Doug Gatlin
Vice President, LEED
U.S. Green Building Council
It’s a great time to be an existing building.
First: President Obama released last year’s Better Buildings Initiative, focusing financing opportunities on commercial retrofits.
Then: USGBC reported that LEED for Existing Buildings project square footage surpassed new construction projects.
Now: A new report has concluded that building reuse almost always offers environmental savings over demolition and new construction.
Empire State Building, LEED Gold.
Photo credit: John Donges, Flickr
It’s a hat trick for existing buildings, the many millions of them across the world. There are 838,337 alone in New York City, some three million skyscrapers across the U.S., and 71 billion total square feet covering the country. Everyone from building industry pros to the President of the United States is recognizing the vast potential to curb emissions and ramp up energy efficiency by greening this enormous stock of structures, to the tune of one million jobs. The market share of retrofit projects that are green is expected to rise to one third in 2015: An $18 billion opportunity. USGBC has been stressing the insurmountable benefits of focusing our greening efforts on the existing building stock, and we are thrilled that momentum is growing.
Doug Gatlin
