In the 19th century, America had a railroad boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many lost money. But even when that bubble burst, it left America with an infrastructure of railroads that made transcontinental travel and shipping dramatically easier and cheaper.

Followed by this:

The late 20th century saw an Internet boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many people lost money, but that dot-com bubble left us with an Internet highway system that helped Microsoft, I.B.M. and Google to spearhead the I.T. revolution.

And finally this:

The early 21st century saw a boom, bubble and now a bust around financial services. But I fear all it will leave behind are a bunch of empty Florida condos that never should have been built, used private jets that the wealthy can no longer afford and dead derivative contracts that no one can understand.

Worse, we borrowed the money for this bubble from China, and now we have to pay it back — with interest and without any lasting benefit.

For the complete piece jump here Op-Ed Columnist - Green the Bailout - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

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“At this point it is my experience green buildings are receiving the same financing they would get for any high quality building with a good tenant,” Jim Amorin, president-elect of the Appraisal Institute, an association headquartered in Washington, DC and Chicago, tells GlobeSt.com. “What I think will change is that lenders will start assessing a premium on financing for any building that is not designed to green standards.”

He likened it to when air conditioning was first introduced. “At first buildings that came equipped with air conditioning were seen as luxury developments. But within a short period of time any building that didn’t have it was considered functionally obsolete.”

The full article can be found here

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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KnowledgePlex: Expert Chats

Green buildings are often thought of as luxuries for those who can afford to pay for the bells and whistles that save energy and protect the environment. But the green revolution is reaching affordable and workforce housing, where energy and transportation savings can equal a decrease in the costs of ownership for homeowners and housing authorities. Learn from experts in the field who have made affordable and work housing energy efficient. What strategies and tools can CDCs and affordable housing organizations use to make their buildings more sustainable? How does the development process change when a housing authority decides to go green? 

Panelists

компютри втора употребаTrisha Miller, Deputy Director, Green Communities, Enterprise Community Partners
Tracy Kaufman, Director, the National Housing Trust’s National Preservation Initiative
Tom Phillips, Senior Development Manager of the Seattle Housing Authority, and Redevelopment Director, SHA’s High Point project.
Elizabeth Schilling, USGBC’s LEED-ND core committee member (Moderator)

KnowledgePlex Expert Chats are free to attend and use Microsoft’s Live Meeting Software, a small and free program you must install beforehand. Simply click on the Attendee URL (below) and follow the prompts to install Live Meeting. (For more instructions on the installation, click here). While you can install Live Meeting at any time, we recommend you do so at least 30 minutes prior to the start of the chat. 

Please note – you will not be able to enter the meeting room until 30 minutes before the chat time.   While we recommend you install Live Meeting well ahead of the chat, when you download the software before this 30-minute window, you will see a message saying your meeting has not yet begun.  This is not an error message — this means you have successfully installed Live Meeting. Simply wait until 30 minutes prior to the chat’s start time, and log into the meeting

You may listen to the chat through your computer or by dialing into a conference call.

To join the chat, click here

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Ed Potter, director of global workplace rights at Coca-Cola, a global leader in the beverage industry, notes that demonstrating the link for an entire company would involve important measurement issues. “I don’t think that anyone has established the connection in accounting terms,” he says. “Much of this is based on faith and a belief that there is a clear connection.”

Michael Prideaux, director for corporate and regulatory affairs at British American Tobacco (BAT), the world’s second-largest tobacco company, agrees that the link is difficult to demonstrate mathematically. “It is an implicit one: If a business is not seen to be sustainable, it is unlikely to be highly valued. I’m absolutely convinced that it is there, but can’t prove it. As far as costs are concerned, good behavior doesn’t cost much, and, on the environmental side, if you use less raw material, you can save money.”

One striking finding of the Economist Intelligence Unit survey is the connection between corporate sustainability and strong share price performance. Companies with the highest share-price growth over the previous three years paid more attention to sustainability issues, whereas those with the worst performance tended to devote less time to those issues. The link appears clear: The companies that rated their efforts most highly over the three-year period saw annual profit increases of 16 percent and share-price growth of 45 percent, whereas those that ranked themselves worst reported growth of 7 percent and 12 percent, respectively. In general, the high-performing companies put a much greater emphasis on social and environmental considerations at the board level, whereas the poorly performing firms were far more likely to have nobody in charge of sustainability issues.

For the full article, follow this link

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Gerding Edlen’s Pearl District project, The Casey, claims spot as first LEED platinum condo tower in the country. 

There are dozens of platinum-certified Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design buildings in the United States. But only one of those buildings is a condominium tower, and it’s located in Portland.

Gerding Edlen Development is banking on the newly awarded LEED platinum rating for The Casey, at Northwest 12th Avenue and Everett Street, as a sustainable status symbol that will help sell condominiums in a cooling market.

“At the end of the day you have to be able to sell these units,” Kelly Saito, Gerding Edlen’s principal of development for The Casey, said. “You’re bound by some economic equation.”
While it’s easier to achieve LEED platinum status with an institutional building such as a hospital or university, Saito said about 75 percent of the Casey’s units have already sold.

Follow this link for the full article

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On April 9th, the Dallas City Council unanimously adopted a green construction ordinance aimed at reducing energy and water consumption in all new houses and commercial buildings. This step adds to the City’s record of being an environmental leader.

“We’re at the lead of the major cities in this country. We had industry come in and really embrace it. We crafted it to make sense for everybody,” said Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert.

While a Green Building standard for city-owned buildings exists, requiring those over 10,000 square feet be built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver standards, a standard did not exist for private development. A Green Building Task Force, comprised of members of the development sector, was created to develop recommendations for all new private development in Dallas.

For More Please go to www.greendallas.net 

Tags: green+buildings, sustainability

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Los Angeles and Dallas, the nations second and eighth largest cities by population, became the latest in a string of big urban areas to pass private sector green building laws last month. Follow this link for the full story.

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Last weekend, the first nine of the new homes at Orchard Heights (3,600-square-foot or larger homes starting at around $1 million) went on sale, and seven were sold. And this in a fragile housing market where sales of new homes fell to a 13-year low nationwide in January and sales in Santa Clara and San Benito counties dropped 45 percent last year.

For the complete story follow this link. Green homes in San Jose sell fast

Tags: green+building, sustainability

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For the full Q & A follow this link.

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Larry Laque, an executive with Silver Spring-based Discovery Communications, felt something amiss last year as his company began gearing up to announce a 24-hour television channel devoted to an all-green lifestyle. Discovery would be preaching environmental awareness around the clock on its Planet Green network, but Laque thought the company was not doing all it could do to recycle, conserve energy and pollute less.

Follow this link for the full article on how they made the transformation.

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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Follow the link above to a full size image of this graphic. It shows various components of a building that have a green flavor. 

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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You need not go to the Middle East, North Africa or Southeast Asia, where there are already reported water shortages, to understand the value and scarcity of the life-giving liquid. Just look in America’s own back yard. The American Southwest has been in a protracted drought for nearly a decade, with sinking water levels in lakes and rivers and decreasing snowpack in the mountains. And now a prominent scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, says that Lake Mead, which supplies water to 22 million people throughout the region, could be bone dry in just 13 years.

For the complete story, follow this link.

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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Parasailing may no longer be just for your Caribbean vacation. This month, a commercial cargo ship will become the first to go into service employing a large parafoil lashed to its bow to provide a cheaper—and cleaner—way across the waves.

If the 459-ft. vessel, built and operated by the Bremen-based Beluga Group, demonstrates the practicality of its SkySails system, the global shipping industry might have a new way to mitigate its environmental impact—for every single vessel—as the world’s biggest contributor to greenhouse gases.

For the complete article jump to this link 

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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Finding energy efficient schools, supermarkets, offices, and other facilities throughout the country has become even easier for Americans interested in being green. Now they can find the Energy Star not only where they live but where they work, shop, play and learn. The number of commercial buildings and manufacturing plants to earn the Energy Star for superior energy efficiency is up by more than 25 percent in the past year, and the amount of carbon dioxide emissions reduced has reached an all-time high of more than 25 billion pounds.

For the full story follow this link.

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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To review a the latest happenings in green building (as observed at the International Builder’s Show in Orlando, Fla.), follow this link.

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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Want to see a model for successful and rapid environmental action? Don’t look to the federal government—check out your own town. Here is a list of the 50 communities that are leading the way. Does yours make the cut?

The top 5 include:

1. Portland
2. San Francisco
3. Boston
4. Oakland
5. Eugene

The complete list can be found here.

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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While predatory lending practices in the mortgage industry have been getting a lot of press lately, there’s a far more positive trend within the same industry: green mortgages.

Jon Lebkowsky blogs:

“What do I know about finance? Though in these columns I focus on social media, I’m often in discussions about sustainability, and many of those focus on the built environment. I’m aware that big developers like Stratus here in Austin are completely serious about green buidling, and there are more and more LEED-certified construction projects in development, and various green building experts looking beyond LEED for better ways to ensure sustainable design and building.

Large construction projects are incentivized by the energy-efficiency ROI realized through green building practices, but how about smaller residential builders and buyers? Are there sufficient and completely clear bottom-line incentives for sustainable residential building and retrofitting? How is sustainable defined at that level?”

For a complete review of the article, jump here. 

Tags: green, sustainablility, green+building

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