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.

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.

Change is a funny thing. Often when I discuss subjects like urban agriculture someone will scoff and say, “You can’t feed everyone through urban farming.”  But the hope is to reduce our dependance on, not eliminate, industrial agriculture.  (And is it churlish to point out that our current agricultural system also doesn’t feed everyone?)  When I raise the prospect of renewable energy I can expect a similar response- and have a similar answer at the ready.  The same goes for biking.  When I argue for continuing the expansion of bike lanes in NYC I am rebuffed with a lot of high dudgeon about how biking isn’t for everyone, that sometimes you need to transport kids or groceries, etc. etc.  But no one is calling for the impound of all combustion powered vehicles.  We are simply hoping to make the city a more hospitable place for cyclists and pedestrians.  I have found that the arguments that are most persuasive in this regard are the ones that explain the multiple positive impacts of these new systems.  Not just from one perspective but from many.  The folks at an organization called Healthcare Management Degree have developed a series of infographics on biking and health that are brilliant example of this.  Their graphics link the impact of driving on public health, the positive impacts of biking on individual health (average weight loss in ONE YEAR = 13 lbs.!) and, perhaps the most compelling argument in this era of tight budgets, the considerable reduction in health care costs. They might have expanded these issues to include positive community impacts like the retention of local dollars, but they are a health care company so we’ll let that slide.

Santa- all I want for Christmas is for someone to develop a similar set of graphics for my other pet causes: retrofitting existing buildings, smart growth planning, and coffee.

The zoning drawn up in 1961 did not envision a city of new green buildings, nor did it foresee the retrofitting of older buildings. Today, we are at a crossroads with respect to the performance of our buildings. We know that they must accomplish much more than they were once designed to do – they can save energy and generate clean, renewable power; reduce the burdens they place on city infrastructure; support our ecology; and provide a healthier environment for New Yorkers. We also know that we cannot accomplish this only with new, high-performing green buildings. We must also improve the performance of our existing buildings, which represent 85 percent of the buildings we will have in 2030.

However, as highlighted by the Green Codes Task Force – convened by the Urban Green Council at the request of the Mayor and the Speaker of the City Council – zoning sometimes discourages or outright prohibits green building features.

So we need to continue a retrofit of our Zoning Resolution.

In the last ten years, the Department of City Planning has completed over 100 neighborhood rezonings and numerous amendments to the text of the Zoning Resolution, to promote transit-oriented development and sustainable growth in New York City. Through a series of green initiatives, we have improved the green infrastructure of our neighborhoods with street trees, front yard planting, and stormwater management for parking lots; enhanced alternatives to private automobile ownership and use with bicycle parking requirements and car sharing; and promoted the availability of healthy, fresh foods with our FRESH program.

Today, we are proud to unveil our latest initiative, Zone Green – the most comprehensive effort of any U.S. city to sweep aside zoning obstacles to the construction and retrofitting of green buildings. City Planning is proposing amendments to promote energy-efficient and green design. Zone Green would:

• Exempt external insulation from floor area and yard requirements, to enable existing buildings to add external insulation within their property line;
• Eliminate penalties for high-performance envelopes in the way floor area is measured, by exempting a portion of thicker, better insulated walls from floor area calculations when buildings substantially exceed energy code standards;
• Enable solar panels to be added on top of any building roof, by allowing them as a “permitted obstruction” above a height limit;
• Allow sun control devices such as vertical or horizontal shades or screens to project from building facades over required open areas;
• Allow more flexibility to accommodate a wide range of rooftop features, including green roofs and stormwater management equipment, boilers or cogeneration facilities, recreational decks, and stair and elevator bulkheads that provide rooftop access;
• Foster local food production by encouraging rooftop greenhouses, by allowing waiver of floor area and height limits for greenhouses on top of buildings without residences or sleeping accommodations; and
• Allow wind turbines to exceed a height limit on taller buildings and in locations near the waterfront, where winds are most conducive to power generation.

Zone Green will also include other legislation to improve building performance.  City legislation would tighten the energy performance standards for the building envelope, ensuring long-term energy efficiency by addressing the longest-lasting elements of the building. In addition, many buildings built before 1961 are subject to the New York State Multiple Dwelling Law (MDL), and would not be able to take advantage of the proposed provisions for external insulation. So the Department is preparing draft legislation for targeted amendments to the MDL to make possible the external insulation of these buildings.

This proposal builds upon other efforts under PlaNYC, including the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, by using zoning to encourage buildings to outperform the New York City Energy Conservation Code. Removing zoning impediments to green buildings will give building owners more choices to make investments that save money, save energy, and improve the quality of our environment. By making these improvements possible, Zone Green can unlock the potential for as much as $800 million per year in energy savings.

Today the Zone Green text amendment begins the public review process, which includes referral to all 59 Community Boards, five Borough Presidents and Borough Boards, and review by the City Planning Commission and City Council, and is expected to take roughly six months. We have complete information about the proposal and public review available on DCP’s website, at nyc.gov/planning/greenbuildings.

This proposal would not be possible without the contributions of the Green Codes Task Force, whose recommendations helped spark the Zone Green effort. The continuing engagement of task force members has also been critical in shaping this proposal. We would like to thank Urban Green Council and the Green Codes Task Force for their continuing guidance and support as we take this critical step to bring our buildings into the 21^st century.

You can read the zoning text Amanda refers to here. Full disclosure: It is a little abstract and dry, but that’s just the way laws must be written.  It’s worth plowing through it if you would like to be involved in the process, since there will be public hearings and the opportunity to comment between now and February 12th, 2012.

Find out more on January 11th from the architect of Zone Green, Howard Slatkin, City Planning’s Director of Sustainability. After Howard’s presentation, a panel of industry representatives and Green Codes Task Force members will discuss the implications of the new zoning proposals. Details are here.

Quite a few people have commented on the recent proposal by Apple to build a kind of suburban spaceship headquarters (pictured above) in Cupertino, CA.  Alexandra Lange at Design Observer has noted that suburban HQ’s are decidedly retro, and Lloyd Alter at Treehugger is reminded of the passage from Lord of the Rings, “One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them” and predicts the end of the creative giant (Apple, not Sauron.)

There is something kind of creepy about the uber-slick aesthetic Apple has successfully applied to their gadgets and retail stores being applied to such a massive structure. With a diameter similar to the Pentagon, the pop cultural reference it brought to mind for me was Revenge of the Sith. But that’s all totally subjective. What struck me most forcefully was the difference between this particular design solution and the solution proposed by another global tech company trying to house a rapidly growing workforce: Google.

First, let’s review the Apple proposal. The building, though only 4 stories in height is massive and is designed to provide space for 12,000 employees. Presenting the project to Cupertino City Council (see the video here),  Steve Jobs points out that the current site is only 20% green space and that their proposal will increase this to 80% landscape, achieved by placing “most” of the parking underground. I put “most” in quotes because in addition to underground parking below the main building there is a huge above-ground parking structure proposed alongside I-280. Jobs says this parking structure is 4 stories because they want everything on the site to be “human scaled,” but one wonders how a parking structure that appears to be 2,000 feet long can be considered in any way approachable. To give you a sense of the scale of parking required in places like Cupertino (where everyone drives everywhere, for everything)- Apple will reduce the surface parking by 90%. It’s a laudable achievement, but still leaves 1,200 surface parking spaces on the site. Another scale adjustment for you, the “café” in the new building serves 3,000 people at a sitting.

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Just in time for our upcoming workshop on the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard, NRDC has published a Citizen’s Guide to LEED ND.  Billed as a “user-friendly and accessible” document, the Guide has been developed to provide residents, policy makers and others the tools to assess the sustainability of development proposals- using the technical framework of the LEED-ND rating standard.  You can download and gather more information (include a sweet little smart growth slideshow) about the guide, here.  And Kaid Benfield of NRDC blogs about the new document, here.

Dockside Green, Vancouver, Canada. Photo Credit: Lawrence Wong

On June 17^th we are holding our first full-day workshop on the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard.

Although our organization largely focuses on buildings, we’ve mentioned many times the great importance we feel should be placed on community planning. Where your building is located, and the contextual fabric of that location, is often more important than the design of the building itself.  It has always been clear that choosing a greenfield site over an already urbanized location has major environmental repercussions: from simple disruption of ecology to less efficient utility distribution.  Since climate change has become the most pressing issue of our time, we have come to understand that even just within the limited focus of energy-use there is a clear imperative to curtail sprawl.  The transportation and energy impacts of a building’s location were codified into the metric of “Transportation Intensity” by Alex Wilson in a quietly transformative article at BuildingGreen.com in September of 2007.  Here were the statistics that backed up many of our suspicions that, say, replacing a poorly performing inner-city high-school building with a LEED platinum school 20 miles outside the town was not an unequivocally good thing.

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Kaid Benfield is in high dudgeon over at the NRDC Switchboard blog, and no wonder: the EPA (you know, the agency responsible for protecting our environment, the agency promoting the federal Partnership for Sustainable Communities) is moving its Region 7 headquarters from downtown Kansas City to an appallingly suburban location- 20 miles outside town- to a building that formerly housed Applebees’ corporate offices.  Will we never learn?

Photo credit: Adam Sparks

New York City has received the US EPA 2010 National Award for Smart Growth Achievement in the category of “Overall Excellence”.

The EPA cited:

* PlaNYC, which targets a reduction in city carbon emissions of 30% by 2030 (against a 2oo5 baseline), improving the City’s infrastructure, creating more open space, and improving our air and water quality.

* The Streets Design Manual, a guide to creating a walkable streetscape.

* The Zoning for Bike Parking program, which requires new developments to provide secure indoor bike parking.

* The Active Design Guidelines, which promotes “active” transportation like stairs.

* The Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, which incentivizes grocery stores in neighborhoods in need of more healthy food stores.

There’s a short piece on NYC and the other cities recognized over at Grist.  And it bears mentioning that, while we have played a proud role in those PlaNYC initiatives that encourage greener buildings, Transportation Alternatives have been ALL OVER the street design stuff recognized by the EPA.

From Kaid Benfield at NRDC we learn that HUD will now use the LEED for Neighborhood Development location efficiency metrics to score their grant competition applications.  I’ll be interested to see the fine print on this but this is in keeping with the major moves towards support of smart growth policies at the Federal level.  More than $3B (yes, billion with a ‘b’) in competitive HUD grants will now be selected with location efficiency as part of the metrics.  It’s big news.  Also noted by the folks at Fast Company.