Green design has become more popular in recent years in large multifamily and commercial building planning.

Take, for example, the Conference Center at the newly re-opened TreePeople Center for Community Forestry in Los Angeles, which recently was awarded LEED Platinum certification.

TreePeople is an environmental non-profit. Its Conference Center provides a gathering place for local, national and international leaders to meet and create plans for sustainable cities.

Which brings us to another growing green practice: Building sustainable communities.

Using green design when planning new multifamily buildings can help maximize energy efficiency and decrease any negative impact a single high-rise structure may have on the environment.

But use green design to construct entire new communities, and you can have an even greater impact. It’s big-picture thinking–that can offer big results.

New Neighborhood Focus

This week, multi-housingnews.com covered South Bronx-based Melrose Commons’ efforts to redevelop itself into a green haven.

Because of its sustainable design and urban neighborhood development work, the project was selected to be a member of the Focus Group for the new LEED for Neighborhood Development pilot program.

Melrose Commons’ renovations have been designed to create healthy indoor and outdoor spaces—no small feat in an urban area struggling with pollution.

When the community is complete, its green design features will affect an impressive amount of people: With 1,379 units, planners forecast 4,000 to 6,000 residents will live in Melrose Commons.
Green Design Tricks

When building on a larger scale–such as a community redesign–developers can include design elements to encourage community residents to live a greener lifestyle, such as:

•    Reducing the need for cars by building walking and biking paths. Promoting walking and biking can help reduce air pollution. And, because it provides daily exercise, residents get a bonus health effect.

•    Encouraging use of public transportation by building developments close to trains and buses. According to the Chicago Tribune, several of the multifamily developments in the Chicago suburb of Palatine, Ill., revitalized a fairly vacant downtown area into a web of condo complexes and walkable entertainment options near the train station.

Residents can simply hop on the Metra and commute to work downtown in less than an hour.
•    Adopting use of recycled and sustainable materials on a greater scale. The company preparing to build the first multifamily, modular housing developments in Portland has proposed doing just that.
The homes’ decks will be made from recycled plastic and cellulose, according to Portland’s Daily Journal of Commerce.

•    And reducing a project’s overall carbon footprint and utility use. The under-construction Gatsby Hollywood single-family home complex in Los Angeles hopes become Los Angeles’ first completely solar-powered urban community. Gatsby’s developers say that solar roof panels will help lower homeowners’ monthly utility bills by as much as 60 percent.

But single-family communities aren’t the only ones getting in on the green action. Habitat for Humanity, for example, plans to outfit the Staghorn Villas townhomes in Pine Hills, Fla., with high-grade insulation to cut the community’s carbon footprint and energy use.

More Money To Go Green

There is evidence that companies may be buying into the effectiveness of green urban planning, too.
Just this week, ComEd announced its first Community Energy Challenge, in which a dozen Chicago suburbs will work to develop and implement cost-effective energy efficiency pilot projects to support municipal sustainability objectives.

Certain lenders are encouraging going green, too. Wells Fargo, for one, has doubled its financing for LEED-certified buildings since May 2007.

It looks like that TreePeople conference space–the one designed to allow leaders to gather and discuss how to make cities greener–may get busy.

Because whether you’re planning a community's rebirth or determining a mixed-use complex’s look and feel, factoring in green design can improve residents' lives– and reduce the development’s impact on the environment.

Despite the optimism that greeted Barak Obama’s election to the Oval Office, the economy continues to struggle in a variety of areas. While experts continue to disagree as to whether or not an official recession is in the offing (or already taking place), it is clear that the President-Elect will inherit an economy with more than its share of problems.

Early this week, the nation’s No. 2 electronics retailer, Circuit City, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The move came a week after the firm announced it would close 155 stores in the wake of a drop in consumer
spending. Circuit City’s remaining stores will remain open throughout the bankruptcy proceedings.

Meanwhile, global delivery company DHL announced that it would cut 9,500 jobs and discontinue deliveries within the United States, though it will continue deliveries between the U.S. and other nations. The cuts come after the firm reduced its workforce by 5,400 earlier this year. 

And speaking of job cuts, nationwide, employers continued to slash positions in September, according to a Labor Department report last week. September saw a net loss of 159,000 jobs—the biggest one month drop in five years and the ninth straight month of losses. Year to date losses reached 760,000. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, remained at 6.1 percent. Perhaps most troubling about the report was the fact that losses were widespread across sectors, and not contained in a few industries.

The housing market also continued to struggle in September, with the National Association of Realtors’ pending home sales index dropping 4.6 percent during the month, after climbing 7.4 percent in August. The decline could have been more severe, if not for a sharp decline in home prices, which were down 9 percent over the previous September, due largely to foreclosures and tighter lending standards for
mortgages.

Those seeking a silver lining to the economic turmoil can look to the pump, where gasoline prices continued their decline, dropping to a national average of under $2.25 a gallon as of early this week–the lowest level since early 2007. Prices have plummeted some 45 percent from their mid July high, according to Triple A, as the faltering economy has decreased demand for oil.

The government, for its part, has kept up efforts to prop up the economy on several fronts.
In a plan to aid homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages, the Bush administration unveiled a plan to modify the terms of those home loans in hopes of stabilizing the single-family home market. The plan is especially significant in that it will apply to many loans held by beleaguered mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were taken over by the government in September due to massive losses on non-performing mortgages. Together, Fannie and Freddie hold a large percentage of the nation’s mortgage loans, and thus the plan could have a similarly wide-reaching effect.

Early this week, insurer AIG got a reworked $152.5 billion deal from the federal government, as the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department made significant changes to the terms of the company's original bailout. The Fed announced that it will reduce AIG's original $85 billion bridge loan to $60 billion, cut the interest rate by 5.5 percentage points and extend the borrowing period from two years to five years. In addition, the Treasury will also purchase $40 billion in AIG preferred stock. AIG was having difficulty paying back its original bridge loan, which it intended to use to sell off many of its subsidiaries to restore the firm’s financial standing.

As Obama prepares to take office in just over two months, his actions until then—especially, perhaps, his selection of a new Treasury Secretary—will be closely watched, and they could go a long way towards determining his early success in dealing with the nation’s faltering economy.

It’s no secret that green building is becoming more popular. And, as a result, green building training and certification programs are becoming more fashionable, too.

With good reason: As green building gains popularity in the multifamily sector–and in the overall building industry–there is an increased need for information about what green building entails and how to actually do it.
The industry is responding by offering grants, training and more information.

•    New grants mean new training funding: Consider, for example, the upcoming green building program at the Technical College of the Lowcountry in South Carolina.

Funded by an $86,000 grant from the Wal-Mart Foundation that was awarded just last week, the college’s green training program will teach students about environmentally sustainable construction next year, according to the Beaufort Gazette.

The program also will certify alternative energy construction technicians.

•    Training makes green building more possible: NeighborWorks America, an organization providing access to homeownership and affordable rental housing, just launched a new Web site–www.nw.org/green–to help the housing and community development industry create greener housing and communities.

The site features examples of green homebuilding efforts and community projects and include links to education and training courses for professionals, according to Thomas P. Deyo, NeighborWorks America’s Senior Advisor Green Strategies and GulfRebuilding.

NeighborWorks America offers a total of 16 green building and related courses, including courses in how to make multifamily housing greener.

•    More educational opportunities offer encouragement: Other entities–such as Mich.-based J.S. Vig Construction Company–are working to make green building a simpler choice for developers and builders.

Noting that LEED certification can be expensive (and to some, confusing and time-consuming), J.S. Vig recently announced that it has formed Project Green, a green building think tank.

The think tank will initially have a staff of five and be headquartered in Ann Arbor, Mich.—in a building that will also house a resource library devoted to sustainable construction as an additional green resource for builders.

Selling Green

Builders and developers aren’t the only ones trying to make going green easier. Real estate agents are also getting involved.

In October, a group of Exclusive Buyer Agents received certification for completing the Green Building for Real Estate Professionals Level One Course offered at the annual National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents convention.

The Green Real Estate Education course was designed to help real estate professionals learn what green building is and what it means for consumers. The course included green facts, initiatives, green materials, financing tools, tax incentives and energy rating information.

That makes sense—if we’re going to take the extra effort to build green, having some qualified to sell something green should be part of the process.

Still, as lending becomes harder to obtain for large projects, the additional cost of building green is likely to prevent some builders from adding sustainability to their design plans.

And—while the extra education and training is all good—certification can be an issue.

The Burden of Certification Costs

Some regions have local green certification guidelines builders can use; yet many in the industry still feel
that the only certification or standards worth pursuing are the LEED guidelines because they’re the biggest and most widely recognized.

They are, however, also expensive. (LEED certification costs vary per area but can be more than $3,000 per project.)

Paying to get some general green education probably isn’t a bad idea. But in terms of certification, the extra cost to pursue LEED status makes the various smaller local certification programs seem like a decent idea. The New York Times ran an article suggesting as much on Halloween.

Would you consider getting your projects green certified if your area had a reasonably priced program? Or would you prefer to just use LEED guidelines and pay more for certification?

Tell us what you think.