Page 160 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

LEARNING FROM A LEED PILOT PROJECT 139

mentalist and constitutional lawyer Ogden Doremus, later known as the author of
Georgia’s visionary Marshland Protections Act, advocated successfully on behalf of
the Melaver business.
I am too young to remember those early years of Abercorn Plaza, but growing up on
the south side of Savannah, I got caught up in the ongoing story of the shopping cen-
ter. My part of the story started at age fifteen, on a Saturday. I rode my bicycle to the
grocery store, parked it at the bike rack, walked inside the store, and began bagging
groceries. I was making good tips, but after a few hours of hard work, the store man-
ager called me over and asked me who I was and what I thought I was doing.
“Bagging groceries and making tips,” I replied.
“Son,” he said, “come back when you are sixteen, fill out an application, and we’ll
put you to work.” Which I did. It was my first job. Twenty-something years later, I was
running the development effort to make Abercorn Common the first LEED retail shop-
ping center in the country.
The long, demanding process of renovating and expanding the center is a collection
of stories. Early on in the process of assembling the neighboring tracts of land, a Wal-
Mart representative, out of the blue, hired an engineering firm to survey the site and
stake it out with the idea of locating one of its Supercenters on the location. We
weren’t notified of the assignment. We simply discovered one day a field of small
stakes with blue flags covering the site. Rumors started to fly of Wal-Mart’s intentions,
and despite our best efforts to convince neighboring landowners we were not planning
on developing a Wal-Mart, folks were not entirely convinced. Land prices started to
soar. Assemblage, often a challenging undertaking, became that much more formida-
ble. Another challenge to redevelopment occurred when a tenant, actually a sub-lease,
pulled out an attachment to its lease that appeared in no other copies on file, with odd
typewritten additional language that stated the sub-tenant had total rights over any and
all additions made to the center. This rider to the sub-lease made our redevelopment
effort more complex and time-consuming.
But the really challenging pre-development work occurred around the company’s
decision to make this a LEED project, at a time when only about twenty retailers in
the nation had publicly made vague commitments to building out their locations to
green specifications. We made our commitment and were proud to do so, but soon the
questions started to flow. Where would our tenants come from? We didn’t really know.
Would they be willing to enter into a cost-sharing green lease with us, since some of
our initial investments in energy-efficient technologies would benefit them? (The mar-
ket simply wasn’t ready for that yet, and it still isn’t to a large extent, though that is
changing.) Who would handle our brokerage representation? We clearly needed a
regional or national brokerage firm that had strong connections with a retail clientele.
But those firms, by and large, were not interested in pitching a deal that looked dif-
ferent from every other locale. Those firms knew their retail clients’ prototype spe-
cifications, made their money on doing a volume of same-old deals, and were
disinclined to take on an assignment that seemed to be difficult and time consuming.
Eventually, we turned to our own brokerage division. They understood the green