Page 158 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

5

3

GREEN IS (ALSO) THE COLOR

OF INEXPERIENCE: LEARNING FROM

A LEED PILOT PROJECT

RANDY PEACOCK

SUMMARY

From 1940 until 1985, the Melaver family ran a grocery business in and
around Savannah, Georgia. Abercorn Common (then called Abercorn
Plaza) was the company’s first shopping center, built during the late 1960s
to house its own M&M Supermarket as well as a Western Auto store,
a discount general retailer (Sam Solomon’s), a small shoe store, and a
finance company. In the late 1990s, Melaver, Inc. began to assemble prop-
erties adjacent to the original shopping center with the intent of both ren-
ovating existing buildings and expanding the development to twice its
original size. The site underwent a dramatic transformation to become, in
2006, the first LEED certified retail shopping center in the United States.
There’s a lot of green everywhere you look at Abercorn Common.
There’s more landscaping than you’d expect to see at a suburban strip
shopping center on a four-lane thoroughfare, and it’s all irrigated with
harvested rainwater. Tall sable palm trees provide shade in the parking
lot, and a wide brick walkway invites shoppers to stroll from store to
store. And there’s lots of green you don’t see. Its tenants pay lower power
bills and use much less water—two factors that directly affect their stores’

137