Green building is all the buzz in the real estate community right now. However, the real estate community’s vision of sustainability is so entrenched in simply maximizing energy efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint of new buildings that it may not be truly sustainable. In a recent CNN article, acclaimed architects Randolph Croxton, Joshua Prince-Ramus and Tuomas Toivonen believe that green buildings alone are not sustainable, it takes a change in lifestyle.
First off, they believe green buildings are not sustainable if:
- Their occupants drive long distances every day
- The energy they consume is carbon-intensive
- Their technology is too complicated to use or too difficult to maintain
- Their impact stops at the property line
- They deny the use of pre-existing infrastructure or building fabric
- They are conceived in isolation from larger, systemic environmental change
You should check it out yourself, but here are what I believe are the most important parts of the article.
We must decide if we are willing to change our behavior: to migrate toward more populated, more diverse, more sustainable cities. Only by changing behavior — particularly suburban sprawl and its accompanying carbon intensive lifestyle — can the United States reach ecological balance.
While all new buildings must be designed to meet the highest environmental standards, updating and/or adaptively reusing existing buildings close to the infrastructure our nation has built over the last 100 years is often far more sustainable than constructing new “green” buildings in the suburbs (or even downtown).
A sustainable future therefore demands that population be funneled back into America’s urban cores, within easy reach of existing infrastructure and amenities such as schools, libraries, recreation facilities, theaters, restaurants and retail, whose carbon debt has already been paid off. Ultimately, urban living itself is the embodiment of sustainability.
The architects believe the following strategies can effectively incentivize U.S. growth and migration to move toward more dense and diverse cities, while simultaneously enriching natural resources:
- Establish growth boundaries between city and nature that allow both to reach their full potential. Cities become more dense, diverse and efficient, while nature and farmland are protected against sprawl. Seemingly radical, growth boundaries are not a new idea in the United States. For example, the Urban Growth Boundaries established by the State of Oregon in 1973 have yielded more than 30 years of smart, sustainable development in cities such as Portland.
- Create regional and nationwide marketplaces that allow rural and suburban landowners outside growth boundaries to transfer their development rights to areas where urban growth is desirable. Again, while seemingly radical, this strategy has already been implemented since the 1980s in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to stem the destruction of Amish farmland and heritage.
- Develop a national ecological balance plan that steers development at the scale of buildings, infrastructure and ecosystem services through a comprehensive framework of guidelines and indicators.
- Devise a quantitative indicator that analyzes and coordinates population density, programmatic diversity and low-carbon travel. This metric would provide policy makers, planners, developers and citizens with a common understanding of the underlying patterns that shape their community’s carbon footprint, and inform consensus-driven systemic action, such as the drawing of growth boundaries.
- Develop new types of urban structures that, by design, can adapt to a rich variety of unanticipated uses and accommodate new construction technologies as they evolve. This new class of structures would engender buy prescription drugs online the organic, heterogeneous evolution that originally shaped America’s cities.
While most of these strategies fall outside the conventional scope of the building-design community, perhaps a broader vision of design is equally imperative, where architects and engineers claim their role in positively changing human behavior, not just advancing building technology.
From the perspective of a real estate developer, there is great opportunity in infill development, brownfield development and completing green retrofits on older buildings in dense location.
When we talk about sustainability we can’t just talk about shiny new LEED buildings, but we must take a broader view and think about who will be using that building and how they’ll be using it.
Do you think that developers build green to meet market demand or because they truly care about the impact their buildings have on the environment?
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