« Near arena site, O'Connor's expands, though AY-connected buyer was rebuffed | Main | Ruffled feathers! Environmentalists, Walmart foes want to stop Four Sparrows shopping center »
February 23, 2011
Why LEED Certification is lagging in New York
Sustainable Cities Collective
by Stephen Del Percio
While some buildings, like the Diana Center, have successfully moved forward with plans for LEED certification and added to New York City’s growing total number of certifications, others, like the New York Times Building, have affirmatively made the choice not to pursue a formal rating from USGBC for a variety of reasons.
According to an article also published earlier this month in the Tribune, Frank Gehry’s acclaimed new 76-story rental building, New York by Gehry at 8 Spruce Street, falls under that latter category. “It won’t be LEED-certified,” a spokeswoman for the project told the Tribune in a phone interview. “It is, in many respects, a green building. [But] [w]e [are] not going to go through the formal process.”
...Curiously, though, Forest City Ratner – the developer behind Gehry’s tower, touted the potential LEED certification and green features of the controversial Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn as that project battled its way through land use approvals and court proceedings before finally breaking ground late last year. Note that those very types of representations have landed the developer of the Destiny USA project in Syracuse in the middle of some very serious allegations about misrepresentation; that story is one we’ll be following both here at gbNYC and over at our sister publication, the Green Real Estate Law Journal, in the weeks ahead.
NoLandGrab: If Forest City Ratner claims one of its buildings is "green," you can be pretty well sure it's not. Given their track record, we can rest assured that nothing at Atlantic Yards will be LEED-certified, yet another in a long, long list of broken promises.
Posted by eric at February 23, 2011 9:40 AM