What is Green Building?
Green Building design and construction practices significantly reduce the negative impact of buildings on the environment and occupants in five broad areas:
- Sustainable site planning
- Energy efficiency and renewable energy
- Safeguarding water quality and water efficiency
- Conservation of materials and resources
- Indoor environmental quality
What Are the Economic Benefits of Green Buildings?
A green building is a higher quality building, and as such, may cost more up front, but it saves through lower operating costs over the life of the building. The green building approach applies a project life cycle cost analysis for determining the appropriate up-front expenditure. This analytical method calculates costs over the useful life of the asset.
These and other cost-savings can only be fully realized when they are incorporated at the project's conceptual design phase with the assistance of an integrated team of professionals. The integrated systems approach ensures that the building is designed as one system rather than a collection of stand-alone systems.
Some benefits, such as improving occupant health, comfort, productivity, reducing pollution and landfill waste are not easily quantified. Consequently, they are not adequately considered in typical cost analysis. For this reason, consider trying to start setting costs for these things or setting aside a small portion of the building budget to cover differential costs associated with less tangible green building benefits or to cover the cost of researching and analyzing green building options.
Even with a tight budget, many green building measures can be incorporated with minimal or zero increased up-front costs and they can yield enormous savings (See "Building Green on a Budget", Environmental Building News, 1999, http://www.buildinggreen.com/features/lc/low_cost.html).
What are the Green Affordable Housing Coalition's program objectives?
1. Establish a permanent organizational structure that facilitates communication and coordination between public-sector and private-sector affordable housing stakeholders throughout the Bay Area
2. Develop a detailed implementation plan that will serve as a blueprint for coordinated regional-level action for years to come, as well as a basis for obtaining dedicated funding from outside sources
3. Develop practical program tools to help local governments and housing developers improve the quality of affordable housing
Who benefits from Green Building?
1. Tenants (reduced utility bills, improved health and safety, improved indoor air quality, improved comfort)
2. Property owners (minimized life-cycle cost of building operation, liability and maintenance)
3. Local and regional community (reduced demand on infrastructure for energy, water, waste water, and solid waste disposal; improved interactions between government and the building industry; improved building safety; reduced strain on the local environment; strengthened local economy, and improved quality of life)
4. Building Professionals (market differentiation by building green, reduced construction defect liability, and improved quality of construction)
5. Global environment (reduced resource consumption and pollution of all types
How does the Coalition promote greener affordable housing?
1. The coalition provides permanent organizational structure to foster positive communication, coordination and cross learning between local governments and affordable housing providers throughout the Bay Area.
2. Coalition members collaborate to develop educational tools and information resources.
3. The Coalition promotes a uniform set of green building guidelines, check-lists, and rating systems for use with affordable housing projects.
4. Coalition members are free to form their own policies on how to use those resources for local affordable housing projects.
What are the Coalition's guiding principles?
- Housing should be resource efficient (energy, water, materials) to construct and maintain.
- Housing should promote good health for workers who build the buildings and the occupants (e.g., good indoor-air quality, minimal use of toxic materials, maximum use of natural daylighting)
- Incorporating green building features should enhance life-cycle affordability; construction alternatives should be evaluated using full life-cycle cost-benefit criteria
- Developers should use an integrated whole-building approach to planning, design, and construction.
- The value of green building needs to be highlighted to the marketplace.
- Incorporating green building features should enhance access to funding sources.
- Housing affordability is a regional problem. Affordable housing developers often operate at the regional level. Therefore, promotion of Green Building should be coordinated at the regional level.
- The Green Affordable Housing Coalition should maximize cooperation and partnerships with organizations that are addressing Green Building in the affordable housing arena.
What should local governments do to promote green building?
Review General Plan, land use ordinances, zone regulations, parking regulations, and building codes for opportunities to encourage green affordable housing (e.g., density bonuses, parking bonuses, adaptive reuse, mixed-use, transit-oriented development, second units, and air rights development).
Explore policy options such as:
- In-lieu fees for developers who do not build green
- Fee waivers
- Business tax credits for for-profit developers
- Expedited plan check or design review
- Financing (loans or rebates) for renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other revenue generating or cost-saving measures
- More prominent and supportive local government role in community participation process
- Ombudsman to steer project through local approval process
What should affordable housing developers do to promote green building?
- Review their building design and construction process and specifications and investigate where it is possible to make "green" improvements
Communicate to their architects, engineers, and other trade subcontractors the desire to deliver "green" affordable housing and work with them to make changes towards that goal
Investigate opportunities for projects that incorporate adaptive reuse, mixed-use, transit-oriented development, and second units.
How is the program funded?
Initial funding comes from California ratepayers through the California Public Utilities Commission. Funding covers only staff consulting services of Frontier Associates and Austin Energy.
Who is Frontier Associates?
Frontier Associates is a privately owned consulting firm with offices in Oakland, California, and Austin, Texas. Frontier's senior management combines for more than 65 years of experience providing energy efficiency-related services to energy utilities and their customers. Frontier has become a leading energy efficiency consultant to investor-owned utilities throughout the nation. The Green Building program manager has worked with all the major investor-owned utilities in California and served for five years in local government in the East Bay.
Who is Austin Energy?
Austin Energy is a municipal utility in Austin, Texas. The Austin Energy Green Building Program is nationally known for expertise in "green" residential and commercial construction. A pioneering program established in 1990, the Green Building Program has won numerous awards for establishing precedent-setting guidelines, ordinances, and market strategies. The Program has been recognized as a top "success story" by the U.S. Department of Energy.