Dockside Green, Victoria, British Columbia.
LEED certification is often a sham. The point system used by the U.S. Green Building Council is too easy to manipulate for the sake of marketing. For example, bike racks and showers earn points even if the building is sited on the edge of a freeway. The proximity of one bus line in the suburbs is equal to a downtown grid crisscrossed by public transportation. I’ve seen aerial pictures of LEED-certified, green-roofed buildings surrounded by moats of asphalt parking. The situation is perverse. Isolated features are used to green wash environmental time bombs—the architectural equivalent of putting a few pieces of organic lettuce on a factory-farmed beef patty.
A new type of LEED certification, LEED for Neighborhood Development or LEED-ND, promises to address some of these deep flaws. I attended a workshop on October 25 at CITYCENTRE, 14 miles west of downtown, to find out about the new point system. Douglas Farr, the original chair of the committee that developed the standard, gave the presentation.
LEED-ND came about as a collaboration between the U.S. Green Building Council and two partners: the National Resource Defense Council and the Congress for New Urbanism. This last group is vilified, especially among academic architects, for requiring nostalgic aesthetics into their codes and for the distance between the ideals they espouse and the resort developments they design. So I went into the workshop skeptical both of the LEED point system and the New Urbanist partners.
Farr started off with examples from Normal, Illinois and BedZed, a suburb of London. Right away, it was clear that LEED-ND does indeed shift the consideration from individual buildings to urban context. He showed a waste treatment water feature at Dockside Green in British Columbia that residents pay a premium to face.
Sustainable urbanism needs to be commodified, legalized, and normalized, Farr argued. His slogans for changing social norms were especially entertaining:
“Sex is better within ¼ mile of mass transit.”
“I thought he was hot until I realized he drives more than 20,000 miles a year!”
“Your SUV Makes You Look Fat.”
Farr’s build up was very convincing, and then came the actual explanation and exploration of the point system. We broke out into groups. Each table attempted to determine whether a local development would qualify for LEED-ND certification. We played the role of inspector, ticking our way through a long and complex checklist, parsing out elaborate definitions in an accompanying binder as thick as a biochemistry textbook.
I sat at the table considering a superfund site in the Fifth Ward that developer Frank Liu is turning into a dense neighborhood of townhouses. Mr. Liu sat right next to me, brimming with energy and determined that his project would cross the silver threshold. LEED-ND is comprised of prerequisites that must be met and optional points added up at the end. The superfund redevelopment easily met the prerequisites for avoiding sensitive lands and it earned innovation points: it is the first and only superfund site to be cleaned up through private financing.
The prerequisites abolish buildings that are inaccessible to the pedestrian and the public street. No blank facades, no high fences lining the street, no security gates between the pedestrian and the front door. For that reason alone, I became a fan of LEED-ND.
The definitions and weighting of points for transit, income diversity, and proximity to jobs were less satisfying, though. METRO wisely does not run many buses by the superfund site now, but it easily could in the future. This type of chicken-egg problem came up again and again leading me to wonder if LEED-ND is compatible with underserved, low-income neighborhoods. Also, Mr. Liu was not rewarded enough for building close to downtown jobs. Perversely, the joblessness of the immediate environs of the Fifth Ward rob the development of points. Furthermore, the points rewarding a diversity of housing types were not strong enough to persuade Mr. Liu to accommodate low-income families.
I had other quibbles. Handicapped accessibility only earns one point. Ten points, awarded on a scale based on the percentage of accessible units, would be appropriate given that access is an instrumental freedom—a means and an end to the kind of society we ought to build. At least accessibility made the list, I was told.
On the whole, I was convinced that widespread legalization and normalization of LEED-ND would move the world closer to sustainability. It turns the technical architecture and urban planning world of sidewalk widths, intersections per mile, façade permeability, density of residential units, and diversity of uses into a branded, comprehensible process that a non-expert can more or less trust.
Duany Plater-Zyberk, the firm synonymous with New Urbanism did do the design for the superfund redevelopment. (See Swamplot's Fifth Ward: New Urbanists Meet Old Toxic Waste.) However, the LEED-ND point system did not, for the most part, reward nostalgia or faux-Charleston styling. LEED-ND's relative neutrality to aesthetics is a relief.
The barrier to legalizing LEED-ND would be lower, one might suspect, in Houston than elsewhere given our fame for no-zoning. The presentation and the exercise made clear, however, that our “minimum parking allotments” and “minimum setbacks,” as defined in Chapter 42 of the city ordinances, are major barriers. They turn the whole city outside downtown into a one-size-fits-all suburban zone.
Frank Liu decried plans for increasing parking requirements. “I hate to see new regulations that make doing the right thing harder,” he said, adding that, “SPUDs (Special Purpose Urban Districts) would be a game changer.”
No doubt, the new LEED-ND point system can be gamed. Somewhere, LEED-ND developments will replace existing neighborhoods or environments that should have been preserved. They will be enclaves, free of metal gates but marked affordability barriers, that perpetuate income inequality and segregation. That said, sitting next to Frank Liu, watching him respond to the challenges posed by the LEED-ND prerequisites and points, was very convincing. I could see his plans for the former superfund site becoming even more promising.
by Raj Mankad
