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U.S. cities sprouting ‘green’ buildings

PORTLAND, Ore. — The skyline of Portland may never rival New York, but the two cities are growing alike in the way they approach basic
building design.
Portland and New York, along with Austin, Texas, have become the national leaders of
the "green building" movement — an effort to stretch beyond simple improvements in energy
efficiency and make everything from skyscrapers to county courthouses better places to live
and work and to blend in as naturally as possible with the environment.

By William McCall
AP business writer

The first replacement building at the World Trade Center site in New York will feature the
latest in green design, said Craig Kneeland, chief of the New York State Energy Research
and Development Authority.
"The architects and the engineers made it clear they wanted a green building," Kneeland
said.
The movement began to take shape in the late 1970s, when the Middle East oil embargo
caused long lines at the gas pump and bred a new public awareness about energy
conservation that prompted then-President Carter to ask everybody to turn down their
thermostat.
It was formally organized in 1993 when the U.S. Green Building Council was founded to
take a broader approach to design and construction, including improvements in lighting, water
consumption, insulation, windows, ventilation systems, electric motors for air conditioning
and elevators, landscaping, new building materials and even reducing the amount of pavement for parking lots.
"It’s all those things in an integrated package that’s the power behind green buildings," said Christine Ervin, president of the council, which
is based in Washington, D.C.
"And I say the power of green buildings because it has so much potential impact,"
said Ervin, who lives and works in Portland.
A study last year by Portland State University estimated that Oregon and
Washington state alone could save $100 million a year by retrofitting older buildings
and incorporating "green" designs into new construction.
The added cost is relatively small, but the payback potential very large, according
to Bob Doppelt, a University of Oregon professor who led the study while he was at
Portland State.
A modest retrofitting program for buildings managed by the state Administrative
Services Department recently saved $1.6 million in less than eight months, Doppelt
said.
"We got that $1.6 million in Oregon in the blink of an eye," Doppelt said. "If we put
a systematic effort into it we could save hundreds of millions of dollars nationally and
reduce our energy load."
New York has become the first
state to approve a statewide tax
credit program to encourage green
building design and construction.
"We’re seeing that we can make
buildings 35 percent more efficient
than our energy code requires for less than 1 percent in construction cost," Kneeland said.
"That’s upstate, downstate, big buildings, small buildings — the savings are there, and
you don’t have to squeeze that hard."
A number of large cities, especially Portland and Austin, have their own green building
programs they hope will be expanded statewide.
"We have the distinction of having the most buildings on the ground or in the pipeline to
meet the ‘green’ standard than any other city," said Dan Saltzman, a Portland city
commissioner who also is an environmental engineer.
As a result, he said, the Portland area has become a showcase for new buildings, such
as the regional training office for American Honda Motor Co., the California-based U.S.
subsidiary of the Japanese automaker.
The building in suburban Gresham has floors made of recycled tires, a roof that funnels rainwater into an underground storage basin for
landscape irrigation and toilets, even tables made from crushed sunflower shells.
Retrofitted buildings also lead the list of green designs. The Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center, a historic warehouse being redeveloped in
northwest Portland, was the first restoration project in the nation to earned a gold ranking from the U.S. Green Building Council.
The council has developed a program called LEED, for Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design, which certifies a building as "green," ranking them like Olympic
medalists, in this case ranging from a basic rating to silver and gold, adding a platinum rating
for the very best.
Portland was one of the first cities to adopt LEED standards. But Austin was already
certifying homes and buildings in the 1980s when it helped develop the federal Energy Star
ratings for energy conservation, said Marc Richmond, project manager for the Austin green
building program.
Austin abandoned Energy Star as too limited to rate a green building, Richmond said,
moving to a LEED model to take account of the broad design range that covers everything
inside and outside the building, from recycled carpeting to paving.
Even the productivity of workers is considered in rating a green building because lighting,
architecture and materials contribute to a healthy workplace, Richmond said.

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