Page 219 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building
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EXISTING BUILDINGS 197
version of older, less-efficient buildings to a green program is a critical part of an over-
all need to reduce our overall environmental footprint. The work requires time, reflec-
tion, a patient eye toward finding the right time to embark on such a program, a
willingness to think creatively, and fiscal discipline. It’s a balancing act. The greening
of Crestwood was fundamentally a team effort. I feel fortunate to work alongside a
team of people who pitched in to make it come together.
Tenants in a building are another important part of the team because renovating an
existing multi-tenant facility to LEED standards is likely to occur while the tenants are
occupying their offices and trying to conduct business as usual. Managing an office
building is much more challenging when a building is undergoing a renovation, but
managing an office facility during a green rehab provides an unparalleled opportunity
to educate tenants about the benefits of going green and explain why it’s important.
It’s also an opportunity to enlist their help in the process, perhaps even to make the
building perform better than initially planned, through education and outreach (ideally
in non-threatening and fun ways).
There’s a lot of work to be done. The nation has 1.5 billion square feet of existing
buildings that need to be sensibly renovated over the next thirty years. We have
somewhere between 500,000 and a million brownfield sites that need to be restored.
We have 6.3 million kilometers of roads, and, despite the fact that 75 percent of trans-
portation funds ($60 billion) is devoted to maintenance, we need over twenty times
that amount ($1.3 trillion) to adequately redress aging highways. The infrastructure
ostensibly distributing clean water to us all is, on average, over fifty years old, with
most of the older cities in the United States relying on systems that date back one
hundred and fifty years. Just restoring and protecting old steel bridges with toxic
lead-based anticorrosion compounds costs us $350 billion a year. 13 The list goes on
and on.
The long list reminds me of the computer game Sim City, where happy-go-lucky
building sprees in the early rounds yield to a growing weight of expenditures later to
manage aging and failing infrastructure. The point of the game, I think, is two-fold:
Manage your growth at a deliberate pace, and devote sufficient resources to managing
what you have already built rather than blithely building more projects.
Working with projects such as Crestwood, and devoting time and money and other
resources to making existing buildings function more effectively, comprise the first
steps in what my colleagues and I hope will be ever-greater attention to restorative or
regenerative building practices. It’s not the easiest journey in the world. Of all the
LEED projects our company has been involved with over the years—including new
construction projects at the Platinum level—the greening of Crestwood was our most
difficult and challenging undertaking. There’s no lack of green consultants out there
willing, for a fee, to advise on this process. But there is most certainly a lack of actual
LEED for Existing Buildings product—only around sixty as of this writing, many of
which are owner-occupied and/or single-occupancy.
Storm Cunningham, author of The Restoration Economy and a leading proponent
of devoting our resources to restoring what we have already built (as opposed to build-
ing new), notes this difference between conservation and sustainable development: