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.”

The East College Street Project expects to break ground in 2008 and is a public-private-philanthropic partnership with funders including the Enterprise Foundation, Cleveland Foundation, the City of Oberlin, the Kendeda Fund and private banking institutions.