From the SEPTEMBER 2007 issue of New Urban News

LEED aims to set ‘first national standard for neighborhood design’

Philip Langdon

 Courtesy of The Rose Companies
With 238 highly varied projects — spread across 37 states, the District of Columbia, four Canadian provinces, and four other countries — the LEED-Neighborhood Development program is off to a strong start.

Developers have been eager to join the pilot phase of the program, which was launched in July by three organizations — the US Green Building Council (USGBC), the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU). The developers pay fees of $8,000 to $20,000 for each project included in the program.
The program’s goal, says the USGBC, is the introduction of a rating system that “integrates the principles of smart growth, urbanism, and green building into the first national standard for neighborhood design.”
Even though the pilot phase is just getting started and will not be completed until 2008, governments have already begun looking at how to support the program’s aims. This spring, by unanimous vote in both houses, the Illinois legislature approved the Green Neighborhood Grant Act, which is intended to give three LEED-ND projects state grants covering up to 1.5 percent of their costs. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.)
Approximately $3 million of state funds — yet to be appropriated — may be provided to the three projects. Illinois’ legislation may spur other states to offer support of their own for LEED-ND or similar programs.
Several county governments are taking action. In July, Kane County, Illinois, which is 45 miles west of downtown Chicago, started offering developers discounts on road impact fees if they do such things as placing a mix of uses within walkable distance of one another. Kai Tarum, Kane County’s director of planning and special projects, says the preparation of LEED-ND “was a real door-opener,” stimulating the county to move forward on the energy and urbanism front. “It was critical that we could point to [LEED-ND] — to say ‘here is a document that is becoming a standard,’” Tarum says.
Another early supporter of LEED is Sarasota County, Florida. The county expedites action on rezoning and on special exceptions if the buildings or their overall developments are in a LEED program or, alternatively, meet standards established by the Florida Green Building Coalition.
The time savings that developers in Sarasota can obtain through expediting are regarded as significant. The county promises to “rezone within six months rather than 12 months, says Paul Radauskas, general manager of permitting and inspections. Reviews of site development plans are speeded up to 10 days, from 20 days. Building permit reviews for commercial buildings are brought down to 5 days, from 20 days. For residential buildings, reviews are handled in three days rather than 10.
In the year since Sarasota County started offering the incentives, “probably 25 builders have committed to building all their houses green,” and two or three projects have committed to land development that’s consistent with LEED-ND’s goals, Radauskas says. He reports that in Florida, green development incentives have also been adopted by Hillsboro, Orange, Pinellas, and Miami-Dade Counties, and they have been proposed in other counties.
Radauskas says the economics of retail remains an obstacle to creating pedestrian-scale, mixed-use development in his county. Ideally, stores and services would be integrated into new residential communities; people would be able to walk to them. But some of the new residential developments are only a couple of miles from retail in road corridors. The roadside stores are too far for people to walk to them, but they dominate the market, and make it hard to create viable retail in new pedestrian-scale developments, according to Radauskas.
Nonetheless, Radauskas says, “We have four huge projects we think will be able to make walkability [between homes and commercial activities] part of it.”

KEEN DEVELOPERS AND NONPROFITS
Mike Davidson, head of the Chicago-based Campaign for Sensible Growth, says that in Illinois, LEED-ND has attracted the support of legislators and business groups because it promises to improve development patterns without being a set of regulations imposed by government. “It’s purely incentive-based,” he says. “That’s why we were able to sell it in Springfield.”
Illinois’ experience suggests that across the nation, smart-growth organizations may be useful in promoting LEED-ND and persuading governments to offer incentives for its projects. USGBC’s earlier LEED certification programs for individual buildings have given LEED considerable credibility among developers — credibility that should aid the Neighborhood Development program.
In July, the Campaign for Sensible Growth hosted a Chicago area LEED-ND event that Davidson says drew “an unprecedented crowd” of developers, financiers, real estate brokers, and homebuilders — “people that know how to do a deal.” “It’s creating a lot of buzz,” says Chicago real estate consultant A. Gail Sturm, executive vice president of ProTen Realty Group. Some developers are interested because “it addresses large-scale urban issues rather than individual buildings,” Sturm observes. Other developers are interested because they don’t want to be left in the dust by their competitors. They realize, she says, that “clients are demanding answers” to livability and global-warming issues.
“The overwhelming response to [LEED-ND] is an indication of the market for it,” says Dara Kovel, a New Haven-based regional director of the Jonathan Rose Companies, which intends to build a large mixed-use LEED-ND project next to the train station in Stamford, Connecticut. The project, called Metro Green, will consist of a 17-story office tower developed by W&M Properties and 238 mixed-income residential units developed by Rose. Among its other features will be streetscape improvements and a new public plaza.
In Illinois, advocates such as the Campaign for Sensible Growth claim that projects meeting LEED-ND standards will reduce the utility costs of the affected households by 25 to 30 percent, or an average of $554 per household per year. Mandy Burrell at the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago says that when the utility savings are combined with a $2,594 reduction in dependence on cars and gasoline, a family living in a LEED-ND neighborhood should reap annual savings of $3,148. Payton Chung, a CNU staff member who has closely followed LEED-ND, says he cannot vouch for those figures.
Whatever the savings, Davidson notes that “we can’t discount the importance of something like this. This is the first quantifiable standard for energy-efficiency at the neighborhood scale.”

WHERE THE PROJECTS ARE
Of the 238 pilot projects worldwide, USGBC released the names, locations, and acreage of 220 (see table). The remaining 18 were kept private at the request of their sponsors. Twenty-four are in Canada — in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec. At least four Canadian projects belong to Canada Lands Company, which converts surplus military bases to new uses (see March 2007 New Urban News).
China has three projects — two in Beijing, the other in Guangzhou (Canton). The other three foreign projects are Loreto Bay in Mexico (Jan. 2006 New Urban News); Wakaari, Bahamas; and New Songdo City, in Incheon, South Korea.
More than a fifth of the 190 US projects are in California — 42 of them. Other US hot spots are Washington State, with 9, and Colorado, the District of Columbia, New York, Ohio, and Virginia, with 8. Texas, the second-most populous state, has sparse representation, with only 4 LEED-ND projects. This may by a sign of Texas’s limited interest in energy conservation and environmental issues. On the other hand, it may mean that developers in Texas, unlike those in California, have an easy time getting government approvals, and consequently don’t need the public relations boost that LEED-ND provides.
The projects span many categories, including:
Brownfield: One of the biggest is the redevelopment of 1,150 acres of industrial land on the South Side of Chicago, much of it previously occupied by US Steel’s South Works. It may produce more than 17,000 housing units in addition to park land and other uses. “This project came about as a way of implementing Mayor Daley’s vision of making Chicago the greenest city in the country,” says Doug Farr of Farr Associates, which has had a major role in the project’s planning. Other brownfield projects include the 34-acre Hoyt Yards in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon; and the 54-acre Georgetown Land Development in Redding, Connecticut.
Transit-oriented development (TOD): Projects include the 38-acre Sheridan Stationside Village in Hollywood, Florida; 130-acre Westwood Station in Westwood, Massachusetts; MacArthur BART Transit Village in Oakland, California; Prairie Crossing Station Village in Grayslake, Illinois; Twinbrook Station in Rockville, Maryland; and Wesmont Station in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey.
Mixed-use center: Projects include Daybreak Village Center, the first center of the 4,126-acre, 14,000-home Daybreak community in South Jordan, Utah, planned by Calthorpe Associates; ECI Investment Advisors’ $250 million Midtown Crossing at Turner Park in Omaha, Nebraska; Lacey Gateway Town Center in Lacey, Washington; Excelsior & Grand in St. Louis Park, Minnesota; Merrifield Town Center in Fairfax, Virginia; and Storrs Center in Mansfield, Connecticut.
Downtown redevelopment: Projects include the 6-acre Pittsburgh Riverparc development, which would set five high-rises and several mid-rise buildings on a block furnished with four “outdoor living rooms”; the 37-acre Truckee Railyard in Truckee, California; and the 20-acre City Creek Center in Salt Lake City.
Renovation: In an eastern section of Baltimore, the Patterson Park Community Development Corporation is marketing Decker Walk “Envirowhomes” — 19 contiguous rowhouses whose interiors have been reconfigured and made more energy-efficient. Behind the houses, fences have been removed to create an open space laid with porous paving stones, reducing stormwater runoff. Fifteen of the houses’ roofs will be at least partly planted with low-maintenance vegetation.

CONTROVERSIAL PROJECTS
Some projects may spark disagreement among new urbanists. One is Belvoir New Vision, a plan to accommodate approximately 22,000 civilian and military personnel who are to be transferred to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, from other locations in metropolitan Washington. The transfer plan has been criticized for shifting many employees from facilities near Metro rail stations to a primarily automobile-dependent military base.
The Global Green USA Holy Cross Project, intended to produce green affordable housing on 1.25 acres in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, is getting a mixed reception from new urbanists because the project — associated with celebrities like Brad Pitt — reportedly does not define the street, and provides hiding places. In New Haven, Connecticut, there have been fierce attacks on the uninspired design — potentially deadly for a block of Chapel Street — of Becker and Becker Associates’ proposed development of high-rise apartments and other facilities.
North Hills, a 4,200-acre project in northern Santa Barbara County, has encountered opposition from people who oppose converting the land (which also contains 177 active oil wells) from agriculture to urban development. Calthorpe Associates laid out the development to have up to 7,500 new housing units and 2 million square feet of commercial space, organized in “small villages, all with a half-mile radius and fairly high density,” says Randy Wheeler of the development firm North Hills LLC. The County Planning Commission voted the proposal down in June, but Wheeler says, “We’re still considering the project active and pursuing entitlements.”
Perhaps the most unusual LEED-ND project is the Tucson, Arizona, Modern Streetcar, a four-mile streetcar route that will connect the University Medical Center to an area west of downtown, at an estimated construction cost of $87.8 million. It appears to be the only project that is not a real estate development.
The pilot phase of LEED-ND will conclude in the first half of 2008, when the focus will shift to revising the rating system. However, pilot projects will have until Jan. 9, 2009, to submit for at least one stage of certification, according to Jennifer Henry at USGBC. She points out that the fees, which range from $8,000 for projects under 20 acres to $20,000 for projects over 100 acres, are mostly used to pay for third-party review of their documentation, in all three stages of the process.
“The average direct cost to us for a project is $14,000 (this does not even cover our overhead or staff costs; just contractual and other direct costs); so the larger projects are subsidizing the smaller ones,” she says. LEED organizers worked with the Kresge Foundation, which paid all or some of the fees for 14 projects, typically those submitted by nonprofit groups. After the pilot phase, USGBC hopes to find ways to streamline the certification and reduce the fees.
This article is available in the September 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.