Sustainable Development Focus
URBAN LAND - Sep 18 Heitman, working with climate risk analytics firm Four Twenty Seven, sought to quantify the concentration of sea-rise risk within institutional real estate portfolios in the United States. According to their analysis, more than 24 percent of the value of the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries Property Index (NPI) is in metro areas whose central cities are among the 10 percent of cities most exposed to sea-level rise, amounting to more than $130 billion of real estate. Nine metro areas in the NPI's top 50 list are also among the 10 percent most-exposed cities in Four Twenty Seven’s database. Among those nine, two are gateway markets: In the San Francisco Bay Area, the San Francisco, Oakland, and San Rafael metro areas are all in the top 10 percent in terms of risk; so is the New York City area, which has already seen significant flooding related to Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
CURBED - Sep 19 Los Angeles may reach a housing goal set by Mayor Eric Garcetti ahead of schedule, according to the city’s planning director, Vince Bertoni. In 2014, Garcetti announced plans to spur development of 100,000 new units of housing in the city by 2021. Bertoni told the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee this Tuesday that the Department of City Planning has approved projects containing 106,000 units since then. Not all of those developments have been completed yet, and some could still fall through. But Bertoni said that, with three years left to hit the mayor’s target, the Department of Building and Safety has already issued building permits for projects totaling 83,000 units.
GREENTECH MEDIA - Sep 24 This week, the Solar Energy Industries Association and The Solar Foundation launched the Solar Automated Permit Processing initiative, which is designed to streamline permitting and slash the cost of installing solar on homes and businesses. Cumbersome and inconsistent permitting and inspection processes can add around three months to the build-out of a residential solar installation and around $7,000 in direct and indirect costs, or around $1.00 per watt. Residential solar installation prices in the U.S. currently range between $3.00 and $3.50 per watt (in some locations prices are even lower, while Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory just pegged median residential 2017 costs at $3.70 per watt). Soft costs, including customer acquisition, permitting, financing, and installing rooftop solar, make up a disproportionate amount of the total solar price.
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER - Sep 18 In an era of high demand for San Francisco’s office space by tech companies, a proposal was introduced Tuesday to prohibit office space on the lower floors of Union Square buildings and allow office space in higher floors for a fee that would fund improvements in public areas. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who introduced the legislation at the Board of Supervisors, said that Union Square is being impacted by changes to the retail market, necessitating these new regulations. The legislation “would protect the lower floors in the Union Square area … from office space encroachment” while allowing “certain office space uses as of right on higher floors — all of this subject to a modest impact fee” of $4 per square foot, Peskin said.
NEXT CITY - Sep 24 This fall, San Jose voters will be asked to open a new front in the fight for affordable housing with one of the biggest local housing bond initiatives in recent memory. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and the City Council finalized the terms of a $450 million bond referendum that would direct money to affordable housing production and preservation at three different income levels, promising to create up to 3,550 units of new affordable housing in the city. The bond follows on the heels of a $900 million bond approved by Santa Clara County voters in 2016 to address homelessness. It will require approval by two-thirds of voters on the November ballot.
MICROGRID KNOWLEDGE - Sep 24 The California Energy Commission last Friday approved a $5 million grant to demonstrate a standardized, renewable energy microgrid at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division near Oxnard. The microgrid is part of a larger, $50 million effort by the commission to help commercialize microgrids — both for the military and private applications. The modular microgrid will power a server farm building at the Ventura County military base.
UTILITY DIVE - Sep 24 Twenty-seven of the largest global cities report they are no longer increasing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to an analysis by climate group C40 Cities. The U.S. cities included on the list are Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Portland, OR. The cities have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10 percent since their respective peaks.
