Going Green Can Mean Green
Monday, July 23, 2007SUSIE GHARIB: The housing market may be on the down swing, but there's one part of the building industry still seeing a great deal of activity. It's called green construction. As Jeff Yastine reports, that's the name given to commercial buildings that are energy efficient and environmentally friendly.
JEFF YASTINE, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: It has all the appearances of an ordinary office construction project -- workmen ready the concrete forms and steel reinforcing rods that will become the foundation for a 13-story tower on the edge of downtown Coral Gables, just south of Miami. But this project when finished, will be the state of Florida's first green office building. Developer William Holly says the building, called "Miami Green," is being built to environmentally friendly, energy efficient standards.
WILLIAM HOLLY, DEVELOPER, MIAMI GREEN: Green is all about sustainability. It's about putting in recycled carpeting. It's about less water usage, less electrical usage, and the sort. So we're conserving energy and we're working to try to create a sustainable environment in a commercial office product.
YASTINE: The U.S. Green Building Council says the number of certified green projects nationwide has risen from 80 million square feet in 2002 to nearly 650 million square feet last year. And as more green buildings have gone up, the cost of building to such standards has gone down, according to industry insiders like Daryl Dulaney, CEO of Siemens Building Technologies.
DARYL DULANEY, PRES. & CEO, SIEMENS BUILDING TECHNOLOGIES: There was about a 2 percent price premium for the total cost of green building construction. And that is shrinking because there's more and more demand and more and more supply. Plus, products are being replaced -- newer products are replacing older generation products, which have built-in properties of improved energy improvement.
YASTINE: Do green buildings sell? Developers say yes, because more companies want to be able to say they're delivering goods and services to customers in an environmentally friendly, energy efficient manner.
HOLLY: That's going to affect their bottom line. And that's what people love about our product. They can care about the environment. They can do something positive for the community and it hits them in the bottom line in a very positive way.
YASTINE: That logic appears to be working for developers like Holly, who says his building's 60 or so office condos are already more than half sold and he expects a complete sellout by the time the project is finished at the end of next year. Jeff Yastine, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Miami.
