Silo valley

After researching the pros and cons of opening a retail green business in San Francisco versus Oakland, Berkeley, or Marin, O’Neil opened The Treehouse, a “green” home and gift store, in Berkeley, where she felt she would both attract the most customers and receive the most support from the city and local green business organizations.

While sales have been brisk, O’Neil recently discovered that she would have to wait over a year to be certified as a green business by the Bay Area Green Business Program, despite having conducted extensive research before opening her store to ensure that she met the program’s standards. Moreover, O’Neil says she’s not sure what kind of help to expect from the program once her business is certified. “I think something’s lacking for entrepreneurs and small businesses, which could use marketing advice and help finding suppliers,” she says.

THE LIMITS OF LOCAL
As the green business world continues to explode, economic development departments in cities throughout the Bay Area are scrambling to get a piece of the pie. With California’s attractive incentives for renewable energy and the Bay Area’s history of environmental responsibility, the region seems ideally positioned to attract a variety of green businesses, with each city addressing a different need: lower cost land suitable for manufacturing in parts of the East Bay, access to university research in Berkeley and Palo Alto, a marquee address in San Francisco, and customers and investors interested in environmentally responsible products and services throughout the region. Rather than presenting the Bay Area as a green business Mecca, capable of competing with China, the East Coast or the Pacific Northwest, cities have tended to stick to traditional economic development strategies, working in silos on their own efforts for fear of losing out on money.

“Cities can be very parochial about economic development, especially in California, where retail sales tax is the theme,” explains Michael Caplan, economic development manager for the city of Berkeley, Calif.

Although not an economic development plan, the Bay Area Green Business Program is a good example of some of the challenges involved in supporting green business in the region. The program certifies everything from businesses services to retail stores and restaurants, and includes all nine Bay Area counties. While all of the counties agree on a basic structure and framework for certification, each county program is responsible for its own funding and staffing.

And certifying your business in one county doesn’t guarantee you certification in any of the program’s other counties. To wit, if you start a business in Berkeley and get certified, then open an outpost of your business in San Francisco, you will need to seek certification for your San Francisco location from the San Francisco office.

Berkeley businesses apply for green business certification through the Alameda County program, which oversees 20-odd other cities with only enough funding for half a person to work full time, according to program director Pamela Evans.