What can municipalities do to support developers interested in sustainable building projects?
Help foster a 'sustainability' culture
Geller, Kalke and Rennie agree on the importance of context in nurturing sustainable projects. For Rennie, this primarily means ensuring that the right kind of demographic is available and willing to buy your product.
Although critical of the role of elected officials in furthering this, Kalke sees a 'sustainability' context arising from good planning principles, starting with clear long term planning goals that encompass, amongst other things, urban densification principles. "You've got to go back and say 'what's our urban planning vision here for a couple of hundred years?'" he says, "And work on that."
"Sustainability has become engrossed in this obsession for quantitative analysis and [while] there's some aspect of that, we've gone way overboard with 'litres per person per year' and 'BTUs per square foot' …and [have ignored] the qualitative aspects of sustainability," he continues.
Michael Geller's Burnaby Mountain Project, Kalke believes, helps nurture "a complete community…and when you build a very vibrant community, of course, the desirability to be there increases. And the value increases. And the quality of life increases…you'll feel so good about making the decision to move there that you'll truck on with life with an increased sense of passion and ability, then it comes round and hits me in the back and that's the sustainability aspect of it."
Kalke concludes: "You can build the most sustainable building but if you put it in the context of an urban setting, that is just like, you know, shutters down over the windows because there's bullets flying round at night, you don't give a s*** about whether it's costing $10 less a month to heat your place".
Geller, however, is more accepting of the role of municipal leadership: "Nelson… is an interesting situation, where I think it isn't inconceivable that a municipality, through it's planning policies, through an attitude to the preservation of heritage buildings, through certain kinds of enlightened attitudes, can begin to create a certain aura to a place that suddenly does enhance its attractiveness to people and that, in turn, works. It strikes me that there's a place that's doing a number of things that Kamloops isn't doing, or Smithers isn't doing -- if you could buy public stock in Nelson, I would do so, because they are starting to identify a certain niche of people willing to pay a premium for a certain type of environment, and so if developments there are, quote, sustainable, or represent best planning policy, they will create value."
Bonuses
Bob Rennie thinks most developers are looking for financial breaks. "If the municipalities want to see people do what Harold did, Harold has the brain and the passion, the foresight to do it, but in order to get the typical developer, who is just after making money … everything is bottom line, bottom line…municipalities have got to look at offering something. It might be density, offsetting taxes, something so that the developer can see a win... somebody has to start it so that the developer doesn't see that it's a huge cost. He just sees it coming out of profit. He doesn't even look at "do I have a better absorption" or "will I attract a better buyer".
Flexibility
One issue Geller and Kalke both agree on is the need for flexibility from those attempting to support cutting-edge sustainable projects.
They see various organizations' tendency towards prescriptiveness as a real problem for developers looking to innovate, whether it's through prescriptive activities required to obtain funding through a government or utility company program, or through municipal engineering design codes. A specific bugbear for both Kalke and Geller are typical municipal design codes for road widths in residential areas:
"I mean they create awful looking communities, they create far more pavement -- I can't believe I'm saying this, I've become indoctrinated up there," says Geller, referring to Burnaby Mountain. "Most developers would love to develop narrower roads that would have less impact in terms of storm water, that would look good and take up less green space, and you're not allowed to, because of municipal engineering standards".
Kalke and Geller both recount war stories in which they have attempted to gain permission to adapt what they considered to be inappropriate design standards. In West Vancouver, the Advisory Planning Commission of which Kalke was Chair developed its own road standards and took them to the municipal council, which approved them. "It's this kind of thinking that's so ingrained in our society about what works and what doesn't work: that's the problem," he explains.
Municipal support for certain technologies over others, Kalke argues, distorts the market's ability to pick winners and losers. Another problem with prescriptive approaches, says Geller, is that they sometimes specify technologies that, in his opinion, are not fully tried and tested. "There's a danger when municipalities do start to put in requirements for things that are unproven," he says. "I don't want to be told to put in geothermal heating because I'm not convinced that it will work all the time".
On the other hand, Michael also thinks municipalities can also be too conservative about new technologies, particularly when needlessly requiring conventional back-up systems to insure against a failure of innovative ones.
Bob Rennie suggests that there might be a role here of an external agency to work with developers and municipalities to help develop alternative design codes. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities might be able to help in such a role.
When necessary, set minimum standards
With the above caveats in mind, Michael Geller and Bob Rennie agree that municipalities should work to establish a level playing field for certain environmental features. "I do feel there is a role for elected officials and governments to impose certain regulations, sometimes on the leading edge, in order to ensure certain things happen," says Geller. "Recycling is an example…There are communities that still don't have recycling. Now I would think that at a certain point it's up to the municipality to mandate that, 'yes we are going to have recycling', and then it will happen."
Geller also sees the benefits of mandated minimum standards:
"Right now, there's a much higher level of energy-efficient building going on in the City of Vancouver than there was ten years ago. Is it happening because the public demanded it? No. Is it happening because the developers and the architects wanted to do it? No. It's happening because the City of Vancouver instituted a new energy code that started talking about the percentage of glazed windows and the percentage of heat loss and heat gain, and the developers have to comply with it and the builders have to comply with it and it's happening."
Lead by example
Harold Kalke, however, would prefer to be left alone to do his own thing. In turn, he suggests public bodies should do more to promote energy innovations in public buildings, rather than dictating the terms under which he can innovate in private ones. He cites an example from Sweden, where a particular percentage of heat in public buildings is mandated to come from geothermal ground loop systems and district heating systems -- a mandate that has spurred energy innovation in the public sector and which in turn is providing models for the private sector to pick up on.
"It's the state's role to look after it's own Ballywick so that we can copy it", insists Harold.
