Page 190 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

168 CHAPTER 6

the more general issue of how an asset manager assesses which existing
buildings most lend themselves to a LEED renovation, including a check-
list for evaluating an existing building for its green potential.

As a culture, Americans are not known for being kind to buildings. Perhaps that is
the legacy of several centuries of having a seemingly infinite frontier, a territory
ahead. It wasn’t just a go-west phenomenon. In the mid-nineteenth century, American
cities in the east began see to low-density development stretch out for miles from city
centers to the suburbs along the paths of horse-drawn streetcars, then rail lines, and
then highways.
This process of jettisoning the old for the new was given greater impetus starting
in 1916 (and then in 1921) with federal subsidies to improve roads, develop state and
national highways, and, in general, promote the use of the car, then seen as the most sig-
nificant influence of the rise of local taxes. While other sectors of the economy during
the Depression were flat, highway building saw a boom. The creation of the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA) in the 1930s, emphasizing single-family detached homes
in the suburbs, synergistically fed off the highway construction. Creation of easy mort-
gages under the Veterans Administration not only facilitated the demand of returning
soldiers from World War II for inexpensive housing but also ratcheted up the develop-
ment of new subdivisions. So too did a new federal income tax law allowing mortgage
interest to be tax deductible. The coup de grace was the 1956 passage of the Interstate
Highway Act, which called for the federal government to subsidize 90 percent of the
construction cost of 41,000 miles of new expressways. 1
It is not my intent in this chapter to offer up a full-scale critique of urban plan-
ning. What I do and am most knowledgeable about is managing the assets of a real
estate portfolio. This much, I think I do know: Managing our existing buildings a
different way can go a long way toward righting some of the wrongs of our con-
sumptive practices. Learning to treasure what we have, as well as make them more
efficient, is a critical aspect of an overall sustainability strategy. One leader in the
real estate industry has even gone so far as to say that greening our existing build-
2
ings is the “holy grail of the sustainability movement.” I think he is right. We in
this country have long faced a challenge having to do with not being efficient in our
use of materials, of consuming rather than treasuring the things we make a part
of us. We build our buildings poorly, for the moment, and then move on down the
road to put up stakes elsewhere. An ethic of rapid consumption, particularly of non-
renewable resources, has gone hand-in-hand with a loss of community and social
fabric. Re-thinking our approach to existing buildings has far-reaching consequences—
for being better trustees of the buildings we construct, for better conserving the
resources from which these buildings are made, for being better stewards of our land
and our communities.