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Trends TodayThe Rise In Green Building Trends TodayBy
Vanessa
A. DoctorThe green building trend that has taken hold across the US
in the past few years, and is surprisingly evolving toward a whole new level.
Whereas before when there were only a few green real estate developments, today
this trend in sustainable development has expanded to whole communities and neighborhoods
as well. The west coast city of Portland has been well known as an urban-design
innovator, particularly for its transit-oriented developments, and is noted to
be among the pioneers of green building and design. Single-Family Home
Builders Are Now Joining The TrendThe basic tenets behind green building-
energy and water-efficient buildings that have features that stress the natural
over the chemical, the recycled over the new and the renewable over the finite-
have now become firmly mainstream. According to environmental and real estate
consultants, big developers today are slow to move, but they still see a using
eco-friendly designs and materials green building. Even in the suburbs, which
are home to large-scale builders of single-family homes, there is a lot more consumer
interest swelling. In a McGraw-Hill Construction survey done in March of 2006,
it forecasted that green building would reach a "tipping point" in 2007
and that two-thirds of US builders will be constructing greener homes. Why
Home Builders See The Need To Go GreenHome builders and real estate developers
and are not simply riding the green building trend purely out of a sense that
it's the right thing to do. The housing and development industry knows that they
can't afford to be left behind. By 2007, it is expected that at least 6% of the
nation's non-residential construction, which represents a $15 billion slice of
the industry, will be green, according to green-building experts, as six years
ago it was less than 1%. More real estate developers are finding that using green
technologies and construction materials adds no more than 1%-2% to total costs,
which area easily recovered through energy savings. Offering Incentives
For Developers To Go GreenAt present, the federal government, 15 states
and 46 cities now require new public buildings to fully comply with the U.S. Green
Building Council's LEED standards (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design),
that requires the use of non-toxic building materials, among other things. Four
states and 17 cities now offer incentives for LEED-rated private buildings. The
Green Building Council has certified nearly 550 buildings across the country since
2002, and recent real estate developments have adopted eco-friendly standards
by creating greener multi-structure projects, such as South Waterfront in Portland,
Oregon. The Green Building Council is also working on creating LEED standards
for single-family homes as well. The corporate world was the first to see
the value of going green that are way beyond energy savings. Businesses and companies
now notice less absenteeism among workers, less time lost to asthma, allergies
and other illnesses aggravated by mold, stale air and chemicals found in many
conventional buildings. However, to large corporations like Ford, Bank of
America, Target, Toyota, Honda, Starbucks,Adobe and others, going green also was
about image-building as well as cleaning up the environment and cutting costs.
Many corporate giants know are aware that aside from image-building, the products
they make should also be green, along with their manufacturing processes and factories
as well. About the Authorhttp://realestatepr.org
- Real Estate PR Vanessa A. Doctor from Jump2Top
- SEO Company Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Vanessa_A._Doctor
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