Gold rush

Seven years from the first U.S. Green Building Council LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards and one year after “An Inconvenient Truth,” things are moving fast in San Francisco’s green building sector. The spate of new luxury condominium towers in the city’s South of Market district (SoMa, as the locals call it) represent a flashpoint moment in a building boom unlike any since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

These condo towers, vertically ambitious and packed densely into the industrial SoMa district, symbolize much in a city where everything is a battle for “the soul of the city”: gentrification, urban renewal, San Francisco’s status as a global city, and a hilly city’s citizens’ affections for the skyline as they are accustomed to viewing it. Indeed, two towers at First and Mission streets will, by the end of the decade, be the tallest buildings west of the Mississippi River.

Yet in an age of the looming crisis of climate change, many of the towers’ architects say they hope ecological sustainability is the scale upon which history will judge them. But hope, not self-satisfaction, is the word of the moment. For San Francisco to ride the crest of the green building wave, much will depend on what developers, architects, municipal departments and the public ask of each other — and of themselves.

Green roofs full of plants and native grasses top off the three levels of Arterra, the first high-rise condo to receive LEED certification in San Francisco. A 16-story collection of 269 homes to be inhabited by early 2008 in the condo-boom neighborhood of Mission Bay, the building boasts a lobby floor made of cork, and each condo’s kitchen floor is bamboo, both of which are rapidly renewable materials.

Low-VOC (volatile organic compound) paints, carpeting and cabinetry make for condo interiors designed to keep residents from rubbing their eyes or holding their aching heads. The bathrooms all feature dual-flush toilets, which reduce water consumption by 30 percent.

Eric Corey Freed and his firm, Organic Architect, consulted on the project and are also involved in the design of Arterra’s penthouse. Occupants of the tip-top condo can gauge their high status by the fact their unit will be powered by its very own solar panels: The California Public Utilities Commission won’t allow Freed to cover the roof with solar panels and then divvy up the power among all building tenants.

Freed’s solar setback notwithstanding, San Francisco building officials are not discouraging the green innovations of architects and developers. It’s trying to inspire them.

Although projects in San Francisco are not required to be LEED certified, city officials are plotting how to prod builders in that direction. Most consumers aren’t equipped to decide whether the condo they’re looking at, for example, is the most energy-efficient on the block. And as fashionable as all things “green” are at the moment, marketing cachet isn’t enough to spur every developer in San Francisco to commit to the rigorous LEED process. The city of San Francisco is working to bring the construction industry to a higher standard, offering in LEED a brand name that is increasingly familiar to the public. One of the biggest changes the city has made to encourage LEED building is speeding up the permitting process for buildings seeking Gold or Platinum LEED certification.

Laura Rodormer, a green building coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment, spells out the average permitting experience for a non-LEED construction project: “You enter into the process. You wait six months. You’re assigned a planner. Then you’re put into a pile. You could be waiting six, eight, 12 months before they even get an initial review out there.”

The city’s Environmental and Planning departments were looking for the juiciest incentives to get builders to meet LEED standards and solicited the opinions of the building community. “We wanted to know what’s more valuable, reducing permit fees, or cutting time off the process?” says Mark Palmer, another green building coordinator for the city. “Overwhelmingly, it was the time.”

In exchange for saving time, developers agree to build according to LEED Gold standards, requiring 39 to 51 LEED points for certification. “That’s nothing to sniff at,” Freed says. Despite the additional work involved, many developers say they find significant benefits in pursuing LEED Gold certification.

Unsurprisingly, time is money. “Not only are you going to save time and all of your holding costs for your land, but you’re in the market probably six to 12 months ahead of your competition,” Rodormer says.

Tishman Speyer’s 33-story office building at 222 Second St. is one of the first such projects to be fast-tracked in exchange for LEED Gold. “It was a major incentive,” says Jeffrey Heller of Heller Manus Architects, the project’s lead architectural firm. “We, as architects, are really committed to sustainable practices, but it’s really the expediting to a large extent that’s responsible for these projects.”

The policy is expected to have the greatest impact on the largest, most resource-intensive projects, and few cut a higher profile than five towers at First and Mission, two of which will be the tallest towers west of the Mississippi. Italian architect Renzo Piano, fresh off designing the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park [see “Piano in the park,” page 24] , designed this 600-residential-unit, 470-room hotel and 520,000-square-foot office space with LEED Gold in mind. “It was a plus for us to have an architect of his credibility dealing with sustainability issues,” says Mark Solit, the lead developer on the project. “Renzo and his office are very open to sustainable principles.”

More and more developers and architects seem to be sharing Piano’s enthusiasm. “In San Francisco right now, we have nine LEED-certified green buildings, and we have 60 in the pipeline,” Rodormer says. It’s difficult to think of a word other than “boom” to describe what’s about to take place, partially a result of city officials such as Rodormer and Palmer figuring out how to push the right buttons.

Several of the towers that will soon reconfigure San Francisco’s skyline predate sustainability’s ascent into the public consciousness. Intracorp, owned by Seattle-based investment firm Intracorp Capital, is proud of its green Arterra condominiums, but The Hayes — its eight-floor condo and retail development in the Hayes Valley neighborhood — does not have “specific green features to delve into,” an Intracorp employee told Sustainable Industries.

And while the Millennium Tower project at 301 Mission and the two towers — with 49 and 61 stories apiece — that make up One Rincon Hill can certainly make the claim that they’re densely packing in professionals who would otherwise be commuting into the city, these projects are not matching their ambitions for height with green building aspirations.

In April, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced the formation of a Green Building Task Force, a collection of more than 10 building and sustainability experts brought together in part to assess whether the city should mandate baseline green standards for all building projects.

“This came out of the priority permitting process,” Rodormer says. “Everybody realized ‘If LEED Gold is this easy for the big projects, why not make it across the board?’ If it’s determined by this task force that the city needs to mandate it, then it needs to be determined what buildings are going to be mandated, and what will be the new threshold.” Jeffrey Heller of Heller Manus says he would welcome modest requirements. “As long as they were reasonable,” he says. “We all have to act responsibly, and LEED level is quite reasonable.”

Organic Architect’s Freed takes a more expansive view: “Just basic certification is a joke,” he says. “LEED Gold impresses me. Remember, in California, you’re meeting California’s energy code; you’re getting the public transit credits, the density credits, and let’s say the site used to be a parking lot — you’re already up to 18 or 19 points automatically, of the 23 you need to get basic LEED. Frankly, any building should be forced to do it, if we could find a way to streamline the paperwork.”

Many green building experts note green building practices, if applied correctly, are not prohibitively more expensive than conventional methods. Others, though, have yet to see convincing proof that the greener a project is, the more it will save. “Simple LEED certification does not have a big economic burden to it,” says Heller. But for LEED Silver, Gold or Platinum, Heller says the innovations start to add up to a significantly higher bill: “The equipment is just a lot more expensive.”

Palmer disagrees by one LEED tier: “It has been shown by many projects around the country that LEED Silver is achievable on a conventional building budget,” he says. “And that’s the challenge I throw down to our designers.” Palmer argues higher levels are achievable through a building process in which the architect, engineer and contractor cooperate, “rather than the old linear way of none of these people talking to each other.” Freed agrees that a more cohesive approach will come to define green building in the future. “A rising tide lifts all boats, and that’s what’s going to happen with LEED,” he says. “If you think about the natural evolution of any paradigm shift, we’re exactly on course. There’s slow adoption and then widespread adoption. We’re using old thinking and imposing new green ideas on it.”

He muses on some possibilities such as designing buildings with north and south sides that are designed differently, rather than building symmetrical glass towers. “The next evolution is that we will start to redefine what it means to build,” he says. “Of course, after that we won’t even make the distinction of calling it a green building. All buildings will be green buildings.”