When the nation’s leading green building organization announced in September 2007 that Cleveland will be home to three pilot LEED for Neighborhood Development projects, sustainability advocates rejoiced. Since then, the city and private developers, including the Wolstein Group for the Flats East Bank, have met to discuss the details and to figure out, ‘how do we create a green neighborhood?’
One issue that the city and developers are grappling with is the intersection of what the new LEED-ND program requires for certification and what city codes and ordinances currently allow. Beyond the prestige bestowed upon Cleveland, some at the city see it as an opportunity to permanently remove obstacles to greening the public realm of a large development, solidify those changes and create a legacy for future development.
Andrew Watterson, director of the city’s Office of Sustainability, Lillian Kuri of the Cleveland Foundation (who’s managing two of the local LEED-ND projects) and Justin Glanville, director of Building Cleveland by Design (which manages the Flats LEED-ND process) proposed the city create a “green team” within city government and jettison its bureaucratic approach to development. During 2008, green team met monthly to identify how to pull lessons from LEED-ND, identify obstacles with city’s codes and alleviate any potential hurdles. The larger goal is to move some of these green design elements from pilot to policy.
"We’ve learned from other cities, including Chicago, that completing pilot projects can help address entrenched skepticism about green design, showing people (in this case City employees) that green design can work in Cleveland, it doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive, and it can be beautiful," Glanville says.
“Normally, a project goes from department to department in isolation,” Watterson adds. “This is an integrated design approach similar to the one you go through in a LEED project. It could have a representative from engineering, construction, utilities and planning depending on the project.”
Examples of new policies that could arise from the green team are addressing stormwater and lighting in public areas in a more environmentally conscious way, Watterson adds.
“On a private property there aren’t a lot of hurdles for doing more than the code allows. Where you run into challenges is each one of these LEED-ND projects you’re reshaping whole neighborhoods.”
Watterson's office has already initiated policy reform in Cleveland that responds to new thinking on sustainable communities, including recently introduced legislation to allow for downspout disconnection (and connection to rain barrels and rain gardens) and to allow permeable pavement.
An ordinance change rather than a variance will help developers under tight time frames by removing steps in the permitting process, Watterson says.
“If the developer is doing the right thing, this recognizes it. What we’re doing is updating the city’s priorities. A long time ago, the priority was to make all the (storm) water go to sewers, now we’re not as concerned about that.”
The long term outcome of the LEED-ND pilot projects could go beyond policy to incentivizing or even requiring green building standards.
"We don’t know exactly when or how that will happen," Glanville says, "but it is one of the hoped-for outcomes of forming the Green Team at City Hall and working collaboratively with them on making the ND projects reach their goals."
Updates
10.31.08—
When the economy and local development projects like the Flats East Bank get back on track, ground-breaking green urbanism in
Working to spread the impact of LEED-ND is a Green Team at
The initial output of their yearlong planning sessions are new Green Design Guidelines which, once approved, would be applied to Cleveland’s LEED-ND pilot projects and an area surrounding them, in existing urban neighborhoods. New developments in that zone would be required to adhere to the green design guidelines, which would be administered through the city’s existing design review process (raising the need for a staff person to oversee the points in the LEED rating system). The guidelines will be introduced to Cleveland City Council on December 5, 2008.
Green Team presentation: Streets
Green Team presentation: Energy efficient infrastructure
