CNU members help regionalize LEED-ND

Thanks in part to the work of CNU members acting as advisers to the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), the LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) rating system may soon award a special bonus point to projects in Arlington Heights or other second-ring Illinois suburbs that minimize off-street parking. In Moline and other smaller riverfront cities in Illinois, projects may get an extra point for redeveloping brownfields and helping these formerly industrial towns transition into a new economy.

Making highly place-specific recommendations for communities across the country was all in a day’s work — actually a few months’ work — for a few dozen CNU members who participated in, and sometimes led, state-based teams charged with determining the new green neighborhood rating system’s “regional priority credits.”

Whether the system is LEED-ND — one of USGBC’s newest, currently in its late pilot stage — or a long-established system such as LEED for New Construction, the regional priority credits function similarly: They are essentially extra points awarded to projects when they fulfill the requirements of specific credits within the rating system. USGBC typically involves its regional councils and chapters in selecting which existing credits deserve extra points. Because the development of LEED-ND has been a partnership of USGBC, CNU, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the selection process for regional priority credits has been broadened to include new urbanists and smart growth representatives.

To ensure member involvement, CNU worked with the newly formed CNU Chapter Steering Committee, composed of representatives from CNU’s 12 chapters, to identify members from each chapter to encourage participation. CNU also rounded up volunteers in states where chapters have not been established.

By mid-July, the CNU representatives had joined with USGBC members and NRDC recruits on teams that were plunging into the intricacies of the rating system to begin determining which six of LEED-ND’s 41 credits will be eligible for extra credit in each US ZIP code. (A project can then get an extra point each for satisfying up to four of the identified credits.)

CNU member Faith Cable, who had relocated to Minnesota after completing both a masters thesis on LEED-ND and a Fulbright study comparing it to similar foreign systems, assumed the role of co-chair of the task force charged with recommending regional priority credits for ZIP codes in the Gopher State. In Illinois, CNU members Leslie Oberholtzer of Farr Associates and Todd Fagen of Sam Schwartz Engineering became co-chairs of that state’s regionalization task force.

Transect as a guide
The state groups were encouraged to create between 5 and 10 zones per state corresponding to distinct combinations of form, regional context, and natural environment as they relate to issues specifically addressed in the rating system. Cable’s task force found the rural-to-urban Transect, a new urbanist invention, a useful tool for identifying variations in urban and natural form across settings from rural preserves to dense urban cores — and Cable herself played a supportive educational role with members of the multi-disciplinary group who were largely unfamiliar with the concept. In their current recommendations, reports Cable, “a lot of our zones follow the Transect.”

While some participants argued for identifying various natural zones, such as northern woodlands and western prairie, many state-based teams began to recognize that while LEED-ND focuses on habitat conservation, it doesn’t distinguish between habitat types. Ultimately, differences between zones are only significant to the extent that they reflect the content of the rating system.
Although there’s a sustainability advantage in developing on a site in water-rich Milwaukee versus Waukesha, in a separate nearby watershed with radium contamination and highly limited drinking water supplies, LEED-ND doesn’t have a credit recognizing this issue, so it can’t be a factor in defining zones. Since so much of the system addresses issues of relevance in highly urbanized areas, many of the groups made a concerted effort to fine-tune distinctions between different types of urbanism. For example, of the 9 identified zones in Illinois, the regionalization group created a rural zone that encompasses much of the state and 8 other zones that distinguish between different types and intensities of urbanism.

Teams in multiple states quickly recognized the limitations inherent in working at the scale of ZIP codes. What makes LEED-ND a breakthrough is the extent to which it captures how factors such as regional location, community form, and quality of transit service determine green performance. But these conditions can obviously vary significantly within individual ZIP codes, particularly at the suburban and exurban edge where farmland and small towns, as well as suburban development, can all be grouped together.

USGBC’s database currently cannot accommodate contexts at a finer grain than ZIP codes, but the experience with LEED-ND may push the organization to make changes in time for the next rating system update in 2011, so regional zones could be defined at the level of census tracts or even addresses.
With the zones identified and pending for each state, the regionalization groups are now taking the final and perhaps most interesting step — finalizing the credits associated with each zone and then delineating the zones, using zip codes. State teams are finding that the credits dearest to new urbanists (contained primarily in the Neighborhood Pattern and Design category) are often worthy of application in multiple zones.

Fagen, the Chicago engineer and CNU member, reports that the “walkable streets” credit (NPD Credit 1), with its emphasis on permeable building frontages, building height-to-street-width ratios, and sidewalk continuity, is currently being recommended as a regional priority credit in zones ranging from “metropolitan inner- ring suburbs” to “traditional [small] cities and towns” to “waterfront industrial areas.” Having new urbanists involved in the decision-making process influenced that result, says Fagen. “It’s a cliché, but an urbanist will understand the importance of not having to get into your car to drive to get a gallon of milk. That’s not necessarily intuitive for a lot of people.”

In Minnesota, Cable says that her task force hopes to send a message to communities, based on the credits selected for their areas — pushing them to take on the challenges that are typically avoided. Consider suburban transit as an example. “In suburban areas, we thought that in using the transit credit, it will either encourage developers to build near light-rail transit or have them talk to transit companies about providing transit service there in the future. That often doesn’t happen now. We thought maybe that credit can give transit prospects a small boost.”

Watch for information on the final results of the regionalization process later this fall.