by Brooks Rainwater
Director, Local Relations, AIA Government and Community Relations

Summary: San Francisco is blazing a trail on sustainability as it moves towards enacting the most far-reaching green building legislation in the U.S. This new green building policy builds on the city’s current sustainability initiatives and will be implemented gradually over the next four years, with full implementation in 2012. The green building code will require all new high-rise residential buildings to be certified LEED® Silver, commercial buildings and major renovations over 25,000 square feet to be LEED Gold, and new small- and mid-sized residential to be rated with the GreenPoint rating system—all leading to a holistic plan for greening the building stock and meeting the city’s climate action goals.

Strong mayoral support
The Building Inspection Commission voted unanimously to adopt this sustainability ordinance, and with little opposition expected, it is anticipated that this new ordinance will be effective by April 22, Earth Day. "Without more energy and resource efficient buildings in San Francisco, we will not meet our city's aggressive climate action goals. One year ago, I convened the Green Building Task Force to develop recommendations for the most advanced green building code in the country,” commented San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

“The resulting green building ordinance challenges the building industry to step up to the challenge of delivering well-designed and high performing projects that will slash greenhouse gas emissions and deliver healthier environments for occupants,” Newsom said. “I am confident that our talented pool of architects, engineers, and builders already doing great work on the environment will continue their tradition of innovation and help to deliver the next generation of truly sustainable 21st century buildings worthy of our great city and its people."

LEED and GreenPoint ratings
The program will use the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system for commercial and multifamily residential, while employing the locally developed GreenPoint rating system for residential buildings. Small and midsize residential buildings will be gradually transitioned into the green building program, with all buildings below 75 feet tall required to submit a GreenPoint checklist for information purposes only in 2008, and then moving from 25-75 GreenPoints over the 2009-2012 timeframe. By January 1, 2010, all of these buildings will also have to be designed to be 15 percent more efficient than Title 24, the California Building Standards Code.

High-rise residential buildings will have to achieve LEED-certified status upon the effective date of the new law and transition to LEED Silver after 2010, while new commercial buildings over 25,000 square feet and new interiors and major renovations over 25,000 square feet will have to reach LEED Gold Certification by 2012. High-rise residential and large commercial buildings will have to achieve energy reductions 14 percent better than Title 24 upon enactment of the law. These building types will also have to meet specific LEED credits on areas ranging from water-efficient landscaping to enhanced building commissioning.

Architects like it
The proposed law has strong buy-in from the community, with architects and others in the design/building industry taking part in the deliberations that led to the final policy. AIA San Francisco’s Executive Director Margie O’Driscoll and Bill Worthen, AIA, of Simon Associates, sat on the Mayor’s Green Building Task Force, and AIA San Francisco President Jennifer Devlin, AIA, recently testified in favor of the new legislation before the Building Inspection Commission.

“Margie O’Driscoll and Bill Worthen were instrumental in helping to craft the language of the final bill. Our Board’s agenda is to advocate for the 2030 Challenge, and policies like this help move us closer to this goal,” Devlin said. “The [AIA San Francisco] board endorsed this legislation wholeheartedly, and we announced this in our testimony. AIA San Francisco has been and will continue to be a resource to the city on this and many other important issues.”

“It is clear that at every level, the AIA is poised to play a significant part in this conversation,” remarked AIA Vice President Clark Manus, FAIA. He reinforced that AIA efforts in 2007 culminated in a major victory on the energy bill in Congress and has led us to using DesignVote 08 to garner continued attention on this issue.