for innovative approaches and emerging technology. To help architects and engineers understand the code changes as well as the process for compliance, Urban Green Council and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIANY) have developed Cracking the Energy Code, funded by NYSERDA. Since its launch this past September, together we have trained over 500 professionals in New York City and have begun offering the course throughout the state.

To view or register for the courses in New York City and Upstate New York, visit Cracking the Energy Code.  There you’ll find a full course listing, resources on related laws, and our just-released sample of the course manual.

Photo Credit: US Army Corps of Engineers

A question for all you design professionals out there: When was the last time a project you designed was built exactly as shown on your drawings?

The answer, I imagine is “never.”

There’s a myth outside of the construction industry that the architectural team hands over a giant set of blueprints and specifications to the contractor and then a team of construction workers execute those plans with nary a glitch.  The misconception is that the construction team “just follows plans” when in fact there is a very entrenched but varying culture on construction sites that determines how workers behave and how projects gets built.

To improve the performance of our buildings, much higher levels of coordination is required between the construction, design and operations teams as well as among the trades working on the project.  To build green, it’s critical to get all of these individuals on the same page and change the culture of the job site to include sustainable work practices.

To help the construction industry teach the workforce about sustainability and green work practices, Urban Green Council developed GPRO, a national training program to teach the people who build, renovate and maintain buildings the principles of sustainability combined with trade-specific green construction knowledge.

We’d like to share an excerpt from Trades Going Green in  the January 2012 issue of GreenSource magazine. Bruce Buckley features GPRO prominently as he writes about the importance of training and collaboration when building sustainable buildings.

“Changing the culture is an important first step in training trade contractors to think green, says Steve Lehtonen, senior director of environmental education with the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials (IAPMO). “The most important thing to me is the psychology of what we’re doing,” says Lehtonen, who runs IAPMO’s Green Plumbers training program. “We want them to buy into green practices.”

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities (GRHC) launched its Green Roof Professional (GRP) designation program to improve the delivery of green roofs. Jordan Richie, manager of education and accreditation at GRHC, says the program sees a mix of designers and contractors in roofing and landscaping. “We want to stress a collaborative design and installation approach to any green roof,”

Knowledge of green systems and techniques should be a skill set that all contractors have, not one reserved for accredited professionals, says Mike Callanan, executive director of the National Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee (NJATC) of the National Electrical Contractors Association and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.“

The takeaway is that properly trained construction teams who understand green work practices and concepts will build better, higher-performing buildings.  As we bring GPRO nationwide, it is our goal to make all buildings be greener as workers become trained in green practices and behavioral norms change.

I was pretty impressed with the sustainable design elements in the recently unveiled plans for the new Cornell technology campus on Roosevelt Island. SOM has proposed systems like under-floor air distribution, radiant heating panels, operable windows and a roofscape of PV panels.  There are rainwater cisterns, a cogen plant and a geothermal system. Most striking, though, is the site planning of the structures- which are laid out almost entirely in relation to the sun. As such, the orientation and massing of many of the buildings naturally provide access to useful north light, easily deal with the high southern sun, and present limited exposure to the harsh, low angled rays of sunrise and sunset. Though wrapped in the cool glass of fashionable contemporary design, the SOM proposal is a model of solar architecture- minus earth berms and banana tree greenhouses.

Interestingly, there is a remarkably illuminating counter-example right across the water from the Cornell site–the United Nations building. The UN project is designed not to ignore the sun- but to boldly and aggressively court the most debilitating aspects of it. The UN building shows its massive glass façades to the east and west horizons, and a narrow, completely solid stone façade to the south and north. If rotated 90 degrees in plan and if some simple exterior shades and interior light shelves were provided the project would be a model of contextual sensitivity. Instead, it is a nightmare. Low-angled sun slams into the east façade in the morning and the west façade in the afternoon- requiring the deployment of interior blinds, blinds that are rarely raised when the sun isn’t present, effectively eliminating the one positive aspect of this design, the view. In addition to the glare problems, the morning and afternoon sun heats up the respective facades creating a situation where the building is cooling one side of the building while it heats the other, and then vice versa, throughout the entire day. It’s a grim situation that could easily have been avoided by rotating the plan 90 degrees.

So it’s inspiring to see SOM, the heirs to the high modernism practiced at the UN, proposing a design so sensitive to its site, a design that won’t be fighting against the sun but working with it, in perpetuity.

Ellen Honigstock, a member of the Urban Green Council Chapter Task Force for LEED Regionalization 2012, shares their initial findings on recommendations for LEED RPC 2012:

The USGBC recognizes the importance of projects that address region-specific environmental issues in their design; these Regional Priority credits were first introduced in the LEED 2009 rating systems.

Urban Green Council, along with all the other chapters of the USGBC, is currently evaluating which credits to prioritize in LEED 2012 for the five boroughs in New York City and Rockland and Westchester Counties.

Starting in late summer 2011, the Urban Green Council Chapter Task Force for LEED Regionalization 2012 began to meet monthly.  Shortly thereafter, the Chapter Task Force (CTF) identified five general categories of regional priority issues: Water, Air, Energy, Ground and Resources.

Focusing first on what the important issues should be rather than where they might occur, the CTF compiled a comprehensive list of 17 possible priority issues. These priorities were compared with the ones identified in LEED 2009 Regionalization in order to maintain as much continuity as possible.  The list was also compared with the recommendations in the Urban Green Council Green Codes Task Force Report to identify which environmental issues would benefit most from green incentives, rather than from proposed legislation.

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A little over 10 years ago, I began a four-year stint as a legislative attorney at the New York City Council. Back in those pre-PlaNYC and pre-Green Codes Task Force days, it was no easy feat to get the Mayor’s Office to concentrate on environmental legislation and we had a big one cooking at the City Council: Local Law 86, which required all city owned and funded construction over $2 million to be built to LEED Silver.

One of the people who would attend meetings at the Mayor’s Office on this legislation was an elegant, soft-spoken woman who seemed to know everything about the building code: Deborah Taylor. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she was one of the principal advocates for this green building legislation within city government. I later discovered she was probably the first person to propose that city agencies meet to develop a broad sustainability agenda – this became the “Mayor’s Task Force on Sustainability,” the precursor to PlaNYC. Without her,  PlaNYC may never have happened. Deborah also recognized that New York City would need to adopt its own version of the state energy code, both to close state loopholes and so the city could make its own amendments. This led to the city finally starting to enforce the energy code for the first time since it was adopted in the 1970s. Another Deborah special. And so on, again and again and again.

Long before Urban Green Council or the U.S. Green Building Council New York, before PlaNYC and the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, before the Office of Long-term Planning & Sustainability, before the Green Codes Task Force, and before Local Law 86 there was Deborah Taylor. Working behind the scenes and without public credit, she nurtured much of the green building revolution we’ve seen in city government and her imprint is on so many policy accomplishments in the last decade.

Last month, Deborah retired from city government after nine years at the Department of Buildings, and eight years at the School Construction Authority before that. A great public servant, she is one of New York City’s unsung green heroes. Let’s all celebrate her enormous achievements and hope that other champions within the Department of Buildings will continue in her footsteps.