Why the USA Today Article Misses the Point

Nadav does a great job here in laying out the issues and problems with the USA Today article. And Brendon Owens from USGBC provides an excellent “inside” perspective in his thoughtful "Fact Check" response piece as well on the USGBC website. But there are a few more points to add to this discussion: 1. It’s ok that you get points for seemingly no extra work. LEED isn’t trying to, nor can it, evaluate what a project would have done in the absence of extra money, effort, or desire for recognition. In other words, LEED doesn't care if something is required by code in a given location, makes good business sense, doesn’t cost anything, or would have been done because the market demands it. So if a downtown project (such as the hotel the USA Today article references that’s located on the Las Vegas strip) gets points because it has transit access and is in a walkable location, and it would have had transit access and walkability with or without the influence of LEED, that is by design. It is objectively and measurably better than having a project located without transit access, so it is a reasonable measure of the project’s sustainability attributes and that is what LEED is intending to measure. Yes, some points may seem cheap and easy for certain projects (e.g. transit orientation and density), but the fact is that projects that have the attributes that earn them these points are measurably better than those built without them. There are Vegas casinos, one should note, that are out in the sprawl and entirely auto-dependent, and these projects don’t get those “free” points for a good reason. The difference between projects with and without these attributes is significant. 2. LEED doesn’t care what kind of building it is. LEED doesn't pass judgment on the programming of the building. So if you have a monstrous hotel with five heated swimming pools (as did the hotel in the USA Today article) or even a manufacturing facility that produces concentrated liquid evil (so long as it complies with local environmental laws), LEED is silent. It doesn’t get into the business of deciding which buildings are good and which are bad. Doing so would be a nearly impossible moral line to draw and would turn into a political food fight that would derail and distract from the focus of LEED. All the LEED rating systems speak to are the design and construction aspects of whatever you were going to build anyway (or for EBOM, what you are operating and managing anyway). So if the Vegas hotel was planning to have five swimming pools, LEED simply measures the degree to which that hotel, which was going to happen anyway, has efficiently heated the swimming pools and has generally built to LEED standards in other areas. After all, no one is going to build more swimming pools than they were planning just so they can be solar heated to earn more LEED points. This is a complicated issue, and one that merits debate, but USGBC has made a conscious and defensible argument, which is that it isn’t the basic intent and program of the building that needs to be green; rather it is how that building is designed and constructed. 3. LEED has to balance not being too easy and not being too hard. The LEED rating systems have to walk a fine line between stringency and market transformation. It wants as many projects to be able to get in the door (you don’t want the five hotel casino being inefficient and toxic in addition to having so many pools, right?), but it also can't be too easy to get certified, otherwise the label becomes watered down and meaningless. Therefore, the question of which measures are chosen to become prerequisites, and how difficult it is to earn 40 points for basic certification is a really challenging one. This is especially true when you consider that there are LEED projects in Portland and Alabama and Dubai, where codes, transit, density, climate, market expectations and available resources and incentives vary widely. And it reinforces the importance of the different levels of certification: there are meaningful differences between Certified, Silver, Gold, and Platinum projects. As nearly anyone who works with LEED knows – and as Nadav points out, and as Brendan Owens articulately states in his post – there are plenty of improvements to make and plenty of contentious issues to grapple over with the LEED rating systems. Among the top of the frustrations are the cost and time associated with pursuing certification, issues in ensuring long term performance, and the customer service that could provide clarification to project teams. But as to the value that LEED brings to individual projects and to the market as a whole, there can’t really be any doubt as to the transformative value it has had and continues to have around the world. I’ve never seen a building become worse because of LEED. They are usually better versions of themselves after going through the process. But one wonders if this point is simply less story-worthy than a few skeletons in the LEED closet.