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Curtailing Growth’s Footprint Developers Apply LEED Across a Wider Landscape
July, 2009
By Barbara Carss
Engineers and urban planners are historic, but not necessarily harmonious partners in forging the built environment. The evolution of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program is a good example of how the two disciplines can constructively critique and complement each other.
LEED for Neighbourhood Development (ND) is one of the most recent initiatives of the US and Canada Green Building Councils aimed at broadening the context for sustainability beyond the walls of a building or the boundaries of a site. It targets development lands and considers how the location, density and form of development can make the most efficient use of resources and mitigate the impact that the development’s occupants have on the environment.
“The LEED program is meant to push the industry to see what is achievable,” reflects Dan Leeming, the Co-Chair of the Canada Green Building Council’s (CaGBC) LEED ND committee and a principal of the consulting firm The Planning Partnership. “Personally, I have seen quite an increase in the number of well known developers who are prepared to make that shift.”
More than 20 Canadian developers are now participating in the US Green Building Council’s (USGBC) LEED ND pilot program, while the CaGBC committee is assessing criteria developed through the US program and modifying them to fit Canadian climatic, environmental and regulatory conditions. The USGBC wrapped up a public consultation period for its pilot program in June and is now developing the final version of the LEED ND criteria, which the USGBC membership will vote on later this year. CaGBC expects to have its LEED ND program ready for launch in the spring of 2010.
Like other LEED programs for construction and design of new buildings or operations and maintenance of existing buildings, LEED ND establishes some prerequisites and a wide range of options for accumulating points toward certification. In this scenario, however, the USBGC collaborated with the Congress of New Urbanism and the Natural Resources Defense Council to devise the pilot criteria. This melds differing yet compatible expertise in energy-efficient and sustainable infrastructure, pedestrian- and transit-friendly design and ecosystem protection to create a more comprehensive framework than merely assessing how buildings perform as isolated entities.
“It’s not just about new houses. It’s about everything,” Leeming asserts.
Prerequisites and potential points are divided into three main categories: smart location and linkage; neighbourhood pattern and design; and green construction and technology. A few points are also available for innovative design and design processes.
Certification can be awarded at three different stages: 1) for the initial conceptual plan for a development area; 2) when that plan is approved by an entity of authority – typically a municipal government; and 3) when the development or the first phase of a development with a long-term build-out is complete.
BROWNFIELD INFILL
Faubourg Boisbriand, an envisioned 1,700-unit residential community on the site of a former General Motors assembly plant in the city of Boisbriand, Quebec, is one of the first Canadian pilot projects to break ground, after achieving LEED Gold status in Stage 2. About 800 residential units have already been sold and the developers expect about 300 will be built and occupied by the end of this year.
“We think by 2013 it will be quite advanced,” says Hélène Gignac, Chief Operating Officer with Faubourg Boisbriand LP.
A mix of condominium apartments, triplexes, row-houses, townhouses and seniors’ housing are slated for approximately 54 acres of the 240-acre site, which also accommodates retail/commercial development and an area for a future business park. More than two-thirds of the planned 1 million square feet of retail space has now been built, mostly along the site’s frontage on Highways 15 and 640 where big box stores are concentrated. Smaller, boutique-style shops and restaurants are planned for the main streets of the village core within easy walking distance for residents.
“When the LEED ND pilot program was introduced, we had just begun to plan our residential so it was a question of timing in our case,” Gignac recalls. “Our vision of how to do real estate development was a good match for the criteria. We looked at the criteria and we looked at what we were doing in terms of our vision and we said: we’re there.”
As a redevelopment site within a built-up area, it already met some key LEED ND objectives since it was connected to existing infrastructure and public transit routes and would remediate and make productive new use of a derelict property. (Ultimately, property tax revenue from the site is projected at more than three times what GM paid annually for its facility.) From the developer’s perspective, the site’s size and location at the intersection of two well-travelled highways on the Montreal metropolitan region’s north shore more than counterbalanced its status as a brownfield site.
“From an economic point of view, the north shore is the fastest growing region of the province,” Gignac says. “In terms of land assembly, it was cutting down on the time and risk of assembling the land, and the contamination was not very deep or serious or complicated. It was in pockets.”
Other point-earning initiatives are likewise based on a cost-benefits analysis and projections for return on investment. In its role as land developer, Faubourg Boisbriand LP strived to establish design parameters that would make economic sense for residential developers to come in and build out the plan’s vision. These directives focus primarily on energy efficiency, water efficiency and pedestrian-friendly and transit-oriented features.
Housing must be built to the Nouveau Climat standard – a level of energy-efficiency at least 25% better than the requirements of Quebec’s Building Code. Dual-flush toilets and low-flow faucets and showerheads are mandatory, while plants, trees and shrubs must be selected from a list of approved native species that require limited watering. Even the lawns have been specified to reduce water use.
“We developed a recipe, working with an agronomist,” Gignac reports. “It has two types of fescue with some clover.”
Pedestrian paths throughout the site provide links from the residential to commercial areas, and essential services such as the grocery store are situated within convenient walking distance of the homes. For longer distances, the developer is now working with other public interest groups to advocate for new commuter train service between Boisbriand and the northern end of Montreal’s subway line located on the island of Laval. This would augment existing bus and train service.
GREENFIELD DEVELOPMENT
Across the country in Alberta, the developers of a new community in the County of Rocky View face similar issues on the rapidly growing suburban edge of a major Canadian city – in this case, Calgary – but also the challenges of a different development culture and tradition of land use.
“In Alberta and Saskatchewan and probably in Manitoba as well, greenfield development is still going to be fairly predominant for many, many years to come,” maintains Birol Fisekci, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bordeaux Properties, the developer of Harmony, an envisioned mixed-use community with 3,500 residential units and a local base for employment building on the economic development potential of the nearby Springbank municipal airport. “The one challenge for LEED ND for us is that it really does tend to focus on brownfields.”
Nevertheless, the conceptual plan for the 480-acre tract of former ranch land has been LEED certified at Stage 2 and development could begin as early as the spring of 2010 if market demand justifies it. The lands have been deemed of marginal agricultural value and thus arguably a preferred place to channel the growth that is forecast to come to the area.
Although the density of development is lower than that of other LEED pilot projects, the plan scored points for energy and water efficiency, pedestrian-friendly configuration and balance of green space – which Fisekci calls a positive alternative to the growing trend in cities like Calgary toward ever larger homes on smaller lots.
“LEED ND is our benchmark, but I am a big believer in the triple bottom line,” he stresses. “The environmental initiative is extremely important, but not to the exclusion of economic and social factors.”
At Harmony, densities will range from a low of 2.5 units per acre at the periphery to 11 units per acre in the village core. In addition to 1,000 units of housing, including seniors’ housing and four-storey multi-family buildings, the 50-acre village core will encompass main street retail, medical offices, community space and an arts facility housing a music conservatory affiliated with Calgary’s Mount Royal College.
For Rocky View, this represents a significant departure from a previous pattern of estate development on 2 to 4-acre lots. “We have to keep in mind we are in an area where traditionally all residential has been single-family. The County is taking a very positive leap forward in changing its land use practices for developable land by allowing us to have a significant multi-family component as well,” Fisekci says.
On the sustainable technology front, the development will be built with the piping to allow for reuse of grey water within buildings even though Alberta continues to prohibit the practice. Bordeaux Properties is also working with the non-profit public interest group WaterSMART to encourage the provincial government to revise rules for grey water use.
DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY
Such steps are in sync with LEED’s market transformation goals. Devisors of the CaGBC’s LEED ND program have been particularly conscious of the need for standards that are applicable across the country, can be realistically but not too easily achieved, and don’t require participants to expend extra money, time and labour to document procedures that are simply part of securing municipal planning approvals.
“In many jurisdictions in Canada there are already very rigorous planning controls in place,” Leeming observes. “What we find in Ontario, for example, is a very tight structure of urban boundaries. Leapfrog sprawl really is not permitted.”
The various stages and levels of LEED ND certification provide for a spectrum of application, investment and commitment – from planning principles to actual communities with low or no carbon footprints. For example, municipal officials in the Town of Oakville on the west side of the Greater Toronto Area have now withdrawn from the USGBC’s pilot program because the market conditions aren’t yet right for development to move forward in a vast 5,400-acre greenfield area slated to one day accommodate 50,000 to 55,000 residents and 30,000 to 35,000 jobs, but a LEED ND compliant template is in place.
“The principles are still to a large degree embedded in our secondary plan,” says Charles McConnell, Oakville’s Manager of Long Range Planning. “We’ve established our own sustainability checklist that we will monitor ourselves on a subdivision-by-subdivision basis. It is part of our process.”
This is really what Stages 1 and 2 of the LEED ND process are meant to accomplish. Alternatively, the criteria can also provide guidance in the absence of proactive plans.
“There are many jurisdictions that may be working with older plans and older planning instruments,” McConnell adds. “Through the LEED ND program there is a whole series of criteria that can lead to a model for sustainability and provide a means of measuring how we can actually meet the criteria.”
As with all LEED rating systems, the levels of certification signify and reward attainment of increasingly meritorious and difficult performance targets. However, Silver, Gold or Platinum certification could be an even harder stretch since LEED ND’s greater emphasis on connections to the surrounding environment leaves developers and investors more reliant on external factors than in building-specific programs.
“If you’re doing a brownfield infill site on three acres in downtown Toronto, you’ve got the density, the transit, the connections to existing services,” Leeming observes. “In a greenfield subdivision it’s much, much harder to build a LEED ND project. You don’t have any control over when the school and other community services are going to get built. You don’t have any control over transit. You’re typically dealing with lower density, which also undermines the economic case for some of the technologies like district energy.”
In part, that’s why Fisekci wanted to participate in the USGBC’s pilot program. “I thought it would give me an opportunity to really voice an opinion,” he says.
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