If you're looking for a sign that green building has gone mainstream, or that Portland is on the map as a leader in that movement, you'd be hard pressed to find a clearer sign than Wednesday's cover story in USA Today.
Two new residents at the Meriwether Condos (designed by Vancouver's Peter Busby and our very own GBD Architects) began the feature, which explores how a variety of increasingly larger-scale green buildings and multi-building developments from Portland to Chicago to New York and scores of places in between are securing LEED ratings and ratcheting up investments in energy efficient mechanical, recycled materials, low-VOC paints/finishes, and natural light.
Here are a few samplings:
Portland's $2.2 billion South Waterfront project, rising on a decaying industrial site south of downtown, signals a watershed in the green-building boom.
What has been a patchwork of green buildings in many cities is expanding to whole communities, whole neighborhoods. Portland, well known as an urban-design innovator, particularly for its transit-oriented developments, is leading the way again. The green ethic — energy-efficient, water-stingy buildings full of features that stress the natural over the chemical, the recycled over the new and the renewable over the finite — is firmly mainstream....
If you're not embracing green, you won't be at the table," says Homer Williams, one of South Waterfront's developers. "We do a lot of public-private work around the country, and it's the first question that comes up now."
Developers find that green technologies and construction materials add no more than 1%-2% to costs, a premium quickly recaptured by energy savings.
"Critics will say, 'Why should we pay upfront for these things?' " says Ethan Seltzer, director of the Toulan School of Urban Studies at Portland State University. "They'd also like to believe global warming doesn't exist."
Green building, he says, "is no longer confined to capital-intensive office towers. Green technology is to the point where these are valid questions for Home Depot shoppers."
To some, the article might seem a collection of boilerplate stuff we've heard about green building for years now. And here in Portland, we often have become mired in squabbles about tram funding or the width of the green way that the USA Today article doesn't even begin to touch upon. But I think the fact that South Waterfront and Portland were chosen as emblematic of the green building movement in such a widely read mainstream paper (if admittedly McDonald's-like in its bland everyman journalistic sensibility) is cause for a pat on the back. Congrats to all those who've had a hand in making it a reality.
Great sentence in the USA TODAY article:
"The buyer demographic is diverse — empty-nesters, single professionals, well-to-do retirees, young couples looking for urban starter homes and guys such as Venice Tunnitisupawong."
Posted by: Bart King | July 29, 2006 at 01:45 PM