Northeastern eyes dorms

Driving by there I've often wondered what sort of security precautions have been taken for student foot traffic on ruggles street. I wouldn't want to be walking back from the library to my dorm room at 2 am...
 
^^ Students living at I.V. have:
- NUPD, on call 24 hours a day.
- Well lit streets along Columbus and Ruggles Streets in the late evening hours.
- The Blue light system of campus security phones all over campus (including at least two phones I've seen at International Village).
- Boston Police Dept. Headquarters right next store.
- NU Library is only a 5-minute walk away.

Furthermore, the school is spending money on improvements to the Ruggles "T" stop and the city will be leaving its doors open 24-hours a day. If I was told correctly, most of the changes will be to improved lighting and some (long overdue) aesthetic improvements.

Why wouldn't you feel safe walking back from the library at 2 am? Students living along Columbus Ave. in Davenport Commons, 780 Columbus, and Douglas Park have been doing the walk for years.
 
Why would walking down Ruggles Street be any different from walking down Hemenway or Forsyth or Huntington Ave?
 
When I was in school at NU, I never once had a problem on Ruggles st or in the station. Sure, we often saw shady characters and plenty of homeless, but once you get used to the fact that they exist, and treat them like any other human, its not so bad to co-habitat. Sure there have been incidents, but, I think it's mostly the kids from small towns, not used to seeing depravity and ethnic diversity that kind of freak out at the culture shock of living in the "big city," that give the area bad rap.
 
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I was waiting for that response...

I think it's naive to think that stretch of road isn't a potential trouble spot. There are no buildings between the new dorm and the complex on the other side of the tracks. As a result there isn't much pedestrian activity and lighting.
 
sidewalks said:
I was waiting for that response...

I think it's naive to think that stretch of road isn't a potential trouble spot. There are no buildings between the new dorm and the complex on the other side of the tracks. As a result there isn't much pedestrian activity and lighting.
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There isn't much pedestrian activity? What about all the people that will live there?

There isn't much lighting? What about all the lights that were just installed?

Huh?

Please go sit in the corner and put your head down for a while.
 
^ You're obnoxious...

It looks like lighting was installed on the southwest corridor park but not on Ruggles between the two dorm buildings. Either way, it's easy to smugly dismiss concerns about security along an undeveloped stretch of roadway between public housing projects as the unfounded fears of suburban whites...but there is a middle ground between encouraging irrational fear and instituting preventitive measures based on an honest assesment of the situation.
 
There is plenty of gang activity, rather open drug dealing, occasional shootings, and stabbings in that area. Ignoring crime and being unwilling to call a spade a spade is never going to make the issue go away. I still wouldn't call the area relatively bad in comparison to the real war zones in the city, but it carries a lower expectation of relative safety compared to Huntington Avenue or Columbus Avenue a block over.

Sidewalks is right, "it's easy to smugly dismiss concerns about security along an undeveloped stretch of roadway between public housing projects as the unfounded fears of suburban whites...but there is a middle ground between encouraging irrational fear and instituting preventitive measures based on an honest assesment of the situation."
 
sidewalks said:
it's easy to smugly dismiss concerns about security along an undeveloped stretch of roadway between public housing projects as the unfounded fears of suburban whites...
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1) The area is not undeveloped, it's underdeveloped. There's only one way to change that, by developing it.

2) You're race-baiting and call me obnoxious? Step off, would you please.

3) Have you actually ever visited that neighborhood at 2:00 in the morning? I'd walk this stretch alone before I'd walk St. Stephen's near Gainsborough alone.
 
i'd have to agree with sidewalks on this one, as i'm sure the police blotter would as well. granted not many students have been included in the incidents that have happened at/near ruggles station, but they do occur and contribute to the street/area's reputation. it is not just suburban white kid paranoia. And you'd rather walk down Ruggles at 2AM than St. Stephen's? Please...
 
Yep, it's fair to say that a black person, or any peroson, w/ street smarts knows that projects are never the safest place to be. These particular ones arn't too bad, and most people that live in the them are good people, but with that being said name one poor area that dosn't have some level of crime associated with it. It's just the way it is.
 
I guess it was more rhetorical. My point is that poverty and voilence tend to go hand and hand in this world. Poverty causes desperation, that if left unaddressed leads to voilence, I call it basic human behavoir being played out in society. Now what causes the haves and have nots is a very long discusion heavily involving old money's strangle-hold on the world's wealth (1% population own 90% wealth). Bottom line the projects accross from N.E. is not the safest place in the city to be, I'm sure a resident of these projects could vouch for the fact that some shady shit goes down in them.
 
If any of you forum-users are interested, there'll be a free lunch tomorrow from 11AM to 2PM in the International Village dining hall before it officially opens this weekend. I just ate dinner there, and the food is phenomenal. I just ate some Middle Eastern pork dish, a spicy bowtie pasta mix, ham and broccoli calzone, and fresh-outta-the-oven chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies.

Also, I've been living in the building now for about 12 days and have absolutely no complaints. I've spent hours just gazing out the window at how beautiful the skyline looks, watching planes take off, thunder showers rolling in--I can even see Deer Island from here. It's pretty great!

Here's a few photos I just snapped minutes ago from my phone, and one from yesterday of the storm rolling in:
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Nice! People pay many hundreds of thousands to a few million to live in a place with a view like that! Though, considering the cost of a college education...that view ain't coming cheap!! Good luck and have a great year at NEU!
 
By chance, I met one of the NU Facilities supervisors yesterday. We talked about things NU has done to be greener and about the new residence hall(s), and that her job is to make NU more sustainable.

Anyway, she shared some exciting news with me. Dockser Hall, one of the law school buildings here that was renovated and completed last summer, was touted for a long time as the first LEED-eligible building at NU for silver certification. LEED certification generally takes a year, and just last week the US Green Council announced Dockser's LEED status. Dockser Hall was not LEED-certified silver.








It was LEED-certified GOLD! This really came as a huge surprise to some members of the school community. It's even making me wonder--if the school is currently touting International Village as eligible for LEED-gold certification, could it actually end up with platinum certification?! What do you guys think?
 
You all know LEED doesn't really mean anything, right?

LEED Certified Buildings Not Always Saving Energy

Shocker! LEED certified buildings do not always save energy. They never said they would be! The New York Times gets wind of what has been known for a little while, that some LEED rated buildings, particularly the ones at the lowest end of the LEED scale, particularly the ones that got certified when the LEED rating was young, aren't saving energy. Read this 2008 article by Henry Gifford (warning: PDF) to get a LEED critic's view on the matter.

Things to know:
1. Chad Smith is a LEED Accredited Professional, as of earlier this year!
2. LEED was developed to make owners, developers, builders, and I guess architects and engineers all happy. Which means it is very popular yet is imperfect and has a few glaring loopholes, like this one: that LEED accreditation does not automatically mean the buildings will have lower energy consumption.
3. The whole LEED accreditation system is undergoing a revamp, to focus more on water use and energy consumption. Future buildings may be more energy efficient? LEED won't nail this down because there still isn't a systemic demand to monitor the building's performance after it is certified by LEED. But the two most pressing sustainability issues in buildings are water use and energy consumption, so they are on the right track.
4. One of the reasons LEED and green building is so hot right now is because LEED has been very popular. So like Wal-Mart bringing organic food to each of their stores everywhere, LEED has brought the idea of sustainability to the world of building in the United States. It's a huge success, but one that is not fully realized.
5. It is difficult to get a higher LEED rating without being somewhat more energy efficient. So a LEED Platinum building: probably saving energy. But no one actually knows!
6. The Times article implies that buildings can install a bunch of bamboo flooring and get a LEED rating. In fact, Renewable Materials is one of the hardest points to get in the LEED system. Basically it's bamboo anything, cork flooring, and like wool carpets...and that's it. As a percentage of construction, you'd need to cover every surface in bamboo to make it work. So no one is installing that much flooring in lieu of other sustainable strategies.
7. But yes you could get most of your points saving water and putting your building on a sustainable site, and still be running a barely-OK HVAC unit.
8. I said it in February 2009: in 5 years we are going to look at LEED Silver as a ridiculously low standard.
9. Some LEED buildings are undoubtedly kicking ass on the energy consumption measure. Let's hear about those too?
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Link

Some Buildings Not Living Up to Green Label
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: August 30, 2009

The Federal Building in downtown Youngstown, Ohio, features an extensive use of natural light to illuminate offices and a white roof to reflect heat.

It has LEED certification, the country?s most recognized seal of approval for green buildings.

But the building is hardly a model of energy efficiency. According to an environmental assessment last year, it did not score high enough to qualify for the Energy Star label granted by the Environmental Protection Agency, which ranks buildings after looking at a year?s worth of utility bills.

The building?s cooling system, a major gas guzzler, was one culprit. Another was its design: to get its LEED label, it racked up points for things like native landscaping rather than structural energy-saving features, according to a study by the General Services Administration, which owns the building.

Builders covet LEED certification ? it stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ? as a way to gain tax credits, attract tenants, charge premium rents and project an image of environmental responsibility. But the gap between design and construction, which LEED certifies, and how some buildings actually perform led the program last week to announce that it would begin collecting information about energy use from all the buildings it certifies.

Buildings would provide the information voluntarily, said officials with the United States Green Building Council, the nonprofit organization that administers the LEED program, and the data would be kept confidential. But starting this year, the program also is requiring all newly constructed buildings to provide energy and water bills for the first five years of operation as a condition for certification. The label could be rescinded if the data is not produced, the officials said.

The council?s own research suggests that a quarter of the new buildings that have been certified do not save as much energy as their designs predicted and that most do not track energy consumption once in use. And the program has been under attack from architects, engineers and energy experts who argue that because building performance is not tracked, the certification may be falling short in reducing emissions tied to global warming.

Some experts have contended that the seal should be withheld until a building proves itself energy efficient, which is the cornerstone of what makes a building green, and that energy-use data from every rated building should be made public.

?The plaque should be installed with removable screws,? said Henry Gifford, an energy consultant in New York City. ?Once the plaque is glued on, there?s no incentive to do better.?

Scot Horst, the council?s senior vice president for its certification program, said that any changes in the process would have to be made by consensus to ensure that the building industry would comply. Already, some construction lawyers have said that owners might face additional risk of lawsuits if buildings are found to underperform.

The council is planning several meetings with builders, owners, developers and others around the country in September and October to promote its building performance initiative, which could lead to further revisions in the rating program to ensure buildings reduce energy consumption as much as they can.

Mr. Horst called the issue of performance one of his ?absolute priorities.?

?If you?re not reducing carbon, you?re not doing your job,? he said.

The LEED label, developed by the council in 1998 to have a third-party verification of a building?s environmental soundness, certifies new homes, schools and other buildings, as well as existing ones. (The certification for existing buildings is the only one currently tied to energy performance.) Its oldest and largest program, in terms of square footage, is the certification of new commercial and institutional buildings, with 1,946 projects already certified and 15,000 more that have applied for certification. Many other buildings include environmentally friendly features and advertise themselves as ?green? but do not seek the LEED label.

The program uses a point system based on a broad checklist of features and buildings can be certified by accumulating points on not just efficient energy use but also water conservation, proximity to public transportation, indoor air quality and use of environment-friendly materials.

Council officials say that these other categories also help reduce energy use and emissions. And many architects and engineers praise the comprehensiveness of the label. But the wide scope of the program, many in the industry point out, also means that buildings have been able to get certified by accumulating most of their points through features like bamboo flooring, while paying little attention to optimizing energy use.

Another problem is that the certification relies on energy models to predict how much energy a planned building will use, but council officials and many experts agree that such models are inexact. Once a building opens, it may use more energy than was predicted by the design. And how a building is used ? how many occupants it has, for example ? affects its energy consumption.

?If the occupants don?t turn off the lights, the building doesn?t do as well as expected,? said Mark Frankel, technical director for the New Buildings Institute, which promotes improved energy performance in new commercial construction and conducted the research commissioned by the Green Building Council on LEED buildings.

?In the real world, the mechanical systems may have problems, so that increases energy use,? Mr. Frankel said, adding that keeping track of energy use is rarely a priority for owners.

LEED energy standards have grown more stringent over the years, and construction like the Youngstown federal building, built in 2002, would not be certified under the current version of the program, the G.S.A. study noted. The LEED standard goes through periodic revisions, and this year, the minimum energy requirements needed for the basic LEED certification for new buildings were raised.

But in its own study last year of 121 new buildings certified through 2006, the Green Building Council found that more than half ? 53 percent ? did not qualify for the Energy Star label and 15 percent scored below 30 in that program, meaning they used more energy per square foot than at least 70 percent of comparable buildings in the existing national stock.

Anecdotal information from follow-up research to that study indicated that the best-performing buildings had limited window areas and tended to be smaller.

Sometimes, a building?s inhabitants are the first to notice energy-wasting features.

At the Octagon, a LEED-certified residential rental building on Roosevelt Island in New York City, residents like Alan Siegal say that obvious energy savers, like motion sensors in the hallway, are hard to miss.

But Mr. Siegal, 59, a customs service broker, said his three-bedroom apartment has floor-to-ceiling glass windows that offer great views but also strong drafts.

?If there?s a lot of glass, is that going to be efficient?? he asked.

Bruce Becker, whose company Becker and Becker Associates developed and owns the Octagon, said that the windows offer day lighting but conceded that there were plenty of opportunities to become more energy efficient. He said the Octagon would soon switch to a fuel cell system for heat and electricity, partly to cut energy costs at a time of a depressed rental market.

Mr. Horst, the LEED executive, said that LEED may eventually move toward the E.P.A.?s Energy Star model, which attests to energy efficiency only for the year the label was given, similar to restaurant ratings.

?Ultimately, where we want to be is, once you?re performing at a certain level, you continue to be recertified,? Mr. Horst said.
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On the contrary Vanshnookenraggen, LEED does mean something. The two articles you posted both outline that LEED standards have improved tremendously since its inception, and that only the highest levels of certification reflect a green building that is conserving water and consuming less energy. The point I was trying to make about Dockser Hall & International Village at Northeastern is that these LEED gold-certified buildings (pending for IV) reflect NU's commitment to being a greener, more sustainable university.

I've studied in Dockser Hall and will be quick to tell you that the building is more than bamboo walls and natural light. The fabrics in the furniture, the compact-fluorescent light bulbs, the green toilet handles, the preserved building facade elements, the smart light sensors--the school has done a tremendous job creating a model academic building there. And don't even get me started on International Village. I've lived in I.V. for a week now and continue to be amazed by the details NU paid attention to designing this place: low-flow sinks, showers, and toilets; recycled carpeting; green roof to naturally cool the busiest part of the building (the dining hall); rain water collection from the garden that is heavily filtered and used to clean dishes in the dining hall; efficient light fixtures in the bedrooms; special elevators (something about its design consumes less electricity and reduces the friction experienced by most other elevators).

We may not see eye-to-eye on the significance of the LEED label, but I think we could both agree that programs like LEED and Energy Star highlight the difference between one tangible place's commitment to being greener and another one neglecting to do the same.
 
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