n/a

Anastasia -

The answer is likely: both.

The definition of previously developed area was changed as part of ID #100001058 (2011/01/11), stating that previously developed areas are land altered by paving, construction and/or land use requiring permitting, but excludes land altered by clearing, filling, agricultural, forestry and preservation activities as "undeveloped." In ID #100001058 for v2009 (but not v4), this definition applies to a whole site under one acre if there are existing structures, or to the development footprint on sites over one acre and land alterations associated with the footprint.

The definition of greenfield area was changed by ID #100001768 (2013/04/01) to state that greenfield areas are all areas not previously developed or graded and could support “open space,” habitat, or agriculture.

These rulings combined would split a site over 1 acre into previously developed and greenfield portions, and the rules for each apply to the respective portions of your site. Note that this isn't an option that the LEED Online form can currently handle. We run into this issue a lot, and often must explain our case under special circumstances.

The biggest difficulty created by these definitions is that areas of a site that had been graded, turned into lawn, or contaminated with waste are still considered "greenfield" if they were not directly associated with the development footprint (hardscape and buildings) of the previous development.

If you feel that restoration is a more appropriate solution on your site than protection of these areas, or if you want to include existing greenfield areas in a native or adapted restoration calculation for compliance, you will need strong arguments to take into your submission to the GBCI or a CIR from the USGBC. Currently there is no intention at the USGBC to fix this or the further contradictory definitions for this credit in v4.

I hope this was helpful.

Anastasia,

Since 1 square meter of grass can make your 1+ acre project a mixed developed/undeveloped site, the key tended to be the bigger picture of the neighborhood. We felt that both SSc1 and SSc2 were geared towards avoiding rural sites.

SSc1 was primarily about protecting soils and staying out of flood plains, so it made sense to apply the more stringent requirements when the site had large areas of actual greenfield (and not just 1 square meter of undeveloped grass).

For SSc2, we felt that the credit was primarily about prioritizing developments in neighborhoods rather than rural areas so we looked more at the surroundings than the site layout on mixed sites.

Rarely did we have a site that was undeveloped for SSc1 and developed for SSc2, but we haven't had any push back from reviewers yet.

I hope this helps.