Green Options

I had an interesting conversation at my town’s Green Team meeting last night. One of the members was talking about someone he knows who wants to be able to put solar panels in a remote field but still wants his home credited with the power drawn from them. He doesn’t want the solar panels on his home. He doesn’t find them attractive.

I got to wondering, what will my neighbors think when I do the renovation on my house and put on solar panels? I know they won’t be surprised - they know me pretty well. But will they think the solar panels are an eyesore? Will it bother them? Will it change my image from “that green writer” to “that crazy hippie lady who made our neighborhood ugly?”

Solar panels aren’t the only thing that apparently turn people off. In September, the town of Wayne, New Jersey said no to wind turbines in their backyards.

Many of my recent posts have touched upon the theme that the building industry cannot accomplish major advances in sustainability by itself; first its market must change.

But there is ample evidence that consumers are now driving a change in the market. The USGBC website has printed a report by CoStar Group which has found “that sustainable “green” buildings outperform their peer non-green assets in key areas such as occupancy, sale price and rental rates, sometimes by wide margins…. The results indicate a broader demand by property investors and tenants for buildings that have earned either LEED® certification or the Energy Star® label and strengthen the “business case” for green buildings, which proponents have increasingly cast as financially sound investments.” The report goes on to cite “constricted supply” as one reason for the premium prices associated with sustainable buildings, and many other experts have been making the case lately that consumers either cannot find the kind of sustainable housing that they are looking for, or cannot identify what makes a property sustainable.

Fortunately, The Cascadia Region Green Building Council and the Commercial Brokers Association (CBA) are about to provide a bridge between designers and consumers in the form of a new professional certification, Certified Green Broker®. Jason McLennan, CEO of Cascadia, says, “It is often the brokers and finance professionals, not the architects and builders, who directly interface with the end user: the owner, landlord, and/or tenant. Therefore they have great influence on how owners and users may perceive the affordability and overall value of green buildings.”