q. i. f?

‘I was asking a banker the other day if and when building resumes, will banks be loaning money for complex projects, like mixed-use transit oriented development, or will they go with the same old auto-oriented projects on the edge of town, which tend to be a lot easier. He said they’d be going with the easy stuff.’

In many cases, Yungmann calls the region’s utility, Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., for a bill estimate before writing a contract.
   Before last fall, “I could count on one hand the number of times people have asked me about gas and electric,” Yungmann said. “In the last year or so when rates have been going up steadily, almost every one of my first-time homebuyers will ask how much the gas and electric will be.”

From yesterday’s Sun. (BGE to Sarah Susanka: ‘We're the real trendmakers. Eat your heart out.’)

Frankly, the difference is so great that one wonders whether we inhabit the same world. No one talks about designing a sustainable building in Berlin because it is so ingrained in the culture.

Canadian architect of Berlin’s Canadian embassy, quoted in a piece about design/construction practice & regulatory environment for commercial and other large-scale building in the leading Euro countries and in North America.

On boosting ‘green’ ambition and the confrontation with Baltimore’s reality, a good article in February’s Urbanite.

Green buildings must be durable buildings. If you double the life of a building, no matter what the building is made of, you halve the environmental impact of its construction. But aren’t we building durable green buildings?
   Too often the answer is “no,” and too often the problem is moisture. . . .
   Astoundingly, most versions of LEED are silent on the critical matter of durability and its dependence on the relationship between energy and moisture control. LEED-Canada is an exception, with a Materials & Resources credit for durability . . . .
   The debate about using bamboo versus certified maple flooring is a worthy one. However, building professionals need to master building performance as well.

Peter Yost, talking straight in the Jan./Feb. Greensource.

Often the ways these projects have been diluted or hybridized means that they cannot deliver the hoped-for benefits of urbanism, including the environmental benefits. In some instances, projects pretending to be New Urbanism have been simply a pretty way to sprawl or to deliver density without parks or connected streets.

On resolving conflicts between ‘urbanism’ & ‘sustainability’ — a short book excerpt at ArchitectureWeek this week.

While it’s great to preserve pristine, historic and environmentally valuable land whenever possible, the effort is a drop in the bucket compared with the amount of land lost to inefficient, unsustainable and short-sighted development each day. Growth can be accommodated; sprawl cannot.
   Mr. O’Malley knows the statistics all too well (he repeated many of them at his GreenPrint unveiling). Since 1990, Maryland’s population has grown by 8 percent, but the amount of impermeable surface has increased by more than 40 percent.

The Sun, from a Dec. 7 editorial response to the news reported in the article I link to below.

It’s all about the soil. We’re all connected to the soil; we just don’t know it. If you can’t grow healthy soil, you can’t grow healthy plants. If you can’t grow healthy plants, you can’t grow healthy people. And if you can’t grow healthy people, how are you going to grow healthy communities? We talk about sustainable communities. Without healthy food, you can’t have sustainable communities.

Will Allen, of Growing Power, summing up in an interview in the November Urbanite.

An item this week in Annapolis newspaper The Capital reports a move made in builder-developer cooperation with environment protection interests, toward improved stormwater handling in the area. Only one builder, in only one of its ‘luxury home’ developments, but evidence of a turn to better practices underway, nevertheless. The builder-developer, consulting with a landscape architect and a Baltimore ecosystem conservation company, replaced standard stormwater collector construction for the site with construction adapted from stream restoration methods. The new approach promotes on-site absorption by plants and drainage through soil, rather than funneling large collection volume via pipe directly into a natural stream.

GreenSource  The kind of environmental work you do has obviously become much more mainstream in the past few years. What is your perspective . . . ?

John Todd  When you work with complex systems like nature, it takes a long time to accumulate enough — I’m going to use the word stories — about how nature works to be able to hold it all in your mental hands. It would have been impossible for me 20 years ago to talk about taking a whole region and using ecological principles to create a new and durable economy. (And I never, ever expected to win the Bucky Fuller Challenge, because I wasn’t offering a magic bullet.) But before then, it was impossible for me to imagine an eco-machine that would take toxic waste and render it harmless. Time is a big factor. I think there is also a shift today in how people perceive our relevance. In the past, people found our work to be . . . quixotic . . . . Everyone knew at the time we could drag petroleum out of the ground forever and that industrial foods were going to feed us all.

From an interview with biologist & ‘eco-designer’ John Todd in GreenSource.

Aside from the provisions designed to improve the financial system, I am pleased to report the new law extends a number of key tax incentives for energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy — long-standing AIA priorities. Specifically, the energy efficiency commercial building tax deduction, a critical federal incentive for green commercial building that was set to expire at the end of the year, will be extended until December 31, 2013. The extension of this deduction has been one of the AIA’s top legislative priorities for nearly two years.

From a letter praising the expansive bailout law just put through, sent yesterday by AIA president Marshall Purnell’s office.

Maryland-regional business & government news service The Daily Record has run a useful little series this past week on the USGBC’s ever more popular, ten-year-old system for establishing buildings’ and builders’ ‘greenness’ — ‘LEED,’ for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design. There’s no head-page for the series, unfortunately. To read the whole, see the last article — a look at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s very successful headquarters, the first LEED-Platinum certified building — and trace the series back from article to article using links under the series’ ‘Uncertain Savior’ graphic.

Of the articles looking at criticism of the LEED system, this one citing building-performance guru Joe Lstiburek’s public concerns is worth specific notice. His critique is a bit narrow in focus and perhaps doesn’t sufficiently credit the USGBC’s holistic aims for built-environment reform, but it seems an important one for making sense of the green building problem.

Mr Lovins should be pleased, but his satisfaction at having been proved right is tempered by lingering unease that there are echoes of the 1980s in today’s debate. The main problem with the approach to energy in the 1970s, he argues, was that the issue was defined as a supply shortage. “The question they asked was how to get more energy, at any price, instead of asking: ‘How should we use energy, why are we using it so wastefully, and what do people really use energy for?’” he says.

The magazine meets the man — in an article here.

Yesterday General Motors announced it will go solar at a plant it maintains here in Baltimore County. The rooftop installation by SunEdison (a Maryland company to the south, in Washington D.C. suburbs) will be one of the largest on this side of the country. This was noteworthy enough to be local radio news yesterday afternoon. The Sun’s report is here — oddly buried a bit in back pages today.

“‘I can tell all our new customers by all the questions they asked,’ [Harford County farmers’ market seller Cindi] Umbarger said. ‘They asked about how our animals are housed. They asked about hormones and antibiotics. They asked about where our feed comes from.’”

The Sun offers a Baltimore-region picture of the surge this season in consumer interest in locally grown produce.

In a story run in Sunday’s paper, Sun reporter Jill Rosen tells of her one-week experiment in car-free living. ‘I wanted to see if, in Baltimore, I could have the lifestyle of a Manhattanite, a Londoner or a Parisian. I would do everything I usually do, go everywhere I usually go, but without getting behind the wheel, taking taxis or begging rides from friends,’ she says. No surprise if the answer to her question seems to be Well, kind of.

I live three miles outside the city, incidentally, near Baltimore County’s boundary with neighboring Howard County. It’s a dense, semi-urban area, broadly speaking, and I can walk to a range of retail & services (with allowance for time). But there’s enormous difference between my surroundings and Rosen’s, even so. It’s likely that her full-reverse lifestyle experiment wouldn’t get off the ground around here, if her situation were that of the typical area resident.