Dear buildings, I love you, you’re not perfect, please change

This month, I started my new role as director of buildings at GreenBiz. It has been a lifelong journey to arrive here, and I am humbled to co-write the Energy Weekly newsletter alongside GreenBiz VP of Energy Sarah Golden. I am kicking it off with a brief introduction to why I love buildings and how I see the building industry transforming in this moment. I wrap things up below with my first ask and offer in this role.

Learning to love and respect buildings

I owe my love of buildings to my grandfather, Andrew T. Ball. He lived across the street from me while I was growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, and I often found him at his highly organized workbench in the basement crafting furniture, fixing things around the house and devising ways to keep squirrels out of the birdfeeder. I loved working alongside him. He taught me the rhythm of using a handsaw, that “the job's not done until the tools are put away,” and how to enjoy some sun-brewed iced tea after the job was done.

My time with Habitat for Humanity at the start of my career grew my love for buildings into a profound respect for the impact that they have on people and the planet. Statistics such as these are etched in my being:

• People spend on average 90 percent of their time indoors.
• Buildings emit 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
• Construction and demolition waste accounts for 30 percent of total waste produced globally.

I have spent the last 15 years working to improve these metrics mostly as a sustainability consultant on corporate, nonprofit and government building projects. Sometimes that work can wear me down, but my passion is reignited every time I experience exceptional buildings such as those I toured during Circularity 23 last week. 

We have incredible examples of sustainable spaces such as the Bullitt Center (widely regarded as the greenest commercial building in the world) to guide us. Now it is time to work together on getting over the tipping point of green building practices. 

Working together to meet this moment

The ethos of collaboration and comradery was visceral for me when I joined the green building movement in 2008. The sustainability community I was a part of at the time met regularly to discuss how we could grow the market for green certifications, and we were highly successful in working together to grow participation in programs such as Energy Star, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and others. 

The building industry is now in a new stage of the sustainability movement, but building owners, tenants, service providers and consultants still have more to gain from working together than from siloing their efforts to transform the built environment. I see this new stage of our market transformation as marked by a number of macro shifts:

• Actual performance over prescriptive measures: Maximizing points on a green certification checklist is no longer enough. Measuring and reporting on a building’s actual performance is becoming a requirement through building performance standards and financial regulations. 
• Deep dive on carbon: The climate crisis has put managing carbon emissions on center stage for the building industry and quickly expanded the focus of building owners on operational energy to the full life cycle of a building’s carbon impact, including the CO2 embodied in its materials. 
• Financial sticks and carrots: Impending disclosure regulations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, building performance standard fines, investors’ push for deeper ESG reporting, PACE (a.k.a. property assessed clean energy) financing and more are shifting the economic drivers of sustainable building development and operations.

All of these changes signal a broader shift in the building industry — from learning and demonstrating what sustainable buildings are to implementing and scaling those solutions. As U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm says, we are now ready to “deploy, deploy, deploy.” While this focus of the work changes so, too, does the way the industry needs to be supported. In my new role at GreenBiz, I look forward to providing online content and event programming in ways that most serve the building community.

My first ask and offer in my new role

I’ll end my first article with GreenBiz with both an ask and an offer. 

My ask is to please share your stories and perspectives on the building industry with me. Your successes, your failures, your lessons learned. Please share them openly and honestly so that others can follow — or avoid — the path you've taken. Far too often in the building industry, we repeat the same mistakes. In order to accelerate our learning curve, we must embrace the spirit of collaboration that has always been core to the sustainable building movement. 

My offer is to serve all people, sectors and interests in the sustainable building movement. For me, the problem and solutions we need include all aspects of the built world — the infrastructure, the urban planning and, of course, the buildings. I approach this work to elevate all voices, especially those heard less often. This transformation of our built world is not just about restoring balance to our ecosystem, it is to improve the quality of life for all people. I'm here for that, and I hope you will join me. (You can reach me at [email protected].)