Now that the very last remnants of ’snowpocalypse’ are gone, I thought it would be a good time for the DJC Green Building Blog to ask “just what did we learn?”

(For those of you not in the Seattle area, a thick blanket of snow carpeted the Pacific Northwest for most of the past week and a half. In Seattle, this amounts to a once-every-15-years-event).

As a city there weren’t many surprises: we learned Seattle doesn’t really know how to deal with snow and local drivers understand how it works even less.

But as individuals did we connect to our immediate environments a little bit more? I did. I live in a very walkable neighborhood with a market, restaurants and a coffee shop all across the street. A little further away there’s a retail district and a movie theatre. I walk to these places constantly and use them frequently.

But here’s the thing: beind snowed in forced me to think about my local amenities differently. No longer did I have the choice to drive to the movie theatre. If I wanted to go, I had to walk. And if I wanted other entertainment not across the street, well I had to reconsider just how much I wanted that too. Was I willing to walk for it?

Cutting out the choices shifted my perspective. If city planners ever hope to make the car a defunct item, that’s the kind of space they’re going to need to create.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was thinking differently: all of my local restaurants were packed whenever I passed by them (even sushi.) People I know who never take the bus were doing it. Or walking to places they had never considered walking to.

The Seattle Times  reported on local retailers seeing big foot trafffic. Looking back on the week and a half, it was annoying, yes. But having Mother Nature limit my choices for me was also kind of nice.

Green building is about creating a structure that gives back to its community a little bit more than the standard product. But a green building in the middle of nowhere only does so much good. Sustainable living, on the other hand, is about creating a community that doesn’t just take but gives back. In a way, the snow made me give back more to my community because it forced me to interract even more with it.

There’s a kind of momentum there, if a city could only capture it. But how is it possible to capture a forced locality, if you will, and turn it into better urban planning? It seems like there’s a great opportunity there, if only someone would step up and find a way to take it.

This week, I wrote an article in the DJC that looked at green building programs outside of Seattle.

The story quoted King County GreenTools, a program that supports green building in the county, as saying every suburban city is interested in green building but to

Built Green project in the Issaquah Highlands

different levels. So far, it said there are only two suburban jurisdictions, Kirkland and Redmond, which have started green building programs. (I have since learned via a representative of the city of Issaquah that that city also has an official green building program. Issaquah has supported green building practices for over eight years.)

Even in the DJC offices, the story struck home on two very different levels. One of my colleagues, let’s call them Randall Potersdam, was surprised that Redmond’s green building program had been around less than a year. Having spent a lot of time on the Eastside, this person thought there would have been a green building program in Redmond ages ago.

Another colleague, let’s call them Tallulah Jillian, was surprised by the extent of cities that were interested and actually working on aspects of green building. When you think of green building, Tallulah said, you usually think of it as an urban thing… but if 39 cities in King County are interested in it, it might not be such an urban thing after all.

How about it, is green building an urban thing?

Duo, a Built Green project in Kirkland

If so, there are a lot of reasons why it could be more prevalent in big cities. Big cities have more money and more staff members through which to spread the work of developing green building programs and policy. They also tend to own utilities, which can be a source of funding or product or project investigation.

But smaller cities, that have buy in from residents, can make things happen without the bureaucracy of large city government. For example, Kirkland, Issaquah and Redmond have no problem calling expedited permitting “expedited”. Seattle calls a similar, newly launched program “facilitated” because it doesn’t want to guarantee the project’s permitting will actually take less time.

So what do you think? Is green building an urban thing or not? Do you think building green is easier or more difficult in urban or suburban cities?

Tune in for my next post for a breakdown of where LEED buildings actually are spread across the state. You might be surprised.

I’ve spent the last two days at two very different but very intersting conferences. The first, King County’s Green in Place: From Policy to Practice conference, featured Gary Lawrence as the keynote speaker and during his talk (discussed at length in an article in the Sept. 19 DJC.. read it if you’re at all intersted in ths subject) he said something a little out of the typical routine:

 “If you’re involved in sustainable design and (not) addressing issues of equity and justice, you’re not involved in sustainability.”

Arup's Treasure Island project in San Francisco

He defined social equity or social justice as considering the impact your building and designing choices have on other humans. So instead of putting on that green roof, you consider how the extra steel needed to reinforce the roof will affect the lives of the people who will mine the steel. Basically you look at your choices from an all inclusive roundabout way.

It takes a lot of thinking. And for those people just entering into green building or sustainable design, it might be too much work to add on (at the beginning stage of the game).

But intrinsically, is Lawrence right? Can you, Mr. Architect or Ms. City Planner really call your work sustainable if you don’t consider all the different people your choice will affect both in the past and in the future? Or is it just too much to handle?

The question in itself is fascinating, and one that I, by my lonesome, cannot answer. What do you think?

P.S. (Lawrence’s resume could make most people’s eyes widen. He has been a former DPD planning director, UW professor, adivsor to the Clinton Administration’s Council on Sustainable Development, the United Nation’s Habitat II, the Brazilian President’s Office, the British Prime Minister’s Office, not to mention currently running Arup’s sustainable urban development globally.)

For more information, it turns out King County Executive Ron Sims has already tapped this topic in a keynote talk of his own. Read the press release. I don’t know much about the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, but it has some interesting definitions here.

Hold the presses Seattle sustainability people! Marni Kahn is taking an extended sabbatical from the Cascadia Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council and has resigned her position as Washington State director!

This, my friends, is a big deal.

For those of you that don’t know, Cascadia is pretty much the main face of green in this region. It hosts conferences, trainings, brings speakers to town and is the official information source for LEED and Living Building information. In Washington, the go-to girl for the last two years has been Marni Kahn.

Marni specializes in providing sustainable design and construction educational training curriculum to… well just about everybody. She is a “firm believer,” according to her profile on Cascadia, that people, not technology make great places.

She also smiles through everything, whether it’s hosting world famous speakers or managing gigantic conferences. Seriously.  Good luck Marni in your next step, whatever it may be!

Yes, this does mean there will be an open position for the Washington director, and it’s a choice position. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you all about it once the information is public.

The move is just the most recent in a series of job changes for longterm Seattle green people (witness both Lynne Barker and Lucia Athens of Seattle’s Green Building Team). Has any other mover and shaker moved on to a new position? Is this a trend or just general business?

Let me know what you think below, or wish Marni good luck!  For more on Marni’s history, visit the bio page of Building Seattle Green here.

Here at the DJC, I write up announcements when companies promote or make new hires and let me tell you, summer is usually slow. Not this one.

In Seattle right now, there are a number of jobs available for green building or environmentally-minded individuals. So if you’re looking to come to the sunny (err) Northwest or might be looking to move, peruse the below possibilities at your leisure. Here are some of the jobs I know about:

• People for Puget Sound is making a series of new hires. They need a deputy director, a full-time education and involvement manager, a canvass director, and a community organizer.
• The Cascadia Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council was hiring a program assistant in Seattle or Portland, but the closing date was June 30. Maybe if you’re the perfect candidate they’d forgive you for applying late….
• Environmental Works, a group that provides sustainable architecture for low income populations, is hiring an executive director and an architect.

((As far as architecture goes, there’s a whole load of jobs listed at AIA’s job board here.))

• Friends of Seattle need a membership and marketing director and a technology director, both here.
• Vulcan Real Estate is hiring a senior project manager for sustainability.

I’ve also heard whisperings that Zimmer Gunsul Frasca will be hiring a sustainability guru, and the city of Seattle will be hiring someone to replace Lucia Athens. But those are rumors. Take them for what they’re worth.

And that’s all I’ve got folks! Happy job hunting….

Yesterday I wrote a story about how GreenWorks Realty  of Seattle crunched some numbers, did a little addition… and discovered that even in the not the best (to say the least) housing market over the last year, green homes in King County have sold quicker and for a higher value than their non-green counterparts.

GreenWorks looked at homes sold on the Northwest Multiple Listing Service between September 2007 and May 2008 that were “environmentally certified” - here that means LEED homes, Energy Star, or the Master Builders of King and Snohomish Counties’ Built Green Program.

On average, single family homes sold for four percent more, 18 percent quicker, and were 37 percent more valuable per square foot.

To see more or learn how condos measured up, visit GreenWorks to look at the numbers yourself here. (By the way, this is some of the first analysis of its kind).

Now, recently a pretty high level developer in the Seattle area told me there was no point in developing office space that wasn’t LEED certified anymore, because it is going to lose its value quicker.

Combine that with this research saying green homes sell quicker and for more, and logically, building green seems to make sense.

But there are a lot of challenges to building green, not to mention building green well. I could go off about the issues forever: some green systems are so new they are untested or people don’t know how to install them, it’s difficult to know if something is really green, green is “more expensive….” But I would rather hear from you.

If you can take a moment out of your holiday weekend, answer me this: What stops you from building green? If you work on residential projects, could these numbers convince you to try something new? Do these numbers matter at all and why? Do they matter in your neck of the woods, or is the information too Seattle-area specific?

And is it better for someone to do bad green design or do nothing green at all?

Or heck, you can just answer the poll at right!

I’m all ears. To read the story, press here.

It sure is amazing how one government decision can issue a string of changes (even if they are in Washington and take forever to come to fruition). Such is the decision of King County Executive Ron Sims last June to consider climate change under SEPA.

SEPA is Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act. The decision means that any project that fills out SEPA paperwork in unincorporated King County, or where King County is the lead, has to measure its greenhouse gas emissions on a spreadsheet and hand them in to the country as part of its SEPA paperwork. Doesn’t sound like much, but if it leads to mitigation (which is the direction King County is heading here) it could mean time, money, and a lot more than just a piece of paperwork.

Already, King County is creating an ordinance that would let it deny or change projects that have too high of a greenhouse gas emission impact (deadline for commenting on that is May 19).

Read the timeline below to see how it’s spreading like wildfire in this state (and California). If you work on projects in Washington, you’ll probably have to consider this in the near future. If you’re not in Washington…. well, you might still have to consider this in time.

So how does it make you feel? Is this an unfair use of government power or is a realistic way to deal with project emissions? Let me know!
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As of today, any project in Seattle that trips a SEPA review will need to calculate its greenhouse gas emissions.

What do you think? Is this a good move or is it impinging on your rights? Should the city, county and state move in this direction, and if not, what would you tell them to do?

I’ve written about this subject pretty extensively since King County kicked off the crusade last June. Back then, King County Executive Ron Sims declared his intentions to connect developments to greenhouse gasses in an executive order. To read that story, click here. 

As the deadline for action neared, I spoke with representatives of local business groups NAIOP, AGC and the Master Builders Association. They told me what their concerns were about the process. To read that story, click here.

Then Seattle began considering the changes, read about it here, and Washington State Department of Ecology Director Jay Manning advised anybody seeking a permit to start considering the same questions, read that one here.

Now, Seattle’s day has finally come. Seattle is using the same checklist that King County has had in place, though there may be some tweaks to it. To see a draft of the checklist, go here. DPD has also devoted a whole Web site to today’s changes. To see that site, visit here.

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Humans aren’t perfect. Machinery is big. Despite our very best efforts, sometimes things spill.

King County knows that but it also knows a quick response to fuel, oil and lubricant spills will stop the problem from getting bigger and (more importantly?) more expensive.

So the county, together with DBM Contractors, is offering a one-time $10,000 grant to the organization that develops and implements the best job site spill response protocol for minor spills. There’s a catch though: only schools, special districts, tribes, local governments and private nonprofits are eligible to apply.

To all you bright private company professionals, would you apply for this grant if it were open to you? Would $10,000 be enough to illicit a response or is it not enough to make it worth your while? It seems to me like people that work near, about or around machines every day could have some pretty innovative ideas about how to fix this, so why leave them out of the running? Do you agree or am I way off the mark?

And another thing, one guideline says the protocol must primarily benefit King County. Nonprofits, local governments… would this help or hinder your interest in the project? For more info on the grant, go here.

And in Pioneer Square….. 

While we’re on the topic of hazardous sites, I discovered a really interesting tool today called MapHazards that conveniently showed me the 150 hazardous sites around the area I work in (Pioneer Square) ranging from an old brownfield 250 feet away to leaking underground storage tanks to hazardous waste generators… before it annoyingly informed me this was just a sample and I had to pay for other reports (don’t you hate that?!) See the report for my workspace here.

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