Sustainable Development Focus
Los Angeles Daily News - May 14 Energy efficient homes like those at Skylar at Playa Vista in Los Angeles, Palo Alto at Stone Gate in Irvine, and Calabria in Rancho Cucamonga, which include features like highly efficient heating and cooling systems, dense wall insulation, tankless water heaters, double-paned windows, heat-reflecting roof barriers, and low-flow showers and toilets, will be critical to the state’s recalibrated energy policies. Those now include a law that requires California’s built environment, tens of millions of structures, to operate twice as efficiently by the year 2030, slashing consumption of electricity and natural gas to half their projected levels. The mandate, intended to reduce the state’s need for carbon-spewing power plants, is part of California’s mission to address climate change by cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Residential and commercial buildings account for about 20 percent of those pollutants. The new target builds on policies calling for more power from renewable-energy sources such as sun and wind, and more mass transit to get cars off the road.
Water Deeply - May 24 A new study in Environmental Research Letters by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Nature Conservancy estimates how water demand will change in 2062 by projecting the present rate of land-use change. This includes urban growth and farmland conversion, both conversion of farms into urban areas and conversion of annual crops to permanent crops, like orchards and vineyards. The results? California is likely to see a 4 percent overall increase in water demand in 2062 compared to 2012. That doesn’t sound like much. But that is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Folsom Reservoir near Sacramento, and enough water to serve 3 million homes for a year.
The Daily Journal - May 21 Now more than a decade in the making, San Mateo’s Bay Meadows, one of the state’s largest transit-oriented developments, is nearing completion and welcoming new tenants. Being able to merge retail and services with a growing community of residents and employees near various commuter corridors is key to ensuring this unique site truly lives up to being a premier transit-oriented redevelopment, Janice Thacher, a partner at the site’s master developer Wilson Meany said. Bike and pedestrian paths leading from the site to the nearby Caltrain station as well as the soon-to-be redeveloped Hillsdale Shopping Center are excellent ways to make commuting to, from, and through Bay Meadows desirable. Using pedestrian-friendly street designs, diverse architecture, and landscaping helps encourage people to avoid their cars and shop locally, Thacher wrote.
Multi-Housing News - May 23 The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is committing $27 million in funding to improve the energy efficiency of existing affordable housing units throughout the state. Owners and managers of multifamily housing will be able to use the funding to reduce energy costs through investing in whole-building and in-unit energy efficiency measures. NYSERDA’s Multifamily Performance Program will provide the funding, as the program has just been relaunched through its new $5 billion, 10-year Clean Energy Fund. The fund supports developing and deploying clean energy technologies to reduce costs and accelerate the use of clean energy.
Phoenix Business Journal - May 18 Doug Bowden and Ed Gorman are putting the finishing touches on the first zero-net-energy multifamily development in Arizona. Gorman, president of Modus Development, said the Equinox apartments, located in Scottsdale, might be the first true zero-net-energy apartment development in the U.S. Modus and Bowden’s Viridis Group are looking to take the zero-energy development concept to California, Texas, Colorado, and other states as sustainability and renewable energy take root in public policies and consumer tastes. The 41-unit Equinox development will have more than 1,100 solar panels on its residential building and parking structures.
S.F. Chronicle - May 19 San Francisco’s greenest city office building isn’t quite as successful as city officials had hoped. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) headquarters at 525 Golden Gate Avenue opened in 2012 and was touted as the most energy-efficient building on the continent, earning a LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council in 2013. With wind turbines, solar panels, and a wastewater treatment facility, the $200 million structure was intended to be entirely self-sufficient. But analysis shows it has not met those expectations. For instance, wind turbines affixed to the front of the 13-story building failed after the first year, and the company that installed them filed for bankruptcy soon after. The commission’s engineers can’t even get to the turbines because safety measures to prevent falls aren’t adequate. There is no estimate of the cost to get the turbines running again.
