Small town green micro-village

“I never leave the courtyard,“ says one of the tenants of the Bison Courtyard in the heart of the small town of Banff, Alberta, Canada (immediately surrounded by one of the most beautiful landscapes anywhere in the world, almost like a storybook).

The Bison Courtyard is just a modest $10 million building complex in scope, but it’s a shining example of what happens when progressive minds work collaboratively toward a shared vision that inspires them on a daily

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Stockholm, Sweden’s eco-city

There’s endless talk about building eco cities that don’t seem to meet reality, so it’s nice to see one that’s actually built. Developed on a 500-acre former industrial and harbor brownfield site, Hammarby Sjostad is a contemporary green, carbon-neutral-oriented neighborhood. Hammarby provides homes almost 10,000 residents with an additional 9000 homes and 10,000 jobs coming by 2015.

One key characteristic that is all too often ignored amid talk about eco

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Growing small businesses with the wind

When one thinks of wind energy, especially via those massive wind farms, small businesses don’t necessarily come to mind. That’s changing very quickly in more ways than one.

First, a clean energy broker/aggregator, Clean Currents is making it easy for small businesses to switch to wind and other renewable energies (solar, geothermal) by linking them to the best ‘green power’ prices, often lower than standard rates! Clean Current locates the

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Portland OR proves green is profitable (and delicious)

It’s the age old debate - the environment vs the economy. CEOs for Cities’ recent report, Portland’s Green Dividend provides evidence that the two are synonymous.

The key statistic* in the report is the following:
20.3 miles/day - average Portland commute
24.3 miles/day - average commute in the 33 most populous metro areas
What does 4 miles/day add up to? Figuring in a conservative $.40 mile, that translates to $1.1 billion. Then add

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The first, and only, green mall

Maybe I should start an entire category of “it was just a matter of time before this happened”, because here’s yet another one…

The Green Exchange in Chicago will be the first silver LEED-certified

tenants. Schedule for a Fall 2007 opening, it should be no surprise the 250,000 s.f. concrete loft building to be renovated is in Chicago, already regarded as the most green-minded major city in the U.S.

Regarded as

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How green is your neighborhood?

A few months ago we wrote that neighborhoods can now be green certified, via the US Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighborhood Development program.

Now that green building is becoming more of an expectation for emerging populations, here’s their criteria for what a green neighborhood should have, with (R) representing requirements and others below it being assigned points for ratings:

Smart Location & Linkage
(R) Smart Location - Walkability, Proximity

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Going for the gold in green development

It’s not easy being

. Greenbridge, a 104,000 s.f. urban infill community in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is planned to be the state’s first mixed-use development to be LEED Gold certified by the US Green Building Council, no small feat considering the first LEED certified multi-unit residential ever was announced less than a year ago.

The vision starts with the six families that make up the development team. They shared the cradle-to-cradle

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Development industry says, “Building green is here to stay”

Last week the leading real estate developers around the world gathered at the ULI’s Developing Green: Integrating Sustainability with Success conference to better understand the future of green building. Their
summation? Not only is green building here to stay (as this official conference summary is titled), but it’s fast becoming a standard, and that’s a good thing considering 40% of the carbon gas emissions released in the U.S.

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Finally, a monetary value is placed on city trees

People know a home with a large tree in front of it sells for more (nearly 1% more according to a 1988 study in Athens, GA), but what are the collective trees in a city worth and what’s their return on investment?

New York City knows, according to this NY Times article. Their trees provide an annual benefit of about $122 million, receiving a return on investment of $5.60 in benefits for every dollar spent on trees.

Dollar values are

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A truly triple bottom line third place

A lot of businesses like to call themselves triple bottom line (economic, environmental and social accounting), but one third place that’s 3BL without question is the White Dog Cafe in downtown Philadelphia.

The evidence starts with its extraordinary owner, Judy Wicks, who not only founded White Dog, but she is also the co-founder of the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and founder of the local Sustainable Business Network

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‘Best Green Cities in America’

Ever wondered what cities really were the most

? Country Home magazine ranked 379 metropolitan areas in their Best Green Cities in America report.

Here are their top 10 green cities, based on air and watershed quality, mass transit use, power use and number of organic producers and farmers’ markets:

1. Burlington, VT (pictured) - It definitely deserves the top nod. Among it’s winning attributes:
- A program collects food scraps from restaurants,

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Neighborhoods can now also receive green-certification

Buildings have long been third-party certifiable as green/sustainable via the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards administered by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), but what about neighborhoods?

Given that more than a third of greenhouse gases are generated by buildings (primarily heating and cooling them) and another third is generated transporting people and goods to and from those buildings, the

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Truly ‘triple bottom line’ urban village coming to the Bronx

One of the most concrete ways of providing sustainable/green, affordable living in NYC is to develop such a benchmark community for others to be inspired by.  That’s certainly the case with the New Housing NY Legacy Project Competition that sought triple bottom line development team to build such a place on a 40,000 s.f. site in the South Bronx.

The sustainable, affordable development competition is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s New

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Springwise’s Top 10 Eco Business Ideas 2006

So you want to think global and act local? Check out Springwise’s Top 10 Eco Business Ideas in 2006. Springwise’s list may be UK-based, but the implementation doesn’t have to be. Here’s their list - visit via the link above to see full profiles of each one.

1. Hailing a hybrid: greentomatocars’s taxi fleet consists only of hybrids.
2. Consumer generated power: Buy a wind generator for your building or neighborhood.
3. Household recycling plant:

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The first multi-unit LEED-certified residential building in the U.S.!

Hard to believe, but according to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and its evaluation arm, Conservation Services Group (CSG), 53 Standish Street in Cambridge, MA is the first multi-unit residential building to be LEED-certified, which is the criteria for green development.

Constructed by AEDI Development, 53 Standish scores high with the following green building features:

- Within walking distance of public

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Urban green building - from Mayor Bloomberg to Brad Pitt

It seems the hybrid car phenomenon is spreading to green building - though while auto manufacturers are finding the market for hybrids is finite, not so for buildings, as it’s quickly becoming a standard demand by the next generation of home buyers.

Here’s just a few of the recent stories this month alone:

- Brad Pitt is advocating for 500,000 new green building homes in New Orleans that would save $38 to $56 million/year, $1200 per

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Another ‘Why can’t more affordable housing look this good?‘

If you want a model example of how to blend a new building in with a landmark house (1907) in a historic (and very fun) neighborhood (Capitol Hill, Seattle), be affordable, transit-oriented and a green building as well, then the Pantages Apartments are a good place to start.  It’s featured in the American Institute for Architects’ new Affordable Housing Design Advisor website.

49 dwellings (45 in the new building, 4 in the

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Why can’t more affordable housing look this good?

Yes, this is affordable housing!  It’s one development that visually stood out from the Smart Growth Illustrated set of case studies highlighted yesterday.

In Aspen, Colorado, the wealthy bid up the prices of homes in the city (average home price of $1.7 million - that’s not a typo!), resulting in traffic jams and air pollution from the commuting employees who couldn’t afford to live there.  It’s so bad that it’s nationally known as the

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Vision for a contemporary eco-village

There’s no shortage of rhetoric on building urban eco-villages, but not much gets pass that stage.  The proposal for New Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, California is one of the few that has.

Sonoma Marin Area Rapid Transit, a quasi-government agency formed in 1999 to establish a 75-mile commuter corridor (Cloverdale to San Francisco), took the lead with a 5.4-acre site they own at a Santa Rosa train station.  The sent out an RFP (request for proposal)

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Wildlife prefers urban life over the countryside?

Really?  So documents this Newsweek article (part of a series presented in the last entry), Wildlife: Cities Are the New Jungles...

“You can take any big city and find more species, more diverse habitats than in just about any national park or nature reserve,“ biologist Josef Reichholf, Munich Germany’s Technical University.

It’s actually the lack of bio-diversity found in extensive mono-culture, chemically treated, single-crop farms that

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In looking at the top sustainable US cities as reviewed yesterday, how did those cities get to the top of the rankings and how can others move up?

There are many factors, but the only category that weighted more heavily than others in the rankings is city commuting, based on use of transit and walking or biking to work. It’s no surprise, given that it affects a city’s public health (fitness), local economy (less car and oil dependence) and quality of life (walkable neighborhoods and

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What are the most sustainable cities in the US?  One organization, SustainLane keeps track, via their annual US City Rankings.  It’s not a measure of how green a city is, it’s a measure of how sustainable its public health, local economy and quality of life is.  The criteria:

Public health - air and drinking water quality, walkability;
Keeping money in the local economy - renewable energy and alternative fuels, transit, walkability, green building and local food production;
Quality of life

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Chicago goes green to attract residents, jobs

You’ve heard of green buildings, but green cities?  Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley’s wants to evolve his hometown into the greenest city in America, according to the NY Times, and his environment commissioner, Sadhu Johnston says it best, “It’s not so much about saving the world. It’s more about using green technology to save $4 million here, or earn $10 million there, and make the city better by doing that.“

The Daley administration has put

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Guess which country aims to be oil-free in 2020?

Creatives and entrepreneurs (this website’s target audience) solicit ideas and inspiration from around the world, and since many of them are actually moving overseas, it’s economically beneficial to learn which countries are tapping into their deepest values.  One of those values lies in green building and environmentalism - Fortune calls it the Next Big Thing and the market has been growing by a third each year ($7 billion in 2005.)

So it

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Beauty replaces blight in the Bronx

What if one extraordinary woman wanted to help revitalize an economically-ravaged urban neighborhood, provide truly attractive housing for its residents, and provide a model for environmental stewardship and health?  Then that would be Nancy Biberman, president of WHEDCo (Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation), a nonprofit dedicated to bringing economic well-being to places where there is little.

Featured in the NY Times, Nancy’s group is

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