"There Will Be No Alternative"
Boston?s new green zoning code makes big promises. Can it deliver?
* by Lissa Harris
* Issue 9.11
* Wed, March 14, 2007
The big, glossy report produced by Boston?s Green Building Task Force in 2004 champions public health, renewable energy, job creation, better watershed management, nicer workplaces and lower utility bills for all of Boston.
Barbra Batshalom, green building advocate and founder of the Boston-based nonprofit Green Roundtable, is annoyed with it.
?We wanted it to be sleek and sexy,? she gripes. ?We said, ?No green! No leaves!? Of course it?s green with a leaf.??
Green building suffers from a bit of an image problem. One of the biggest hurdles for it is that it?s called ?green building,? a rather lazy piece of shorthand. The phrase conjures up some ugly images: an underground dirt bunker containing a paranoid, squirrelly hippie; a luxury high-rise inhabited by self-righteous ultraconsumers who eat only organically farmed foie gras.
None of this has much to do with the reality of the situation: In a world in which energy is scarce and the public costs of waste are mounting, putting up drafty, poisonous buildings is stupid. It?s a piece of common sense that has started to catch on in Boston.
In 2005, the city began requiring all new city-owned buildings to meet standards developed by the US Green Building Council (USGBC) for green design and construction. And this January, Boston became the first major city in the US to impose rigorous green standards on private development as well as public: Under recent amendments to city zoning law, all projects over 50,000 square feet must now be certifiable under the USGBC?s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, the emerging national standard for green building. LEED presents builders with a checklist of 69 points, of which they must meet 26 for basic certifiability. (Locally, the city has added four more possible points; they address energy consumption, effects on groundwater, historical preservation and integration with public transportation.)
What the city hopes to accomplish, says Batshalom, is nothing less than an end to the era of ?dysfunctional design.? Typically, an architect will figure out a nice shape for a building, draw up the plans, then call in the engineers to figure out how to get the water, heat and electricity to work. That makes about as much sense as knitting a sweater first and then figuring out how much you need to weigh in order to fit into it.
To Batshalom, Boston?s new regulations are just part of a rapidly growing synergy in the green building field that includes government, private developers, homeowners and advocates like herself. ?If LEED is successful, it will become obsolete. It will become code. It will become practice. There will be no alternative to green,? she says.
A step that once seemed radical?forcing green building practices into the mainstream of design and construction?has now been adopted by one of the most hidebound cities in America. And in doing so, Boston is leapfrogging ahead of its municipal peers. Many cities have begun requiring publicly owned buildings to be green (New York did that in 2005). Others are taking incremental steps toward regulation (Washington, DC will require all large construction to green up by 2012) or putting timid incentives in place (Los Angeles has begun offering grants and expedited utility connections to green builders).
But Boston?s move to regulate private development is unprecedented for a city of its size.
Few entities stands to gain more from a total overhaul of development priorities than the city, which ends up paying many of the hidden costs of bad design, says John Dalzell, senior architect at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. ?Business as usual passes on a lot of inherent burdens in environmental impact and community impact,? he says.
The costs of traditional design show up in a lot of places. Poor indoor air quality? Rising rates of asthma in children and more expensive medical care for the uninsured. Roofs that shed water instead of capturing it? Millions of gallons a day pumping through the sewage treatment plant on Deer Island. Carbon emissions caused by excessive energy wastage? Boston?s on the waterfront; ask a local flood insurance company whether they?re worried.
Environmental advocates like Batshalom have been preaching the gospel of building green for years. But what?s really surprising about Boston?s new mandate is that the law was practically written by developers themselves.
?We did not pull together green building advocates. We pulled together industry leaders,? says Dalzell. ?If you look at the members of the Green Building Task Force, they?re architects and developers and financiers. We?re not dealing with tree-hugging Birkenstock wearers. We had a peer advisory group who were very smart green building advocates, but the task force itself was stakeholders.?
image?The ordinance is a good thing. It codified what was a general direction,? says Peter Nichols, a senior vice president with the Boston-based real estate firm The Beal Companies, who was not involved in the task force. ?My belief is that this is a standard that will spread pretty rapidly.?
Even in areas like affordable housing, where budgets are balanced on a razor?s edge, green building has enthusiastic proponents?like Noah Maslan, director of real estate at Urban Edge in Roxbury, which started greening their housing projects several years before the city began requiring it.
?I think that doing certain green elements does impose additional costs. But it depends on what they are. You can do a green building that doesn?t have any high-tech stuff, and not spend any more money. You spend it intelligently in the walls and the design of your HVAC system,? Maslan says.
Not surprisingly, the economics of energy efficiency don?t always work in favor of green design. A recent, widely run story from the Associated Press reports that residential development is lagging behind other kinds of construction in adopting green building practices ? which is no surprise. Much of the extra costs of green building?which can range from huge markups all the way down to actual savings, depending on the scale of a project?s green ambitions and the intelligence with which the building is designed?are made up for in maintenance and utility savings, which are more important to a developer with a long-term vested interest in a building than one who is going to pass those costs on to homebuyers.
?From a strictly selfish perspective, if a building owner is asked to invest capital to save energy costs for somebody else, the building owner is going to say, ?I?ve got to look at my dollar as well,?? says Nichols.
Depending on how developers choose to interpret it, the new zoning law won?t necessarily bring about vast improvements in energy efficiency. A building design can meet basic LEED certification standards without addressing energy use at all, since all points on LEED?s 69-item menu are weighed equally: A bike rack counts the same as a new state-of-the-art HVAC system, for example. Since Boston?s zoning code is tied to LEED, it?s susceptible to the same loopholes.
Dalzell says that big Boston buildings typically meet about 19 of the required 26 LEED certification points without even trying?which means that getting another seven points probably won?t be too painful, but could also mean that builders won?t have to engage in much real design reform merely to comply with code.
Auden Schendler, executive director for community and environmental responsibility at Aspen Ski Company (a business that stands to lose big-time from global warming), wrote an exhaustively researched indictment of LEED in 2005 for the environmentalist magazine Grist, called ?LEED Is Broken: Let?s Fix It.? Front and center in the critique was the issue of LEED?s environmental priorities.
?In this day and age, in 2007, these words, ?environmentalism,? ?green,? ?sustainability? ? they all mean one thing, and that?s addressing climate change,? he says.
Schendler is not the type of environmentalist who gets excited about minutiae like bamboo floors and nontoxic paint. In his opinion, the many other goals that LEED values more or less equally?indoor air quality, watershed impacts, human health?are all pretty minuscule compared to the carbon-emissions elephant in the room.
?We don?t have time to fuck around,? he says. ?I?m the Doctor Strangelove of energy. This is the issue. There?s no other issue.?
It?s a valid point, and one that hints at another of LEED?s shortcomings: It only applies to single buildings. While making sure that buildings are efficient is important, much of the environmental impacts of development stem from broader, neighborhood-level planning: where buildings are sited, how accessible they are to public transportation, how dense development is, whether neighborhoods are planned so that people can get around by walking or biking or using public transportation.
While it?s not perfect, LEED remains a work in progress; the USGBC is currently looking at ways to develop standards for neighborhood planning as well as single buildings. And as the prevailing green standard evolves, so will Boston?s building code. But LEED alone won?t bring about an end to wasteful building practices: A good deal of the responsibility for ensuring that developers follow the spirit of the law, and not just the letter, will fall to city planners.
In weighing the new code?s effects on city development, perhaps the most troubling question of all is the eternal dilemma of regulation, the bugaboo of big-government-fearers everywhere: Do strict municipal regulations discourage business, or do they help the local economy by preserving an environment that people want to live in? If forcing a green mandate down developers? throats ends up squeezing big development into the suburbs, everyone loses: the city, developers, taxpayers and especially the environment.
Dalzell understands the worry, but he thinks that the increasingly critical eye that Boston is casting on building design will help more than it will harm.
?You go to other places where anything goes, and you do see building there, but?and this is my own cultural perspective?you see incredible sprawl, massive waste and kind of a placeless character of things. At times it feels like we are competing with North Carolina for biotech and stuff. But you know what?they can tear down a forest and throw up some factory, but people don?t want to be there,? he says. ?The challenge for Boston is that the quality of the urban environment is very important.?
City policy advisor Sarah Zaphiris puts it simply: This is where all cities are headed, not just Boston.
?We don?t view it as an experiment,? she says. ?We view this as the way buildings are going to be built in the future, and we don?t see the sense in sitting around waiting.?
