Home Builders to Give LEED Competition

Last month it was announced that the home builders are going to launch a rating tool (subs. req’d) to compete with the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system.

Still too soon to tell if this is a positive development (bringing competition into the marketplace of rating systems) or a negative development (a watered down system designed to be a weak version of LEED).

Since you need a subscription to read the piece, it’s posted in full below (from Greenwire).

The National Association of Home Builders says it plans to launch a voluntary program this winter for certifying residential green buildings.

The program, to be unveiled Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day — at NAHB’s International Builders’ Show in Orlando, would link dozens of state and local NAHB affiliate organizations’ green-building programs with a national certification tool and online registry of NAHB-certified green homes and builders.

To date, about 100,000 homes have been built to environmental sustainability benchmarks established by local builders’ associations throughout the United States, according to the Washington, D.C.-based building industry trade group.

NAHB is crafting its national standard based on its model green home-building guidelines, published two years ago. Certified projects would be rated bronze, silver or gold, based on lot preparation, energy efficiency and other factors. The rating criteria would also take into account regional climate differences, said Lauren Forgacs, NAHB’s green building program manager.

“Our members wanted guidelines that allow a certain level of flexibility and affordability,” she added.

Developers would need to pay for a site inspection by a third party, but NAHB officials say they are not yet ready to say how much the entire certification price tag would be.

“We’re trying to bring green building into the mainstream, so we’re trying to keep the costs of certification low,” said Calli Schmidt, an NAHB spokeswoman.

Price could be a big factor in the increasingly competitive race to define what makes a building green.
Head-to-head contest

The NAHB green homes standard would compete head-to-head with the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating tools for residential and commercial buildings. USGBC is conducting pilot testing of its proposed LEED for Neighborhood Development rating tool, which emphasizes energy efficiency of residential buildings, as well as site selection and other elements that relate the neighborhood to its surroundings (Greenwire, Aug. 8).

Not to be outdone, NAHB is asking the American National Standards Institute to sanction its green certification tool as a sustainable design baseline for the housing construction industry. The 88-year-old institute is the United States’ unofficial certifier of more than 10,000 voluntary consensus standards, including the electronics industry’s UL label.

Certification tools that are sanctioned as an ANCI “American National Standard” have added clout when it comes to government contracts. A 1998 order by President Clinton directs federal agencies to increase their use of voluntary consensus standards whenever possible. Thus, preference for federal procurement goes to organizations that have undergone ANSI’s rigorous peer-review process.

The Portland, Ore.-based Green Building Initiative, an NAHB ally, is also seeking ANCI certification of its Green Globes rating tool for commercial buildings. Ward Hubbell, GBI’s executive director, said he expects the ANSI review process to wrap up as soon as next summer.

Like NAHB’s draft green homes standard, GBI’s Green Globes awards builders certification points for using wood that has the timber industry’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative stamp of approval. LEED, rather, recognizes wood certified only by the independent Forest Stewardship Council, which requires more rigorous — and often more costly — environmental standards for timber harvesting than the industry-backed SFI certification.
‘Marketplace will decide’

The American Forest & Paper Association, which created the SFI standard, has argued that the widely used LEED standards unfairly block out many wood producers from the booming green-buildings marketplace. The financial stakes are rising as cities, states and federal agencies require green-building practices to drive down energy costs and mitigate global warming.

AF&PA, which is helping develop NAHB’s green homes rating criteria, has lobbied the legislatures in Arkansas, Connecticut and several other states to amend LEED-specific legislation to recognize Green Globes and other green-building certification tools.

“Our view is that the marketplace will decide,” Patrick Rita, AF&PA’s vice president of government affairs, said in a recent interview. “You can’t grant a legislative monopoly and expect the marketplace to decide.”

But the USGBC doesn’t appear ready to let its dominant share of the green building marketplace slip.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit is partnering with the American Society of Heating and Air-Conditioning Engineers and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America to develop LEED-based language that could be dropped into municipal building codes across the country. The LEED language, known as Standard 189p, would set benchmarks for commercial building site preparation, indoor air quality and energy and water use.

The organizations hope to submit the voluntary standard language for ANCI approval in early 2008, said Taryn Holowka, a USGBC spokeswoman.

“We’re writing this standard so it could be dropped into a local building code anywhere,” she added. “It’s raising the floor of building codes, which aren’t green now.”