Page 15 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

xiv INTRODUCTION

building, but rather to facilitate this movement by being transparent about the many
challenges facing it so problems could be fixed, quickly.
Those engaged in environmental issues today, even on the most cursory of levels,
understand the urgency. This environmental urgency is not confined to the familiar
issues of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions but is linked to issues of con-
sumption and waste of natural capital on a global scale. In the United States, we lose
more than a million acres annually to urban sprawl, parking lots, and roads, while world-
1
wide, we destroy 80,000 square miles of tropical forest each year. Twelve million acres
2
of once-productive land is transformed each year into desert. Global warming, deserti-
fication, and loss of productive arable lands are in turn linked to the diminution of the
quantity and quality of water supplies worldwide, with one-third of the world’s irrigated
lands suffering from saltwater intrusion. It is projected that by 2025, 40 percent of the
world’s population could be living with chronic water shortages. 3
The building trade, which has played a significant role in this degradation, needs to
find an alternative paradigm for shaping our lands and communities in the years to
come. Part of that new paradigm-shaping needs to come not just from jettisoning an
older, more consumptive, more wasteful, less ethical way of doing business, but also
from being direct and forthcoming about the challenges and opportunities of a new
approach to doing things. That was the impetus behind our presentation on Abercorn
Common in 2005. It is also the impetus behind this book.
As I sat in the back of the room that day in November 2005, I felt proud of my com-
pany and the long, slow, patient years of work behind the presentation. Melaver, Inc.
began with a corner grocery store founded by my grandmother Annie Melaver in 1940
in Savannah, Georgia. My father, Norton Melaver, grew the business over the follow-
ing forty-five years into a supermarket business in and around the outlying environs
of my hometown, eventually selling M&M Supermarkets to Kroger in 1985. Since
then, the business has been devoted to real estate: development, acquisitions and sales,
property management, and leasing. It’s a family-owned business, one that since its
inception has had a strong sense of core values having to do with community and the
land of which that community is a part.
Early on in our entrance into the real estate business, family members felt quite
strongly that we needed to practice real estate in ways that were more respectful of
locale. Over time, that commitment evolved into a set of principles and practices encap-
sulated by the term sustainability. We develop to a minimum of LEED standards in
everything we do. We avoid greenfield development, focusing our attention on urban
core, largely in-fill projects. Our projects are guided by a set of triple bottom line met-
rics that not only call for viable economic returns, but also set threshold expectations
for maximizing our positive impact on the communities in which we work (social bot-
tom line) while minimizing our impact on the environment (environmental bottom
line). Roughly 80 percent of our small staff of some thirty folks is LEED accredited,
and everyone takes the exam at least once. And, despite our small size, we have par-
ticipated in three of the U.S. Green Building Council’s pilot programs for specific
LEED programs (Core and Shell, Home, and Neighborhood Development) and account
for roughly 1 percent of all LEED certifications in the country.