Cleveland’s four LEED-ND pilot projects will bring "green" to a neighborhood scale, but the silver lining would be creating a legacy that spreads to surrounding areas.

To that end, the project managers are proposing that Cleveland adopt design guidelines and a green overlay district. We could then leverage an amazing opportunity—being the home of three ND pilot projects—as real catalysts for green neighborhoods.

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We’re five years into the modern green building era—as defined by the birth of U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system—and in that time America has seen exponential growth in green building, which has had a measurable impact on energy use, USGBC Vice President Tom Hicks told a packed house at Levin College yesterday.

Hicks talked about the impact of expanding LEED to encompass neighborhood development. Cities like Cleveland, as well as counties and states, are leveraging their pilot projects to blaze a path for more green neighborhoods. It begins with finding and removing the regulatory obstacles, but the larger goal, the big prize, is being an early adopter of green building standards, both in government buildings and community wide.

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We’re five years into the modern green building era—as defined by the birth of U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system—and in that time America has seen exponential growth in green building and measurable impact, USGBC Vice President Tom Hicks told a packed house at Levin College on Feb. 6.

Out of 9,000 projects that have registered for LEED in the U.S., only 1,200 have been certified, Hicks says, adding that more will be as the group catches up to demand. To do so, USGBC formed a new group, the Green Building Certification Institute, to run its certification process and deal with the rising demand.

Environmental benefits of LEED-rated buildings include a 35-50% energy savings, a significant figure for a country that pumps more than one-third of its carbon into the air from buildings, Hicks says.

USGBC, the largest green building group in the U.S., is expanding its reach to 55 countries including India and Canada. The U.S. needs to set the example and share its lessons, Hicks said, with developing nations like India and China.

LEED for Neighborhood Development will help: Northeast Ohio’s four LEED-ND projects join 240 from six countries in a pilot program where design in and between private and public spaces encourages biking and walking to work, shop and play.

Expanding the scale of LEED to neighborhoods is starting to have an impact on urban design, Hicks says. It’s influencing how cities and states are dealing with regulatory obstacles, and, in some cases, its leading to incentives, green building policies or new efforts to encourage green design.

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. The green team will identify what LEED-ND wants to do and how that bumps up against the city’s codes and alleviate any potential hurdles. The larger goal, however, 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.

Upper Chester is a 100-acre development that aims to restore vitality to part of Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood that sits at a crucial juncture in University Circle, between the Cleveland Clinic and Case’s proposed West Quad research campus at E. 105th Street. Plans call for 840 units of new housing, plus 80,000 square feet of neighborhood commercial and retail space. The Finch Group and Heartland Developers of Cleveland plan to break ground on the first building in the complex in about a year, the Plain Dealer reported in March, 2008.

Combining living spaces and stores supplying everyday necessities within walking and biking distance of University Circle’s top medical and cultural institutions will be a boon for the area. What’s more, Upper Chester is one of three pilot sustainable urban neighborhood design projects under the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program.

What this translates into is green buildings in a setting that feels comfortable and accessible as a pedestrian without being gated or disconnected from the city grid. In fact, the LEED project manager, Lillian Kuri, is working with the city of Cleveland and City Architecture on making Upper Chester and the surrounding blocks into a green design district. When approved, the district will ensure that the green features in the LEED development reach into the surrounding neighborhood.

A few examples of details that Kuri would like to see in Upper Chester:

Heading up Oberlin's LEED-ND project is Naomi Sabel, Josh Rosen, and Ben Ezinga—2002 Oberlin graduates and founders of the Sustainable Community Association in Oberlin. According to the Sustainable Community Association website, The East College Street Project is a sustainably designed mixed-use development in downtown Oberlin featuring new condominiums, restaurants, and shops within a high-performance green building.

Savings and larger societal goals are at the core of East College Street. Sabel, presenting at CSU's Levin College in Feb. '08, said they chose to redevelop the site of a former Buick dealership into a mixed-use place because its vacancy has held back the small town center from rediscovering its vibrant, walkable roots. In addition, SCA has social equity in its mission, keeping one-third of the 36 residential units below market rate. Artists and small businesses will also find breaks on rent as SCA plans to carve out studios and incubation in the 19,000 sq. ft. of ground floor space.

We asked Sabel to describe how the shift from individual buildings to neighborhood scale might impact smaller projects like theirs. “Regardless of the LEED-ND pilot we will still design the individual buildings to achieve LEED Gold-New Construction,” Sabel told GCBL back in June.

“LEED-ND is much more focused on context while LEED-NC focuses primarily on building systems and performance," she observes. "They do overlap a lot but I think that’s the general difference. It seems as though LEED-ND rating is heavily influenced by where you develop and how the structures integrate into the community.”

LEED for Neighborhood Development: Pilot projects in Northeast Ohio

Green building is moving "up scale"—in impact—as the U.S. Green Building Council launches its new Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) program this year. The good news for Greater Cleveland is it can boast four projects in the pilot phase, which is better than average for a region this size.

Of the 120 projects selected to be a part of the pilot program, the following four are from the Greater Cleveland area:

• East College Street (in Oberlin)
• Flats East Bank Neighborhood
  
• St. Luke's Pointe
• Upper Chester

Local organizers hope to capitalize on the catalytic strength of these four high profile projects as anchors for green neighborhoods that, someday, stretch for blocks.

LEED for Neighborhood Development’s principal aim is to improve land-use patterns, neighborhood design, and technology in the United States. Project size and strict definitions for what comprises a neighborhood aren’t specified. The only requirement is that projects must be able to meet all prerequisites and anticipate that the minimum number of points through credits to achieve certification can be earned.

As more large-scale developments are being planned in Cleveland, interest grows in making them as green as possible. Building Cleveland by Design (BCbD) is a new nonprofit project that is working to expand the influence of local expertise in green building, urban design and public art initially by making the Flats a green neighborhood.

The project is being managed by ParkWorks and Cleveland Public Art, and it also involves The Cleveland Museum of Natural History's Center for Regional Sustainability (host of this GreenCityBlueLake site), Kent State's Urban Design Collaborative, and other organizations.

For now, a geographic focus of BCbD's work will be in the Flats near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. The convergence of major developments in this district — including Flats East Bank, Stonebridge, Canal Basin Park, Wendy Park, the Towpath Trail and a possible new convention center — provides an exciting opportunity to bring together high-performance building techniques and high quality public spaces.

BCbD will be managing the LEED-Neighborhood Development design and certification process for the Flats East Bank development, which is one of four pilot projects seeking LEED-ND rating in Greater Cleveland. The project also seeks to work closely with other parties involved in redesigning the Flats as a vibrant, 24-hour neighborhood.

BCbD director, Justin Glanville, says the organization will offer services in these three areas for the Flats and future projects:

Old River Road on the east bank of the Flats used to be Cleveland’s Bourbon Street. Bars and nightclubs lined the road, and pleasure boats docked four and five deep along the back patios of the clubs, clogging the Cuyahoga River.

A few years ago, however, the party died out as the scene of youthful drunkenness lost its charm and other areas of downtown began to compete with higher quality nightlife. Many bars closed, leaving the area with boarded-up buildings and a fraction of the vitality it once had.

But the Flats East district, framed by historic bridges near the mouth of the river, remains a spectacular urban location. Now, one of the nation’s leading developers, Scott Wolstein, CEO of Developers Diversified and a Greater Cleveland native, wants to realize its potential by turning it into a $225 million mixed-use neighborhood. The project, while early in the design phase, is planned to include 331 units of housing, 255,000 square feet of retail and entertainment, and a 450,000 square foot office building. And it will have many environmentally friendly features, from green buildings to pedestrian friendly public spaces (see link below for details on the green design elements).

Many government agencies — including the City of Cleveland, Port Authority, ODOT, and the Regional Sewer District — are assisting the project with financing or infrastructure investments. The Port is also helping with eminent domain proceedings to acquire a few remaining parcels of land. If this land acquisition process ends up in court, the planned 2009 opening of the development could be delayed.