As we noted in a post earlier this week, Berkeley’s city council — judged by the source of their campaign contributions — is a wholly owned subsidiary of real estate developers and allied businesses [architects, property brokers, and the like].
Two of the favorite mantras of the council-owning cabal are smart growth and green building.
Smart growth means concentrating development on transit corridors, in hopes of getting people out of their cars. Not entirely a bad notion in itself, although it’s often used as justification for tearing down the buildings that give cities their unique character and sense of history.
In Berkeley, we witnessed a citizen committee spend over a year coming up with a new downtown plan, only to see the developer-back council majority throw it out, and substitute a more developer-friendly plan cooked up by the mayor.
Notably absent from the mayor’s plan were the green building requirements and parking restrictions built into the citizen plan, as well as it’s clear call for preserving the historic character of the downtown.
But now comes information from a wealth of new studies showing that preservation is the greenest way to go.
John McKinney of Miller-McCune Magazine has the details in a must-read article for folks here in Berkeley who followed the downtown plan debate:
“This whole idea that reusing existing resources — especially historic buildings — is the ultimate in recycling is beginning to get some traction,” agrees Donovan Rypkema, one of America’s most prominent and outspoken preservationists, and author of the classic book in the field, The Economics of Historic Preservation: A Community Leader’s Guide.
Helping historic preservationists present their case are new studies that calculate what is lost — in measurable environmental terms — when we tear buildings down and replace them with new ones. Plenty of studies have demonstrated the merits of constructing new green buildings, but until recently, there’s been relatively little data available on the economic and environmental benefits of building reuse.
Some of the latest reports calculate both the enormous amount of energy and materials already locked into buildings (embodied energy), and the significant carbon emissions they represent.
>snip<
Meanwhile, to the delight of preservationists, old buildings have been adjudged to be surprisingly energy efficient. U.S. Department of Energy research on the energy performance of existing buildings ascertained that commercial buildings constructed before 1920 use less energy per square foot than buildings from any other period of time except after 2000. Older buildings, it seems, were constructed with high thermal mass, passive heating and cooling. And, obviously, were built to last.
Some builders acknowledge that historic commercial buildings use less energy than buildings of more recent vintage but insist the exact opposite is true of homes — the older the home, the worse the energy consumption is likely to be.
Yes, but historic preservationists counter that recent studies show older homes can be remodeled and upgraded to meet energy standards at less cost — and at less cost to the environment — than tearing down and building new ones. That was the conclusion from a study in England by the Building and Social Housing Foundation and another in Scotland commissioned by Historic Scotland.
Both studies also looked at the carbon impacts of building new homes compared to retrofitting old ones. The BSHF study commissioned by the Empty Homes Agency found it could take as long as 35 to 50 years for a new green home to recover the carbon expended during the construction process, while the Historic Scotland estimate was 15 to 20 years.
Reminds of something we reported for the Berkeley Daily Planet back in 2008 when we covered a green building seminar during the UC Berkeley Energy Symposium:
Want to build green? The best way isn’t to build at all, but to retrofit an existing building, says architect and green building expert Sandra Mendler.
“In general, it’s always better to reuse a building” than to tear it down and build a new one, Mendler said.
The reason? Over a 30-year span, 20 percent of a building’s energy consumption is embodied in the building’s physical structure itself, she said.
Besides, those old buildings are usually well-built, with lots more craft and artisanship than their modern counterparts. And most of them look a darn sight better too, at least to our jaded photographer’s eyes.
But for folks like Mayor Tom Bates and the council majority, there are lots more contributions to be made from tearing things down and building new — and if modern politics teaches us anything, it’s that corporate votes are the only ones that matter.
eats shoots 'n leaves 
Greener in construction, but more expensive, and less green in terms of energy use.