VerdeXchange Panelists Address Efficiencies in Built Environment

Gail Goldberg: As one might guess, planning professionals all over the country are talking about sustainability. They are talking about the role that we, as land use planners, can play in improving quality of life and helping to reverse the trends we are already seeing in terms of climate change. Every year in November, I spend a week at Harvard with the planning directors of the 30 largest cities in the country. Each year we pick a particular topic; this past November we all talked about sustainability, climate change, and how our cities were responding to the challenge. I can assure you that the state of California is a leader in terms of sustainability and climate change. AB 32 and, more recently, SB 375 begin to talk about how it is that we will connect land use changes with the reduction of vehicle miles traveled. That is going to be a huge challenge for us-not so much to make the land use changes, but to actually figure out what our targets can be and figure out how we can measure our success. This is going to be one of the biggest challenges facing all of us...

...A couple of years ago the mayor came up with an action plan for the city of Los Angeles that dealt with a large range of issues, issues ranging from changing our fleet to conservation of energy, but he also identified how important it would be for our city to address the two things for which planning takes primary responsibility. One of those things is creating new development standards for buildings in our city. I have heard that 75 percent of the buildings that will exist in the year 2050 have yet to be built. That is a reminder of the change we can make over the next few years in terms of physical buildings.

As a way of showing leadership, the city of Los Angeles, like many large cities, began with a requirement for public buildings-taking responsibility and showing that we are our own best example. The city of L.A. required, as many cities did, that all public buildings meet certain sustainability requirements.

More recently, we have adopted one of the best private building standards of any of the largest cities in the country. Using thresholds of 50 new units or 50,000 square feet, we require that new buildings meet the intention of LEED certification. We provide incentives for building projects that want to go beyond that.

As important as developing a solid standard and requirement for new buildings, our local legislation included the creation of a green building team, which would review our requirements constantly to continue to push the threshold. Whatever we are doing today, it is the expectation in the city of L.A. that we would raise those standards for development as we go along. Thresholds will be lowered so that more and more buildings are built with sustainable standards. More and more we will move to100 percent sustainability in this city in terms of new buildings. The new standards also apply to major remodels. We think we can make a significant change here in the city of Los Angeles.

Also in terms of land use, this is an area where I believe planning can make the biggest difference of all: This morning you heard a couple of speakers, especially our Oregon visitor [Congressman Earl Blumenauer, -ed.], talk about how we can change the sustainability of our community through land use changes. We need to create more mixes of uses and create places where people can live, work, and play that are much more walkable and much more available to transit options other than vehicles. I loved a phrase I heard today: "You should not have to buy a gallon of gas to get a gallon of milk." That is especially true in this city. This is a city where that change can make a huge difference.

Only a few years ago, in 2000, we adopted a new framework plan for the city of Los Angeles that lays out a strategy for growth-a smart growth strategy that takes new development to accommodate new growth and places it near transit and transportation corridors that promote a better mix of uses and better walkability.

We in the planning department are currently working on 13 new community plans. The entire city of L.A. is made up of 35 community plans. We are re-planning one third of this city right now. We are re-planning communities to make certain they follow the guidelines in the framework plan. We are paying particular attention to creating neighborhoods and communities where there is not only the ability to walk, but there is some usefulness in walking in terms of creating a better mix of uses.

We are also working on ten new transit-orientated development plans. We have taken on the task of looking at the extension of both the Expo Line and the Gold Line. We are re-planning the stations around those extensions as we speak. The mayor has committed that within the next two years we will take on ten more TODs. This is something that the mayor and city take enormously seriously.

There is another opportunity that is important for everyone to hear about as we are doing community plans. We are not only trying to make better neighborhoods where people have a lot more opportunities in terms of moving around. We also have this opportunity to really look at the employment land in the city. We have a lot of under-utilized industrial land that needs to be repositioned for the jobs we will be attracting to this city. One of our objectives as we look at the employment land is to begin to position it for jobs in green industries and environmental technology. These are the kinds of jobs that we would like to attract to Los Angeles. Not only because we are creating a wonderful market for these types of things, but also because we want to improve the economy of our city and provide better middle class jobs for the people of L.A.

We also believe that this city is very well positioned. People who live in this city are very unique; this is a city where the people, even in a hard time, are willing to pay for something that they want. In this bad economy, residents voted for a tax increase to get a transit project that they liked. I would remind you that this city is the creative capital of the world. The most wonderful thing you can say about the city of Los Angeles is that it is a place where wonderful, new, and exciting things can happen.

I believe that this is the last, greatest, unfinished America city, and we believe that over the next ten years this city will become an absolute leader and innovator in the field of environmental technology and sustainability

Kevin Ratner: Forest City develops urban neighborhoods all over the country, and we've been doing it for over 80 years. Developing urban places near transit, near houses, and near jobs is something our company has believed in for a very long time. It's great to see community planning departments around the nation starting to adopt some of the principals that we've believed in for a long time. From our mission statement, this is what we believe, this is how we go about doing development, and this is a guiding principal for us. That mission leads us to mixed use and mixed income developments throughout the country. We try to develop around infrastructure and around jobs where people in our community work. "Live, work, and play" is a reality.

I am going to try to take you down to the ground level from a lot of the initiatives, which are all extremely important, but this is how a lot of them show up. That takes us to Oakland. A lot of you would say "Why Oakland?" But, in 1998, Oakland adopted a sustainable development initiative, and in 1996 they adopted a TOD zone around the downtown. Mayor Brown came up with the "10K Plan," which said that he wanted 10,000 people living in the downtown. Many times he came to us and said, "You have to come to my downtown." He had a bunch of land assembled. We came there to help him plan for what he was going to do, for example the Uptown Oakland Projects. It has 665 units. There is an additional 5 percent affordable at a moderate level. As I mentioned, it was a public-private joint venture with the city of Oakland. The Oakland Uptown Project is in the middle of downtown. There are several BART stations-there is one a block-and-a-half away from our project. It's a 12-minute ride from that station to downtown San Francisco, where there is a lot of employment. Plus, there is a lot of employment in Downtown Oakland.

After we did this project, which opened about a year ago, there has been a tremendous amount of development in the surrounding area, development that was not subsidized by the city of Oakland. When Oakland decided they wanted to redo their downtown, they came to us. They stretched, reached, and worked in order to get this project to work. We went into a place that was, in redevelopment terms, blighted. We came in and changed it. When we came to town and showed everyone what we were going to do, many other small and local developers were able to go to their banks and say, "Look. There is Forest City, a national company; there is Merrill Lynch, one of their partners; there is CalPERS, one of their partners-all doing development in downtown. We're not as crazy as you thought we were." Now Whole Foods has opened up around the project; a lot of projects have opened up, and that's very important to the city and the growth of the urban environment.

The project was certified LEED Silver. It was sustainable and sited near transit and jobs. We have a water efficiency system within the project. We use energy efficient lighting and appliances. Ninety percent of the construction waste was diverted away from landfills-it was either recycled or reused in some other way. We dealt with air quality. Ten percent of the products we put into the project we recycled content. The city of Oakland has a local hiring policy, where the people who work on a job to build a project actually live in Oakland. It was amazing to walk to the site and see the pride these people had that they were building a project of this quality and this standard within their own community. It was something we resisted at first because it does drive cost, but it did show us that hiring local people, even though it adds cost, adds to the project in so many ways.

Another big part of our sustainability initiative, internally, is tenant education. We believe that you can build a green project and you can put it in the right place, but the people using the property need to understand what you did and how they can change their lives. I continue to believe that a lot of people doing small things can make huge change. We try to really show people what is going on. We put signs above plantings that say, "drought resistant planting"-some things are as simple as that. We have a website and materials that we hand out to people. We have resources that we try to make available to them, like Zip Cars and bicycle sharing.

In the end, I believe that these policies are worth talking about around California and around the country. They force us to look at what is really happening. They force us to change some of our behaviors, change the support we give to politicians, and change the discussions in our community about how we grow.

Larry Eisenberg: I'm the designated radical on the panel this morning. If one listens to leading scientists, like Jim Hansen from NASA and thought-leaders around the world in sustainability, we have about three to four years to solve this thing or we won't need to worry because the human race will stop existing the way that it does. It's a simple kind of thing and we can make a choice now to move radically ahead to address the issue. I went to an interesting lecture the other night put on by Dr. Steven Koonin, who used to be the provost of CalTech and who is now chief scientist for BP. He was talking about Plan B for global warming, if Plan A doesn't work in three or four years and we blow it-chances are we're going to blow it unless we really figure out how to mobilize.

Plan B offers many interesting choices about what one can do to address global warming in a significant way. We will need to cool the earth on a global scale. I'm going to talk about what I think some of the right things to do are, but I just want you to understand what it means for us if we can't do it right-why we need to make this commitment now. I love the city of L.A.'s commitment to green building, but the reality is that we need to do it for every single building, now. Dr. Koonin has six very interesting solutions. Each of them is within our current technological capability. One of the solutions, just to give you a sense of the drama, is to put a small nuclear device in every major volcano around the world. At the appropriate deployment time you set them off. That creates a global winter. That's the radical kind of thing we need. That's the kind of cooling we need for the human race to survive. We can endure a few years of global winter. That's clearly within our technological capability. Or we could choose the alternative, which is to do something now that's a little more rational.

He raised the interesting question of who would actually decide if we were going to do that. Do we let the UN decide? Does the U.S. decide? Does some radical country like North Korea thinks it's a good idea and they do it? Who decides? A better way is that everybody decides now that we should build all our buildings to a zero-energy standard. We need to change our building codes so we don't allow people to build in a non-sustainable way.

The LACCD has been leading the way. We have been working on this since 2002, when our board adopted a sustainable policy. We've had years of experience heading toward this goal. In 2009 all of our colleges will be climate neutral. That means that they will be supported by 100 percent, renewable, non-carbon-based energy-solar, wind, geothermal, and solar thermal. We will use energy storage, hydrogen fuel-cell technology, and lithium-ion batteries, and we figured out how to do it at no capital cost. We are a public sector institution. If we can do it, everybody can do it. Everybody should do the same thing. One hundred percent energy is doable today at no additional capital cost. It's a replicable model.

We currently have 30 buildings under construction that will be LEED certified, turning out to be Silver and Gold. Thanks to the voters, we passed Measure J, which gave us $3.5 billion. That allows us to build 50 new buildings. We are committed to building those to a zero-energy standard.

They are very few buildings in the United States today that are zero energy. There are some in Asia. There are some in Europe. They are lovely buildings and they have no impact on the environment. We need to do the same. Our commitment is to build the 50 new buildings to a zero-energy standard. The buildings will integrate renewable technology. The technology is improving radically. Integrated photovoltaics are available; windows can create electricity; the skin of the building generates electricity to power the building. The building design can be structured in a way to facilitate heating and cooling without any mechanical systems. Thanks to nature, hot air rises and cool air sinks. We can take advantage of that in our design process. We can stick green roofs on our buildings to capture water and cool the buildings. There is a broad range of technologies that are available today.

The architecture and engineering industry has gotten very sophisticated in this area. They know the answers. The owners just need to say, "Do it. That is what we want. That is what we need." If we don't do this, then we need to think about the attractiveness of Plan B.