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Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024
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San Diego Falls in Middle of Green Rankings

City Rankings by Green Space.

Though San Diego may think of itself as green, the green may stem from jealousy over the performance of other cities when it comes to having environmentally sensitive office space.

San Diego was ranked 18 among the country’s 30 largest metropolitan areas in having green certified office buildings in a recent study by the commercial real estate brokerage firm CBRE and Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

That’s better than last year, when San Diego was ranked 19.

Among the metropolitan areas outperforming San Diego in order of their ranking were Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Chicago was the top-ranked metro area, followed by San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Minneapolis/St. Paul rounding out the best five.

At the bottom of the list in ascending order were St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburg and Baltimore.

Orange County was ranked 12, and Sacramento was ranked 23.

“We could definitely be doing better, that’s for sure, and I think this report shows that,” said Josh Dean, executive director of the San Diego Green Building Council.

“I don’t think we’re overly pushing the boundary, like San Francisco or maybe Los Angeles,” Dean said. “I don’t think the number 18 surprises me.”

The study ranked metropolitan areas based on the amount of office space that’s been Energy Star or LEED (U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified. Energy Star is a voluntary U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program that measures energy performance.

Nationally, more than 41 percent of commercial space in the 30 top metropolitan regions has been certified as green, according to the study.

29.8% Certified Green

In San Diego, nearly 29.8 percent of the 77.6 million square feet of commercial space included in the study have been certified green.

Of the 1,729 buildings in San Diego that were reviewed for the study, 147 were certified green.

David Pogue, CBRE senior vice president for global client care, said one reason that San Diego ranked low in the study is that San Diego has many smaller buildings than some of the other cities that ranked higher.

That matters in rankings such as this because it would take several small buildings with green certification to equal one large building when measuring by the amount of overall square feet of space.

“Even though San Diego is a big city, by the size of square footage of office buildings, it’s a small city,” Pogue said. “When we look at what are the characteristics that drive buildings to be certified, one of them is size.”

The average commercial office building in San Diego is 44,000 square feet.

“Size matters,” Pogue said. “I don’t want to say that the city is not performing as well as it can. Some of it may be preordained in the genes to some degree, the makeup of a building stock of a city.”

Big Buildings’ Green Advantage

Nearly all buildings reviewed nationwide in the study that were 250,000 square feet or more were green certified.

“When we got down to 100,000 square feet, almost none of the buildings were certified,” Pogue said.

Big buildings tend to be owned by larger corporations, who value green certification as a way to attract tenants and for tenants to recruit and retain younger, skilled workers, Pogue said.

“We do have a little bit of a lack of those big company headquarters here in San Diego. We do have a lot of smaller buildings. That it part of the driver for having a lower level of certification,” said Ravi Bajaj, president of the San Diego Green Building Council and project manager of Healthy Buildings, a Carlsbad company that helps companies achieve LEED certification.

“While we’re talking about San Diego being behind the leaders in the market, we are on the list. We’re just not in the top 10.”

Some other California cities — most notably Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Francisco — have regulations requiring building owners to document the energy use of their property.

“San Diego doesn’t have that yet,” Bajaj said, but he said the city deserves kudos for adopting a climate action plan.

“We’re likely to see the impact of that trickle down into buildings,” Bajaj said.

Sandra Gramley, principal with Platt/Whitelaw Architects Inc., said San Diego is “better than average” when it comes to having green buildings, “but we’re not one of the top cities, for sure.”

“If you were to ask me on the street, where do we fall, I would say maybe a third of the way down,” Gramley said. “Some cities have green goals more of a priority, like San Francisco and Chicago.”

Lack of Corporate Headquarters

In San Diego’s defense, Gramley said cities which have many corporate headquarters — which San Diego lacks — are more likely to have more green buildings because corporations see green building certification as an important public relations tools.

Weather also may be a factor.

“We have such a benign climate here where you can’t get as big a savings from having a tight building. You don’t have to keep the outdoors out as much,” Gramley said. “It’s hard to compare us against a Chicago or Minneapolis.”

Gramley said most of her firm’s work has been with public agencies, which have been faster to adopt green building standards than private building owners.

That’s in part because public agencies tend to hold onto their buildings long-term, so they’re looking for savings over time, compared with private corporations, which have a greater tendency to buy and sell buildings.

‘Working At It’

“Now it seems the (private) market is kind of catching up to that a little bit with corporations seeing the value of green buildings,” Gramley said. “There’s a lot of people here doing the right thing and working at it. There’s a lot of us in the industry that realize there’s kind of a moral imperative to do the right thing and keep our buildings green and our cities more sustainable.”

California cities in general are likely to become greener due to changes in state a law and building codes, including the California Green Building Standards Code that took effect in January.

The new code imposes standards that are nearly equal to those required for green certification.

“California is a leader in green building codes and policies, so that works in our favor,” Gramley said.

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