Page 120 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

INCENTIVES AND BARRIERS TO GREEN BUILDINGS 97

building and development, all costs are going up—the replacement cost of buildings, the
cost of operations, and cost of hiring people—all costs are going up. As a society,
we simply can’t afford to, nor should we be willing to, accept the premise that buildings
are disposable. Buildings have to be as productive and sustainable for as they can possi-
bly be. At a minimum, they need to have a 100-year usable life or more. We believe that’s
not only quite possible, but essential to our industry, our communities, and the world.

Incentives and Barriers

to Green Buildings

Still, there are barriers to the widespread adoption of green building techniques,
technologies, and systems, some of them related to real-life experience and the rest
to perception in the building industry that green buildings still add extra cost. This
is surprising because senior executives representing architectural/engineering firms,
consultants, developers, building owners, corporate owner-occupants, and educational
institutions have held positive attitudes about the benefits and costs of green con-
struction for some time.* For example, I even found a LEED-certified public library
in remote Homer, Alaska (Fig. 6.1).
Given these positive views, it is surprising that the leading obstacles to wide-
spread adoption of green buildings continue to be perceived higher costs and lack
of awareness of the full range of benefits of green construction and operations.
Other factors discouraging green building remain the perceived complexity and
cost of LEED documentation; short-term budget horizons on the part of clients and
long paybacks for some renewable energy measures; and the often split incentives
between commercial building owners and tenants. Sally Wilson of CB Richard
Ellis, the world’s largest property management company, describes how this might
work. †

I worked on a project where I had a tenant who was going into a LEED-NC building.
It was a small tenant taking up about 15,000 square feet. The major tenant was a util-
ity and they had the LEED requirement initially. There were a lot of requirements in
the lease that the tenant had to comply with on the LEED side. Helping the tenant
understand what the added cost is compared to a non-LEED building was pretty crit-
ical. The other important role for us was structuring the lease in a way to get the land-
lord to take responsibility for payment of those things. The landlord was essentially
getting the tax credits but they were trying to get the tenant to pay for the improve-
ments. So that was a negotiation point. The tenant wasn’t pursing LEED but they had
to understand what it meant to them in terms of the lease and their obligations.

*Turner Construction Company [online], http://www.turnerconstruction.com/greenbuildings/content.asp?d=5785,
accessed March 6, 2007.
†
Interview with Sally Wilson, February 2008.