green building

Aggressive federal energy efficiency policies, such as building codes and appliance standards, would put money in consumer wallets in every state.

That's the message of a new report that adds to evidence of the economic potential of curbing energy use. Analysts at the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) calculated that U.S. citizens would save $301 to $451 annually on average on their utility bills in 2030, if the nation slashes projected energy use by 20 to 30 percent, or 1 to 2 percent per year.

The report is one of the first to look at how strong federal efficiency policies would shrink home energy bills.

California last week became the first state to integrate green building practices, largely based on the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Efficiency and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, into its statewide building codes.

It was a big, Governator-style move, but while the USGBC officially supports CalGreen, and most in the green building world see it as a net-positive step, not everyone is thrilled about it. In fact many architects, engineers and city planners that fully support the integration of green building practices in the building code are concerned about the challenges involved in implementing and enforcing that code — and those are the building professionals who are advocates of green building in the first place.

There are new jobs to be had from America's "green" building boom, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) confirms, and lots of them.

In a new report conducted with consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, the USGBC says green construction is on track to support nearly 8 million new jobs by 2013 — a 400 percent leap over the previous five years.

The report is one of the first to focus exclusively on the employment opportunities from green building.

The authors found that efforts to make buildings more energy efficient already supports more than 2 million jobs and contributes $100 billion in gross domestic product and U.S. wages.

"The study demonstrates that investing in green buildings contributes significantly to our nation's wealth while creating jobs in a range of occupations, from carpenters to cost estimators," said Gary Rahl, officer of global government market at Booz Allen Hamilton.

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• Stacy Feldman's blog
• 1 comment

A few years ago modular, or prefabricated, housing was the stepchild of the homebuilding industry, just a cut above mobile homes or manufactured housing.

Now, with the offering of higher quality, green modular housing in the marketplace, consumers are beginning to view it in a fresh light.

The reason? Hurricane Katrina.

Organizations concerned with rebuilding New Orleans green aligned architects with modular housing. This, in turn, accelerated the acceptance of modular housing in the new home market, suggests New York architect Frederic Schwartz, who designed several New Orleans projects.

Every year America throws away 250,000 homes.

Bulldozers are knocking down almost 700 houses every day and trucks are carting the demolition debris for burial in landfills all across the country. It's estimated that 1.2 billion board feet of usable lumber ends up in the garbage, not to mention salvageable hardware, fixtures, wiring, piping, doors and windows.

But a new appreciation of the value of this waste stream is leading to the growth of a nascent industry: deconstruction. In a worsening economy and in the effort to create green jobs for a low-carbon future, deconstruction could prove to be a boom industry -- if it wasn't so cheap to throw things away -- creating jobs, recycling valuable materials and recovering and reusing the energy embedded in these existing construction materials.

The New York Times Magazine followed around a deconstruction crew involved in the painstaking, labor-intensive work led by Brad Guy, a "journeyman architectural academic" who is supervising the deconstruction of two homes in Cleveland, one of the cities hardest hit by the subprime mortgage crisis. The city of Cleveland is expecting to spend $9 million in the next year demolishing 1,100 of its 8,000 vacant homes. It's a $9 million expenditure that is largely headed headed straight for the dump.

What if that money could be put to more productive use? It's a question Cleveland is exploring by helping to fund Guy's experiment in deconstruction -- to determine whether the cost of the labor required to deconstruct some of these homes would be offset by the value of the material the labor recovers. The short answer appears to be yes.

Rumor has it that the US Green Building Council (USGBC) is about to unclog its big backlog of LEED registration certificates. So reports the Huffington Post.

Good news for green developers because that backlog is crazy.

Take New York City. By the end of 2007 -- after four years in the program -- the USGBC had LEED-certified 15 buildings. Meanwhile, the number of projects waiting for approval had swelled to 294.

That’s a ratio of one certification for every 20 registrations -- just five percent. Pretty poor. Especially when you compare it with the UK’s equivalent green building program BREEAM, which boasts a ratio of one in five.

The reported fix?

Remember this news: That among the 13 largest homebuilders in America, none are building green?

Well, if this new report from Frost & Sullivan (reg req'd) is to be believed, then they'd be wise to change course because the movement toward green construction is "inevitable."

And it's also hugely profitable -- even as the whole housing market is stuck in a slump.

A study out this month by Calvert, a socially responsible investment firm, shows that the homebuilding industry is lagging on green construction.

In fact, among the nation's 13 largest publicly traded homebuilders, none has fully incorporated green building into their business practices.

And exactly zero of them are close.