The Broken Promise of LEED

Kaid Benfield, on the broken promise of LEED’s “green” buildings:

In particular, did you know that this latest LEED-Platinum home – the highest rating bestowed by the Green Building Council, in theory only for the very greenest of green buildings – is nearly three times the size of the average new American home? Would you be surprised to learn that it sits on a lot occupying two-thirds of an acre, consuming nearly twice as much land as the average new-home lot in a US metro area? How about that it is located in a “gated community” on the far outskirts of Las Vegas, 1.2 miles to the nearest transit stop? Or that its Walk Score is a miserable 38 out of a possible 100 points?

[…]

But I do hold the LEED standards accountable for bestowing the system’s highest rating on a building that not only isn’t likely the best of the best in total green performance but may not even be average, considering its size, land consumption, climate conditions, and especially its transportation characteristics. LEED does a lot of good; but, unfortunately, at its worst the system doesn’t really measure how green something really is but how many credit points it can check off for having compliant technology.

As I’ve mentioned before, to find true sustainability you have to look beyond the checklist and focus on stewardship - a comprehensive analysis of both the individual project and the context and system that project fits into. While the house Kaid describes can boast a full checklist of green strategies, it fails the test of stewardship. It fails because the reliance on the car for transportation makes the lifestyle of its inhabitants less sustainable than those in walkable neighborhoods that live in an 80 year old house with no insulation. It fails because its hardscape and vast pool ignore the context of life in a desert. It fails because of the inordinate amount of resources consumed to make this one enormous house with only 3 bedrooms. This is the broken promise of LEED: certified platinum but a putrid shade of green.

Kaid ends his excellent piece with a brilliant point:

But why shouldn’t that work in both directions? Why should a building be considered green if its location is brown? Or, at the very least, why should a building qualify for the highest, platinum rating – signifying the greenest of all green buildings – if it is completely dependent on long automobile trips that will collectively emit more carbon than the building’s efficient heating and cooling systems will save? Maybe ten years ago, the green building movement was so new that it would have been counterproductive to have high standards. But we should be better than that now.

Retiring Abroad

Speaking of retiring, Jacquelyn Smith has a list of the top countries to retire to in 2013 if you aren’t inclined to remain in your current community:

Planning to retire abroad? Ecuador is the top spot for North American retirees, according to InternationalLiving.com’s newly-released Annual Global Retirement Index 2013.

[…]

The South American country offers great variety in lifestyle options, she [Jennifer Stevens, Executive Editor of International Living] adds. You have sunny beaches, temperate mountain villages, college towns where there are plenty of cultural offerings, and historic colonial cities. “This country rolls out the red carpet for its seniors, as well—offering benefits like 50% off international airfares and cultural events. Plus Ecuadorians are welcoming, friendly, and easy-going. It’s a friendly place to launch an adventure in retirement.”

Other countries on the list:

1. Ecuador
2. Panama
3. Malaysia
4. Mexico
5. Costa Rica

I would bet most retirees who relocate are looking for a little slice of heaven for a price they can afford. For some that means seclusion in pristine nature - the beach, the rain forest, the mountains. For others it means enjoying the culture of town, whether a small village or large city. Probably not many retirees who move to one of these countries are looking for the suburban life though.

Many Shades of Gray

Leslie Braunstein, writing for Urban Land, on the needs of retiring boomers:

A majority of older Americans want to age in their current homes, even when they need assistance, according to surveys cited in the report. Other people are remaining in their homes, at least for the time being, because of the difficulty of selling them in the current housing market. However, many who are able to move are choosing urban locations—both cities and suburban “town centers”—where they can be close to grown children, friends, work, public transportation, and health care. “Leading-edge boomers will not settle gracefully into quiet retirement and move into traditional senior housing communities for years, if they ever do,” McIlwain says. “This is not a generation that is looking forward to moving back into a dormitory or other institutional setting,” he adds.

[…]

Centrally located urban neighborhoods, including those in downtown cores as well as inner-ring areas, can provide services and amenities—such as public transit, health care, pedestrian-friendly streets, arts, cultural events and facilities, ongoing education opportunities, libraries, stores, and human interaction—that appeal to older and younger residents alike. To accommodate a higher proportion of seniors, however, cities may need to make a range of infrastructure improvements such as curb cuts, benches at transit stops, access to bathrooms, slower timing of traffic lights, well-maintained sidewalks, and zoning that allows people to rent out portions of their homes.

Regardless of your age or proximity to retirement, consider for a moment how you would like to age. I would imagine that the institutional “retirement center” or even the resort like “active adult” community are not high on the list. Our lives are built within the context of our towns and neighborhoods. There is no reason that retirement should change that. Yes the needs change, the desires change, and sometimes the means change. But retiring within the community you spent your life is so much preferred to being sequestered with a homogenous demographic of retirees. I believe that the world is truly better for everyone when we don’t have specialized neighborhoods and communities for any demographic. There is a richness and vitality to embracing the diversity around us.

As this report notes, traditional compact development patterns are better prepared to support aging in place than sprawling suburbia. These places are conducive to car free lifestyles and have a great mix of amenities for all ages. As a retiree, being able to choose to ditch the car and not compromise on living life to its fullest is a great freedom. It is much better than stubbornly clinging to a drivers license for fear of being institutionalized. I know that my grandmother continued driving well past the point it was safe for her to do so just because her lifestyle would have suffered without her car.

T-Bikes

Troy Turner, writing for Yanko Design, reports on designer Jung Tak’s concept for bike sharing storage:

This ingenious bike sharing system, designed specifically for the city of Seoul, focuses on the problem of parking capacity in the urban environment where limited space is available. The minimal T-Bikes are contained in vending machine-like, compact modular stations that can be easily relocated to popular areas or even transported as a permanent installation on a truck for mobile delivery. Simply locate and check out bikes directly from a smartphone!

It’s a neat design, though some have questioned the resilience of the design. Regardless, it is nice to see some innovative thought towards making urban biking a better experience.

Making Better Streets

Amalgamated, on transforming streets:

How can an arterial streets be improved? Lancaster, a city of 158,000 provides some lessons. The city recently completed an $11.5 million dollar project to revitalize its main street, Lancaster Boulevard. The main street, like many in North America, was in decline due to competition from commercial centers and strip malls. For years, big box retailers and regional malls had captured nearly all new commercial growth. The City was looking for a strategy to revitalize the main street and settled on a revitalization that emphasized slowing traffic and improving the streetscape.

The resulting street is pretty great. I particularly like the “Ramblas” concept - a flexible part of the street that is typically for parking but can be easily changed to a plaza for street fairs, farmers markets, and other events. As for the economic results?

According to Moule & Polyzoides forty-nine new businesses have opened, property values rose by 10 percent (the rest of the city saw a 1.25 percent decline), and 800 permanent jobs were created. Furthermore, there were significant benefits to public safety. Traffic collision rates were cut in half, while injury-related collisions plummeted 85 percent as a result of the new street design and traffic pattern (based on a comparison of the two years prior to the transformation with the two years following).

Overall, this is a great example of how public investment can make for a more productive, more human environment. We need more of this.

The Genius of Traditional Development

Graeme Sharpe, writing for Urban Indy, has a great post contemplating the genius of traditional buildings:

Have you ever been to a old downtown and marveled at the historic buildings? Have you ever wondered how they could create such beautiful buildings on such small budgets, compared to the placeless architecture we are told is barely affordable today?

This is really an analysis of traditional building patterns and typologies rather than an exploration of style, but it is right on. His “recipe” for traditional development is this:

1. Leverage small investments
2. Share with your neighbors (the advantages of party wall construction)
3. Build up, not out (a celebration of incrementalism with a critique of minimum parking requirements)

The focus on incremental, small investment growth that empowers citizens to participate in the development process is part of what allowed the rich, vibrant neighborhoods of historic districts to develop their unique character. One of the worst results of our current development patterns is the elimination of the small developer. Typical middle class individuals can’t build their own houses in neighborhoods and business owners can’t build their small commercial building and lease out the upstairs (either as office space or apartments) because the system is stacked against them. Between the onerous review processes with associated fees, the sprawling infrastructure, and the zoning/planning of our cities, this vibrant class of small time developer doesn’t really exist. Instead we have vast swaths of residential “communities” with a monoculture of style and amenities and large strip retail centers built by the same developer of the one a few miles down the road. Our places suffer from this consolidation of decision making both aesthetically and functionally. Small, incremental growth is more interesting, more resilient, more efficient, and more democratic.

Cognitive Dissonance

Kevin Klinkenberg on the cognitive dissonance of transportation funding:

Like all highway projects, it was chosen, funded and built with no public vote. The voters of the entire state of Missouri, and in fact the entire United States were the primary funders of the project. Again, the project was entirely for the benefit of suburban commuters, since the intersection had no congestion outside of at most 10 hours per week.

This is the cognitive dissonance that says one group of people must vote for and fund their own lifestyle choices (urbanites who use transit); while another group gets their lifestyle choices funded by everyone.

I remember in my Driver’s Ed class that it was reiterated many times that “driving is a privilege, not a right.” However neither the way we fund transportation nor the way we plan cities reflect that idea.

Slower can be Faster

Kenneth Small and Chen Feng Ng have a radical idea: slow roads can provide faster travel. From their report:

Older urban parkways, such as the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway in Los Angeles, and an extensive parkway system on Long Island, feature architecturally interesting structures, attractive landscaping, and designs that fit into the surrounding landscape. They also provide ample capacity and are much cheaper than modern Interstates. Such designs are still possible…

[…]

The choice of lane width leads to a tradeoff between free-flow speed and capacity, but the tradeoff is not symmetric. We find that squeezing more lanes into a given road width produces large time savings during congested peak periods. By contrast, wider lanes and shoulders offer only slightly higher off-peak speeds. Thus, the compact design with higher capacity often results in shorter total travel times. Furthermore, people find congested travel especially onerous, making it even more likely that a system of urban roads carrying people at modest speeds will make travel more pleasant.

Compact roads also have considerable environmental advantages. They integrate better into urban landscapes because they accommodate tighter curves and steeper grades. They require smaller structures and less earth moving. Neighborhoods suffer less disruption, an advantage accentuated by the lower free-flow speeds. Therefore, urban residents are likely to benefit from the smaller environmental footprint of these roads as well as from their superior ability to carry high-peak traffic flows.

The key is factoring in congestion. A 3 lane road designed for 60 mph peak speeds will accommodate more traffic in less time than a 2 lane road designed for 65 mph peak speeds using the same pavement width. The slower roads will be more pleasant as well as they can be made to more closely follow the natural contours of the landscape. Of course, making better performing roads is only part of the picture. Connecting two productive places with an efficient and effective road is great, but we must also ensure that the places on either end are productive as well. The most productive places tend to also be the neighborhoods where the automobile has been tamed such that the neighborhood can operate at the human scale rather than the scale of the machine.

Design for Learning

Karissa Rosenfield, reporting for Arch Daily, relays the findings of a study on the impact the design of a school has on learning:

For decades, schools have slowly morphed into prison-like facilities with artificially lit rooms and barricaded playgrounds. However, the trend is beginning to shift. With a highlight on sustainable design, a focus on safety and an increased demand on positive learning environments, more people are paying attention to the way we design our schools.

[…]

They found that “73 percent of the variation in pupil performance driven at the class level can be explained by the building environment factors measured in this study.” This means “placing an average pupil in the least effective, rather than the most effective classroom environment could affect their learning progress by as much as the average improvement across one year.”

Design matters.

Making Productive Places

Chuck Marohn is back writing after a holiday break and he is on a roll. In a post contemplating the nature of productivity he presents an argument for traditional development patterns based on productivity alone. I find these kind of analyses fascinating:

In order to provide an apples to apples analysis, I went to the adjoining city of Brainerd to make a comparison of the Mills site – the most productive site on this STROAD – to the productivity found in the traditional development pattern. The nine blocks of downtown Brainerd shown below create a site of slightly less size – 17.4 acres – but far greater value. The total value of these nine blocks is $18.9 million, a per acre productivity of $1.08 million, a 72% premium over the Mills STROAD site.

[…]

The traditional development pattern of the downtown not only starts the productivity race 72% ahead of the STROAD, it has lots of opportunity to grow. All of the parking can easily be converted to more productive uses. When that low hanging fruit is consumed, all of the buildings can be improved. The second and third floors can be recaptured, renovated and remodeled. This doesn’t require one sugar daddy but can be accomplished through the organic functioning of many different players. And when this happens, it won’t suck the life out of the surrounding properties. To the contrary, this can only happen successfully in conjunction with the surrounding neighborhoods. Even though the current downtown is far more financially productive than the STROAD, the current atrophy and decline should be the low point. With a little different focus, it is easy to envision the value of these nine downtown blocks doubling, tripling or more.

We need to focus on making our places productive. In an era when we bounce from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis, we cannot afford to keep throwing money into low value infrastructure and development patterns. As Chuck advocates, we must put our limited resources into making places that are productive and efficient. The good news is that those same patterns that make for resilient, productive places also make for the most livable places as well. We literally can get more for less.