Page 285 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

THE FINE PRINT: LEGAL ISSUES IN GREEN BUILDING PROJECTS 263

■ How will people get to the building? How might I encourage the use of public
transportation? Could people travel to the building by bicycle?
■ Should I install pervious paving? A green roof?
■ How do I make sure that indoor air quality is healthy? How do I measure it? Where
do I find less toxic, low volatile organic compound (VOC) products?
■ How can I help tenants of the building recycle? Are there recycled materials I can
use in the building’s construction?
■ If I make my building more “green,” can I use that to my advantage when market-
ing the building to potential tenants or buyers?

As you seek answers to these questions, you begin to understand that building green
concerns nearly every aspect of your project, from the design of the building to your
construction budget, to how you market the building and what is expected of your ten-
ants. This means, of course, that in every contract you have with a third party, you
must address the concerns raised by the project’s green aspects.
This chapter explores how developers can address the contractual and legal issues
that arise in green building projects. Because many such issues must be dealt with in
the context of the design and construction contracts and in leases to building occu-
pants, our discussion will focus on those documents but will (at least briefly) address
all the major legal and contractual aspects of a real estate development project.

Design and Construction

KICK-OFF
Once a developer has decided to construct a building, he or she must begin to think
about what that building will look like. How much square footage should the build-
ing have? What will its intended use (or uses) be? How it will relate to the sur-
rounding area?
Most important for our purposes, perhaps, is how the building will provide the serv-
ices that tenants expect. We expect much more of buildings today than four walls and a
roof. Among other things, buildings must provide easy access to electricity and water,
maintain a comfortable temperature, provide for telephone and Internet communication,
regulate humidity, and provide security and comfort for their occupants. To satisfy these
demands, buildings incorporate hundreds of different materials and complex mechani-
cal systems. Green building requires developers to satisfy these demands in ways that
use fewer resources and produce less waste than conventional methods.
The best way to work through these problems is to hold, very early in the design
process, a design charette—a meeting or meetings that include the architect, engi-
neers, contractor, and other members of the project team. Design charettes accomplish
a few things:
1 They allow the early communication of project goals to all parties. If a developer
is planning to seek LEED certification, the charette is the time to discuss the LEED
points it is feasible to seek. (If no one on the project team has any experience seek-