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If the tenant will occupy a significant portion of the building for a minimum of ten years, consider working with building management to encourage implementation of green strategies that will help your project meet LEED requirements in areas beyond the tenant’s control. Look especially at the credits in the Sustainable Sites section. For example, the project team could suggest:
With a longer lease term, it’s important to select your building location very carefully. If you don’t choose a LEED-certified building, try to find a building with improvement opportunities that have payback periods within the lease term. Use the thresholds outlined in the LEED credits, especially those in the energy section, as a framework for determining the cost implications of potential improvements.
If your project is a renovation, and the tenant is halfway through a ten-year or longer lease, you can still comply—there is no stipulation that the lease has to start at the beginning of construction.
To earn the credit, the tenant must commit to remaining in the same location for at least 10 years. The most straightforward way to do this is through an extended lease.
For both options, a licensed professional (PE, RA, or RLA) can sign off on the credit in lieu of entering all the calculations. The professional whose license is on the line will likely want to confirm all the calculations anyway, and the credit form offers a good way to do that.
For onsite services or those within a half-mile, you can count up to two restaurants in the list of ten community services, but no other service can be counted twice. For example, if there are three restaurants, two hair salons, and four dry cleaners within your radius, you can count two restaurants, one salon and one dry cleaner.
All the services must be accessible by foot via an uninterrupted, safe path stretching from the designated entrance to the service location. The path cannot cross a highway, for example, unless there is a pedestrian pathway.
For projects with more than one main entrance or more than one building, you may draw a circle from more than one entrance. The area contained within the circles drawn from all these radii is then used as your project’s radius.
