Page 14 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

INTRODUCTION

MARTIN MELAVER

The genesis of The Green Building Bottom Line was an early Friday morning in
Atlanta, Georgia—November 11, 2005—the closing day of the U.S. Green Building
Council’s fourth annual Greenbuild conference. A number of my colleagues at
Melaver, Inc. and several close outside team members were appearing on a panel
about the challenges of developing Abercorn Common, the first LEED shopping cen-
ter in the country, in our company’s hometown, Savannah, Georgia. The LEED pro-
gram (LEED is an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) had
been created a few years before by the U.S. Green Building Council as an independ-
ently verified, points-driven set of development criteria assessing five major areas: site
management, water consumption, energy efficiency, materials used, and indoor air
quality. Abercorn Common was our company’s second LEED project, one that we had
worked on for the previous four years (and it’s the subject of Chapter 5 of this book).
Instead of a typical three-person Greenbuild panel presenting on three discrete proj-
ects, a team of eight—developer, architect, builder, general contractor, legal counsel,
leasing agent, marketing representative, and property manager—gathered to discuss
one single project. There wasn’t enough space at the podium for the entire team to sit
comfortably side by side, so the members were jammed into several rows of chairs,
changing places as the time came for each to speak. Rather than a slick PowerPoint
presentation about success, the whole orientation of the presentation was less about
putting a pretty veneer on so-called best practices and more about sharing many of the
mistakes the team had made along the way.
When we had decided as a company several years back to develop all of our proj-
ects to LEED standards, Abercorn Common was already under development. At the
time, less than two dozen retailers in the country had gone on record indicating a
desire to build their stores to green specifications, and none of these had modified their
store prototypes to accommodate LEED guidelines. Nevertheless, we charged ahead,
going green midstream to develop the project to LEED criteria. And here we were, in
front of a national audience of designers, developers, retailers, and other real estate
professionals admitting to a long litany of mistakes.
It should have been a recipe for disaster as far as a buttoned-up professional pres-
entation was concerned. It wasn’t. There seemed to be a pent-up demand to pull back
the curtains on a green project to reveal the pitfalls and challenges of going green—
not for the purpose of throwing cold water on this explosive new movement for green

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