Winter 2011
Featured Stories
Tell Your Story: Opportunities to Earn GBCI CEs
USGBC's new LEED Stories from Practice offers you the opportunity to contribute and learn from real-life LEED project experiences. The beta online LEED project library features stories told by diverse project stakeholders about lessons learned, challenges, successes, best practices, strategies, ROI, and more.
Get involved:
Share Your Own LEED Stories from Practice.
Share your stories to have your project, your company, and yourself featured in the new and improved online library.Contribute by December 9 for your project(s) to be launched in early 2012.
Review LEED Stories from Practice.
Green building subject matter experts are needed to serve asvolunteer reviewers for the online library. Earn GBCI CEs while gaining new knowledge of LEED, first-hand from other practitioners. Learn more and apply. » Top
Coming Soon – Green Retail Guide: Integrating LEED Into Your Leasing Process
USGBC's Green Retail Guide: Integrating LEED Into Your Leasing Process assists retail tenants, their real estate departments, store planning and construction teams, and service providers to better understand how sustainability strategies affect real estate decisions. The guide also contains useful tools to help green the leasing process, and explains approaches to green team selection, negotiations, and lease language. The Green Retail Guide: Integrating LEED Into Your Leasing Process will be available for purchase in the USGBC Online Store in early 2012. » Top
From the Desks of Brett Phillips
and Brian Geller:
The Seattle 2030 District – the NEXT big thing in green building
The green building movement has made great strides in recent years, but it's not enough. In order to put up a good fight against ever-increasing environmental and economic pressures, we need a united front of the public and private sector, and to approach issues on the city – or district – scale.
District sustainability currently experiences the same limited level of awareness that individual green buildings did a decade ago, when the U.S. Green Building Council announced its first 12 LEED Certified projects, of which there are now over 11,000.
Get ready for a paradigm shift.
The Seattle 2030 District is an innovative, private-sector led project attempting to create a groundbreaking high performance building district in downtown Seattle. The project is already gaining national attention; earlier this year, the 2030 District was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to represent Seattle – along with the cities of Los Angeles and Atlanta – Better Buildings Challenge. By 2020, this program aims to reduce commercial building energy consumption by 20 percent nationwide.
The 2030 District model of private-sector engagement and aggregated goals is unique among the three selected cities, and will serve as a guide for other cities to follow. The District has key support and partnership from the City of Seattle and King County, but is being led largely by the private sector: property owners, managers, developers, engineers and design professionals who believe that setting aggressive energy performance targets at the district level is the key to elevating our region's economic and environmental potential.
Working together civic leaders adopted the goals from the2030 Challenge for Planners, which adds reductions in water consumption and vehicle miles traveled, to the energy and fossil fuel building reduction targets of the 2030 Challenge. These goals, to be met by 2030, include aggregated district-wide reduction targets of 60% reduction in energy from new construction, 50 % reduction in energy from existing buildings, 50% reduction in water, and 50% reduction in carbon emissions from auto and freight.
These voluntary commitments are not empty promises. District members are required to share, under proprietary agreements, building energy, water, and transportation data, join the Seattle Climate Partnership, enlist in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, and enroll LEED buildings in USGBC'sBuilding Performance Partnership. In return, the Seattle 2030 District is delivering innovative financing vehicles, sharing critical industry tools and best practices, and creating joint education opportunities to participating property owners and developers.
Improvement districts are not new – but the Seattle 2030 District takes a novel approach to the concept. District-wide reduction goals for energy use, water use, and CO2 emissions translates directly to using less power, water and fuel. While this may be hard to conceptualize, it yields tangible results: less traffic, better indoor and outdoor air quality, a more pleasant and desirable urban environment, a healthier Puget Sound and greater economic activity. These are the changes that Seattle and other growing urban areas must make in order to maintain vibrant and competitive cities in an era of population growth and resource overconsumption.
But don't environmental priorities run counter to economic ones? Not always.
Take energy use, for example. Buildings use approximately half of all energy consumed in this country. Reducing that use will take human energy: conservation managers, building auditors, manufacturers and installers of more efficient equipment – in other words the green jobs we've all been hearing about.
For decades, it's been cheaper to displace human labor with fossil fuel energy in the U.S., and we've followed that trend to its logical economic conclusion: high unemployment and rising energy prices. Yet thanks to those rising energy prices, projects to make buildings resource-efficient can more convincingly provide faster financial paybacks and higher asset values for building owners and investors. These conditions, paired with the right partnerships, technologies and financing solutions increases our ability to scale efficiency projects more broadly. The Seattle 2030 District aims to be the catalyst to make that scale reality.
There is no one-size-fits-all prescription to achieve the performance goals necessary to survive and thrive. Property owners and managers should be free to pursue the most innovative solutions to generate the best financial returns or other desired benefits for their property.
The bottom line is that the private sector must take the lead in transforming our economy away from fossil fuel dependency. More than 60 organizations, and over 23 million square feet of building space (30 percent of downtown Seattle) are participating in the Seattle 2030 District, a model that can lead the country in that transformation. It's time to join forces; 2030 is right around the corner.
Brett Phillips
Director of Sustainability, Unico Properties
Board Chairman, Seattle 2030 District
Brian Geller
Executive Director, Seattle 2030 District » Top
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End of Year Sale: USGBC Exam Prep
All USGBC exam prep materials are 30% off through December 31st, 2011. Thinking of taking the LEED Green Associate or LEED AP exam? Prepare for your test with USGBC, the developers of LEED. Don't miss out on this limited-time offer. Use the promo code: STUDY30.
Shop now »
2012 USGBC Webinar Subscription Now Available
The 2012 USGBC Webinar Subscription is now available for both individuals and organizations. The USGBC Webinar Subscription gives you access to webinars and courses that fully support LEED credential maintenance requirements, courses that can be viewed anytime, anywhere. USGBC's library includes more than 40 webinars with new ones being added weekly and allows you to fulfill your LEED and AIA credential maintenance requirements in one place. Plus, new this year, all your CE hours will be automatically reported directly to GBCI and AIA, which means you don't have to do anything but take the course. Access begins December 1, 2011 and extends through December 31, 2012.
Purchase now »
Market News
San Francisco International Airport first in the nation to earn LEED Gold certification.
10,000 LEED certified commercial buildings and counting. Greenbiz has the story.
Facebook, Yahoo!, and QTS data centers achieve LEED Certification.
Frito-Lay's new 55,000 SF distribution facility in Oahu, HI earns LEED Gold certification.
LEED Gold certification for one of America's most Iconic buildings: the Empire State Building.
Top 10 Winter Leases in LEED-Certified Office Buildings
Kellogg USA, Inc. @2710 Edmonds Ln, Lewisville, TX - 1,020,030 SF
Unknown @ 17182 Nevada Ave, Victorville, CA - 1,008,732 SF
Amazon @ 800 Perry Rd, Plainfield, IN -
925,800 SF
Novo Nordisk, Inc. @ 800 Scudders Mill Rd, Plainsboro, NJ - 770,000 SF
Unknown @ 702 Commerce Center Dr, University Park, IL - 696,540 SF
Amazon @ 21 Roadway Dr, Carlise, PA - 558,700 SF
Honeywell International, Inc. @6766 Pontius Rd, Groveport, OH - 520,00 SF
United Furniture Industries @ 13133 Innovation Way, Victorville, CA - 505,192 SF
Brooks Sports @ 2701 142nd Ave E, Sumner, WA - 427,253 SF
Unkown @ 21700 Barton Rd, Colton, CA - 425.286 SF
» Top
Want to meet with USGBC staff on-site? E-mail:commercialrealestate@usgbc.org
Find more resources for the commercial real estate community:usgbc.org/commercialrealestate
Is there something you would like to see in the Commercial Real Estate Update? Let us know.
Membership
Join: Membership in USGBC enables you to connect to a vast network of green building knowledge, gain access to unique marketing opportunities and provide your workforce with affordable education to keep them on top of the latest trends in the industry.
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