Bringing Public Health into Urban Revitalization Workshop Summary (2015) / Chapter Skim
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2 Utilizing Green Technologies in Washington, DC
2 Utilizing Green Technologies in Washington, DC
Pages 5-26
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From page 5... ...
GREEN BUILDINGS The session's first speaker was Gregory Kats, president of Capital E, a national clean energy advisory and venture capital firm. He was previously the director of financing for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the U.S.
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In carrying out its research on green schools, his group was able to quantify various benefits for the students in such schools, as reported in 1 In this context, green building design refers to construction certified by the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)
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When the U.S. real estate market went into recession in 2008, Kats noted that there was some question whether green buildings would continue to thrive or whether people would choose to go back to basic building design and see green design as a superfluous option.
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Green roofs retain water and release it gradually through the presence of plants growing on the roof. They also help reduce the heat island effect, reduce the level of ozone, and reduce heat-related mortality, but in addition, they help reduce storm water management costs.
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All three types of roofs have energy benefits -- energy savings by keeping a building cooler for cool and green roofs and energy generation from solar-paneled roofs -- and in the case of cool roofs and the solar-paneled roof, these benefits already outweigh the costs, even when no other benefits are taken into account. A major benefit of the green roof is the savings associated with storm water accommodation, and the savings are enough to more than balance the cost of the roof.
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By shifting when a home's air-conditioner is operating, for instance, it can significantly reduce residential power consumption, thus decreasing power bills. It can also move much of the power usage to off-peak hours,
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When the location-specific data are combined with the additional neighborhood characteristics related to transportation and employment, the Places model turns out to be a far better predictor of whether a person will default than a conventional FICO score, Kats said. To test the Places program, it was used to analyze a 100,000-loan portfolio evaluated and invested in by AIG.
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From page 12... ...
The past decade has seen a burst of activity in the area of green building, Shane said, specifically in healthy buildings, green roofs, storm water management, cleaner water programs, and green power. Among all the cities in the United States, the District of Columbia ranks near the top in the number of green and energy-efficient buildings, both in absolute numbers and in numbers per capita.
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From page 13... ...
"The government is not buying all this power and it is not building all these buildings; this is the private sector adopting market greening in a significant way." Another green initiative is the District's 5-cent fee for disposable bags supplied at a grocery or other store, which has led to an 80 percent decrease in bag usage and a corresponding drop in the number of bags that end up in the Potomac River. The District also has more than 2 million square feet of green roofs, and, Shane said, over the past several years the District has been installing more green roofs by square footage than any other city in the United States.
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The second health and wellness goal is to "create safe environments that are conducive to healthy living." The associated target is to "require all new housing projects in the District to meet Healthy by Design standards." To meet this goal, the District will develop a Healthy by Design program for new affordable housing projects that focuses in particular on low-income and underserved neighborhoods. The idea, Shane explained, is that housing needs to be designed with health in mind.
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What would happen if the cool roofs were to spread across the system until they were on a substantial percentage of the city's roofs? "When you start increasing the reflectivity of the city," Shane said, "you start seeing decreases in morbidity -- in this case, reducing the number of deaths on an average of 6 percent if we increased by 10 percent the urban reflectivity" (Kalkstein et al., 2013)
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There is no simple answer." The District is trying various things to keep housing affordable. In particular, the current mayor is looking at major investments -- $100 million per year or more -- to preserve and increase affordable housing.
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"The idea that you have a walkable neighborhood, a healthy neighborhood, is independent of whether someone is new, moving into the area, or has been here for a while, whether they paid $50,000 for their house or whether they paid $1 million for it." Thus, he and his colleagues focus on improving the quality of the community citywide, including the affordable housing, and on developing new assets that will improve the lives of everyone in the city. "You need to understand that the community will be changing, will be growing, and you need to build these assets in and make sure they are accessible to people at all levels of income," he said.
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For example, in saying that a 10 percent increase in reflectivity would result in a 6 percent decrease in heat deaths, how is that measured? Is that done completely according to a model, or are there programs looking at actual health effects?
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Part of the success is due to the District's public charter school program, which is one of the most robust in the country, he said. "About 40 percent of public school students in the District are now in a public charter school, which are all over the city with a whole variety of focus areas." The city has also instituted universal prekindergarten that is available for all 4year-olds and will likely be made available to 3-year-olds as well.
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It's very fresh; there are no contaminants." Concerning the life cycle of green buildings, he said that the LEED certification program has done a good job with paying attention to the upstream and downstream environmental effects (that is, the effects related to the production and disposal of the building materials)
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From page 21... ...
"You could use similar numbers probably for making people healthier or getting them to exercise," he said. "The ability to achieve any of our big-picture goals 8 To receive LEED certification, building projects satisfy prerequisites and earn points to achieve different levels of certification.
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From page 22... ...
For instance, the District has a voluntary program called the Smarter DC Challenge that challenges businesses to be smarter about the way in which they operate. "We provide incentives where we can," Shane said, "but it's about networking, about leadership from the private sector in the workplace." As for quantifying benefits, Shane said that when a clear business case for green power exists -- with data showing that green power is in businesses' best interests -- real movement will take place in the market on a larger scale.
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Part of it was that the DC mayor made sustainability a major focus "and invested in it and provided the bully pulpit that helped so much of the rest of us in the government, staff folks, move things forward." Another part of it was that the U.S. Green Building Council is headquartered in the District, and thus, the council could influence thinking in the District.
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In particular, he noted that exposure to biologically diverse environments has been shown to be beneficial for children with asthma, and he wondered if there is any screening of the green spaces that prescriptions are written for. Shane answered that the District of Columbia Department of Health is working with the District of Columbia Primary Care Association to determine the most effective approaches to such prescriptions.
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To his knowledge, he indicated, no health TIFs have been put into effect, but, he added, "I would think that some of those green TIFs may well have a number of health-focused outcomes very well integrated in them. It would be interesting to see where those are." Kats spoke briefly about a green affordable housing example led by Enterprise Community Partners and called the Green Communities initiative.
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From page 26... ...
2012. Fact sheet: Cool roofs.
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