Page 244 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

222 CHAPTER 7

Making Dollars and Sense
for the Green Developer

Our company has pursued a holistic approach to measuring return on our own devel-
opment projects, balancing the long-term needs of the community with the more
immediate financial concerns of tenants and financial institutions. This synergy and
balance among environmental stewardship, social obligation, and financial opportu-
nity goes by many names today—sustainability, the triple bottom line, socially respon-
sible property investing.
Regardless of the name, a business strategy that embraces and enhances the commu-
nity fabric is the one to which we aspire. To achieve this, we’ve attempted to define a set
of performance metrics that captures the simultaneously competing and reinforcing forces
of place, people and profit. We work on refining and redefining our metrics on an ongoing
basis, with the pursuit of a community-enveloping methodology at the forefront.
That is what this chapter is about—a pragmatic, holistic business approach to sus-
tainability, from very broad notions of being stewards of land and community, to the
very specific ways in which that values-centric framework is implemented, from the
theoretical to very practical application of sustainable business principles. Our approach
tends to be one that lays broad foundations first, and then drills down in to specifics.
Without viewing a specific project like Birmingham Federal Reserve & Tower in a
broader context, the individual application of dollars makes little sense. It would be
easy to follow the numbers and end up in the wrong place entirely. Much of the past
resistance to sustainability was embedded in a deeper mindset that held business and
communities hostage, believing our choices must be framed in terms of “or” rather than
“and,” that we can have environmental responsibility or social accountability or
financial opportunity. That is just not true. These are reinforcing concepts, not preclu-
sive ones.
As business professionals, we can talk about the world being flat; we can discuss tip-
ping points, and we can even freak out about economics. In each instance, what we are
talking about is seeing the daily tasks before us as part of a much larger landscape. Is
it not reasonable, then, to address change in our business in an integrated fashion rather
than a siloed one? Environmental educator David Orr has noted that quantum leaps of
change on a global scale are most efficaciously addressed community by community,
arguing rightfully that the environmental movement has “grown out of the efforts of
courageous people to preserve and protect particular places.” 10 If this is true, then we
need to—no, we must—begin constructing our thought processes around “and,” not “or.”
Applied to sustainable communities, the “or” mindset holds us back in any number
of areas: we can have affordable housing or innovative, sustainable design; we can
push economic growth for a region or retrench ourselves in an older, slower, more cos-
seting sense of community from a generation or two ago; we can revitalize our urban
core areas in ways that enrich them, or abandon them to the urban poor and go live in