When it comes to actually knowing things about sustainable real estate and such, Steve's the heavy hitter. (I'm the guy who buries YouTube links to Fleetwood Mac performances in otherwise dutiful posts.) SDP also has an actual job and is doing all the writing at Green Real Estate Law Journal, though, which means that it falls on me to comment on a pair of recent reports that bring both good and not-so-good news to the USGBC's LEED rating program.

For all its faults -- and we'll get to those below -- LEED remains the best-branded, most-recognizable way of telling a green building from, like, a beige or brown one. The good news is that, per a recent study by the Urban Green Council, building to LEED specs has proven to be roughly as expensive as building brown. (Eww on the "building brown," by the way, sorry) The bad news is that, once again, building to LEED specs has been revealed as not necessarily being as green as it seems.

The good news, then. The Urban Green Council's study, "Cost of Green in NYC," surveyed 107 properties throughout 2008, of which 63 -- 38 multi-family high-rises and 25 commercial interiors -- were pursuing LEED certification. While the results will likely be more surprising to people who don't already spend a lot of time reading about this, the study found that, in the words of Globe Street's Paul Bubny, "the cost premium on building green has all but disappeared." Construction costs in the LEED high-rises came out to around $440 per square foot, while the non-green group averaged $436 per square foot -- a difference of just one percent -- while the cost of LEED commercial interiors was actually six percent lower per square foot, $191 per square foot compared to $206. If we can take as a given that perceived cost issues are what has slowed the adoption of green building practices in New York -- and I'll take that explanation over raw laziness or some secret love for, like, half-toxic finishes -- then it qualifies as very good news to see that particular canard getting roasted.

Another recent study, though, poses a more troublesome question -- even if LEED-certified buildings cost essentially the same as non-LEED buildings, how much does that matter if LEED structures don't actually perform to a higher standard?

This isn't necessarily the first time that LEED has come under fire for being more impressive as a brand than a metric, and Steve has already discussed the hazards of LEED's bestriding-colossus status in the green-certification game in his posts on "LEED Creep." That study comes courtesy of the (passive construction alert!) National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Research in Construction, which found that LEED certified buildings do not, on balance, perform more efficiently than non-LEED structures, and in many instances actually consume more energy. Furthermore, the correlation between a building's LEED certification level (platinum, silver, molybdenum, whatever) and its relative energy efficiency was found to be notably weak. Again, this is probably bigger news to me than it is to gbNYC's founder/publisher/magus-in-chief, but I found them interesting in the context of Jacob Gordon's brief, blistering piece on LEED in (the pretty excellent) Good Magazine.

The essence of Gordon's argument is that, because LEED ratings are granted on pre-construction promises, many of those LEED Gold plaques wind up conferring credibility (and PR advantages) to buildings that often prove undeserving once they move from computer screen to skyline. "Because LEED buildings don't have to perform up to spec in real life," Gordon writes, "LEED has contributed to a trend of showboating and point scrounging, leaving energy efficiency—arguably the most important metric—lost in the shuffle." Gordon favors Germany's Passivhaus/Passive House standards -- which are just beginning to make their presence felt in the US -- and the EPA's far more stringent (and weirdly obscure) Energy Star rating system, but applauds the USGBC's belated-but-welcome requirement that developers provide water and energy usage data over the first five years of a building's life in order to keep the plaque their worthy plans have earned. It's a step in the right direction, obviously, but also a reminder of just how much closer we are to the beginning of this particular journey than we are to the end.

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