April 14, 2004
235 East 42^nd Street
New York, New York

Summaries of Speakers’ Comments 

Panel Two - High Performance Buildings 11:15 am – 12:15 pm

Eva Hanhardt, Moderator, Senior Planner, Municipal Art Society

Ms. Hanhardt opened her remarks with a memorial to Catherine Shawn.

Ms. Hanhardt asked how can we meet our energy needs, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, reduce the environmental and health impacts of energy facilities, and reduce operating costs for homes, offices and businesses.  According to Ms. Hanhardt, green buildings hold part of the answer.  Now green building design is called for in various projects in NYC and some new City facilities.  As their numbers increase, new jobs in construction, manufacturing installation, product design and marketing will appear.

George Aridas, Senior Vice President, The Albanese Organization

Mr. Aridas observed that the design and development of the Solaire in Battery Park City taught us much about high performance buildings, including how to characterize and promote them. He defined high performance buildings as those that uses energy more efficiently and conserves other natural resources, such as water.  They also provide a cleaner, healthier environment for residents.  High performance is a term of context, the context of the building and the parameters of how the building functions, Mr. Aridas noted.

According to Mr. Aridas high performance is a continuum and not every parameter can be maximized on every project.  The design and development of a high performance building will reflect certain trade-offs.  It is an interactive, goal-oriented process that is refined for each specific building.  The high performance city is not a set of buildings in a vacuum.  Creating the high performance city involves many segments of the society – finance, the municipality, regulators.  A high performance city is greater than the sum of its parts, he noted. 

Mr. Aridas noted that the Solaire demonstrates some of these points.  It opened in July 2003 and now is fully occupied.  It won a LEED gold standard award, the first high rise residential building to receive this award.  It uses 35% less energy than a typical residential building and it uses 65% less electricity during peak demand periods.  It has solar panels and uses natural gas for cooling.  It also has a black water system which uses 35% - 45% less potable water than the typical building, depending upon the season according to Mr. Aridas.

He also said that the design, construction and operations of a high performance building differ from a conventional one in the following ways:

● Design – It is iterative not liner.  Analytic tools are very important in evaluating environmental and cost impacts of design alternatives.  Project designers employed DOE-2 and other computer models to build the structure and to meet the goals established for the particular project.

● Construction – The quality control, inspections etc. are all heightened and there are other fundamental adjustments in the normal mode of construction.  For example, the Solaire recycled construction waste, which required paying careful attention to the selection of materials and construction processes to be followed.

● Operations – The Building Management System (BMS) monitors the operations of the building systems.  This is “continuous commissioning” to achieve the building’s designed goals.  Tenant education and cooperation are also important since high performance building is about how occupants interact with and are affected by the building.

Mr. Aridas noted that the context for a high performance building, that is, the role of the rest of society, is also critical.  Tax policy has an impact on construction costs.  Since green construction costs are often higher than conventional construction costs, current real estate tax assessment policy penalizes building green.   Regulations related to utilities also play a role.  Utility rates must be based on electric consumption (he referred here to Ashok Gupta).  We must move away from standby rates and toward net metering and the ability to sell distributed power into the grid.  According to Mr. Aridas connectivity is important.

Capturing the value of a high performance building is important because of its relation to building operating costs and their external impacts on the environment, he also observed.

He concluded with the observation that a new cooperative relation with labor, a “new paradigm”, is needed.  We all must change how we view the natural environmental and how we use the built environment.

Carlton Brown, Principal, Full Spectrum of New York

(Ms. Hanhart noted that Carlton Brown’s 1400 Madison Avenue project was awarded the energy project of the year award and it is the only affordable housing project in New York State to qualify for its green building tax credit.  It has received a LEED Silver rating.)

Mr. Brown said that Full Spectrum of New York works in urban communities with low and moderate income families and focuses on what will have an immediate development impact for them.  These communities have elevated rates of asthma, so indoor air quality is very important, he noted.

According to Mr. Brown, the design and construction of Full Spectrum buildings can create affordable, sustainable housing that empowers the community.  This is done at the same cost as the design and construction of conventional buildings.  At 1400 Madison, the hard costs are about $130/square foot and it’s a 225,000 square foot building.  This shows that there can be a paradigm change.  It is essential to establish objectives and goals and then follow an iterative process to achieve them.  High performance builders must use computer models to understand how all parts of the building interact.  Value Engineering, estimating and evaluating the energy performance of each iteration, is an important process for which there are not short cuts if enhanced performance at no increased cost is the project’s objective.  By not spending money on things that customers do not value, developers may create opportunities to create high performance buildings and create value in ways that might have, otherwise, been overlooked.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Traditional analysis of buildings in a piecemeal fashion with a strong attachment to doing things in the manner in which they have always been done will not get to the right answer as far as affordable high performance buildings are concerned. The traditional approach will lead to design of a conventional building and patch on some appliqué to call the building green without ever actually having achieved high performance he asserted.

According to Mr. Brown, we must focus on creating value.  1400 Madison is a mixed income residential building in Central Harlem.  Initial investor reaction was skeptical, so he had to be really committed to get the $40 million to be able to do this project.  His firm had to “equity up”.  1400 Madison shows that business can “do well and do good” at the same time.  Some examples: Mr. Brown found effective ways to increase building envelope thermal performance while reducing envelope cost.  He took these savings and invested them in a much more efficient mechanical system that super- filters the building’s air, including small micron particulate matter at 85% efficiency.  He used sustainable, low VOC materials, with no incremental costs because market transformations have brought the costs of such materials down to the cost of conventional materials.  The expectation that low VOC paint would cost more was not true.  Mr. Brown said that another example, for gypsum partitions, we expected to pay a 10% premium for recycled content, but the price dropped.

Mr. Brown observed that building is capital intensive and risky, so we tend to “do what we did yesterday to mitigate risk”.  Therefore, the building industry does not take advantage of technical innovations, although buildings consume 40% of the nation’s energy and is the source of lots of the nation’s air pollution.  1400 Madison has focused on a 37% reduction in energy consumption in relation to ASHRAE standards.  This reduces residents’ energy costs in this129 unit building by approximately $1000 year.  This is an important fact for the affordable housing market, according to Mr. Brown.

Taking the green building risk is a manageable risk.

Ed Ott, Director of Public Policy, New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO

Mr. Ott began his comments by noting that the Central Labor Council is working with the Apollo Project to engage in energy issues after seeing how energy affects every aspect of the City’s industries.  Apollo is labor’s effort to engage in alternate energy and how it can be done and what labor’s role will be, he said.

Mr. Ott noted that the earlier panel mentioned the fight over the Trans-Gas power plant in Greenpoint.  In general, labor supported siting the plant along the waterfront.  There is a tension in the City between access to the waterfront and manufacturing jobs. Now there is a desire for the entire waterfront to be turned into parks and houses.  This endangers the City’s ability to diversify its economy.  The return of manufacturing to the waterfront is an important issue, he asserted.

According to Mr. Ott, people want buildings with every amenity, such as air conditioning, and at the same time no one wants a power plant anywhere near them.  In this climate, poor communities have had to bear the burden of fossil-fuel fired power plants and this is grossly unfair.  Labor does not have a consolidated position on this issue, he noted. 

Mr. Ott noted that now, for labor, high performance buildings do several things.  A real discussion is needed between environmental justice groups and labor about how energy production should be done and who bears its burdens.  High performance buildings are important in this discussion because of their efficiency and they lend themselves to some very positive things.  The housing question in NYC is a key to the City’s competitive edge.  NYC is perfectly positioned to compete in the global economy, but the cost of housing will drive the working class further out toward the periphery and it increases the cost of labor, Mr. Ott said.

According to Mr. Ott, high performance” housing helps to solve this problem.  Let’s say that the initial cost of constructing a high performance building is higher than the cost for putting up a conventional building.  But, if more high performance buildings get built, the economies of scale will kick in and the start up costs will drop.  Building “high performance” also amortizes operating costs and lowers them.  However, market forces alone won’t increase the number of “high performance” buildings, he noted. 

Mr. Ott went on to note that a commitment to high performance allows for a nationwide discussion about the transition from where we are now to where we are going.  Unions work to protect what they have; workers are afraid of being discarded by the new.  So, the new must invest in retraining re-educating and reusing workers or it will generate its own opposition.

According to Mr. Ott, high performance buildings and alternative energy must be engaged from the point of view of NYC’s competitive edge.  Efficient cities will be the places most desirable for people to come and invest.  NYC can respond to its dependency on the finance industry by making use of the high performance initiative as a means of beginning to diversify our economy.

Mr. Ott observed that by commitment to high performance NYC can attract manufacturers and suppliers of high performance building materials and technologies and get them closer to the City. The role of government is to develop the commitment to high performance.  One example is the Healthy Schools Initiative that would use high performance technologies.  It is government’s job to promote commerce and government commitment to building “high performance” would go a long way in this direction.  This will attract more high performance developments and begin to bring down building costs, he noted.

Mr. Ott concluded his remarks by noting that the labor movement is traditionally a negotiator – “Make us an offer”

Highlights of Panel Two Questions and Answers

Q: What kind of offer to labor would be successful?  Is labor willing to promote job training in concert with the City and industry?

A: Some of this training is already going on.  But the general point is that labor traditionally resisted change.  We must recognize the importance of training and retraining and this costs money.  Labor has been talking with environmental justice communities, groups traditionally left out of decision-making, about getting better jobs.  “High performance” is not just a project.  It is 100 years of work to solve the energy problem. (Mr. Ott)

Q: What should be done force the question of high performance buildings in affordable housing for NYC?

A: You can’t force markets to perform.  You can provide incentives for markets to perform.  He cites the work of the High Performance Buildings Taskforce and its recent publication.  You can provide incentives, for example, through changes to the Building Code and NYC should adopt the International Building Code.  New zoning rules can provide another set of incentives.  If buildings got incentives for building green, you’d get more of them built, if NYCDEP structured its water rates to reward reduced consumption, then the markets would perform.  Many current regulations do not encourage market change. (Mr. Brammer)