Shelter Skelter | BC green buildings | LEED

Before the financial crash of October 2008, green buildings were the darling of the media and the market, and nowhere was that more true than in B.C.

Victoria’s Dockside Green promised to be the first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum-ranked community in the world; the Millennium Water project proposed to turn the derelict industrial lands of southeast False Creek into a shining example of sustainable design and new urbanism; and PR companies across the province stoked our green-building fever with an impressive barrage of eco-hyperbole.

They pitched a heady cocktail of consumerism and environmentalism, promising us the opportunity to find Mother Nature – and indeed our own souls – on the verdant balcony of a luxury condominium.

But that was all before Black October. Since then the construction and real estate industries in B.C. (and around the world) have been in a tailspin. Average residential real estate prices in Metro Vancouver dropped 11 per cent between January 2008 and January 2009, with the total number of sales declining to levels not seen since the early 1980s. The value of building permits issued across the province slid 32.6 per cent in November 2008 compared to a year earlier, with the residential portion of those permits diving 47.3 per cent.

As if to highlight the woes of the once-mighty construction industry, development giant Onni Group of Companies held a massive liquidation sale in January and February of this year, off-loading 396 Lower Mainland condos and townhomes at discounts averaging 30 to 35 per cent. It was a sharp descent from the glory days of bidding wars and presale sellouts that had been commonplace just a year earlier.

So where does that leave green building? Will it shrivel and die along with our once-hearty appetites for premium-priced condos within walking distance of the local yoga studio? Or will it survive this recession and emerge all the stronger when the economic clouds finally break? The answer, as with so many things, depends a lot on perspective.

Norm Couttie is the president of Adera Development Corp., B.C.’s largest builder of homes certified by the Built Green criteria (see sidebar p. 70). Adera has focused on building green for the past half-dozen years, but Couttie claims the rationale has more to do with ethics than it does with finances. Referring to green features in the homes Adera builds, he says, “We’ve never charged a premium, and people have never been all that willing to pay for them.”

In fact, he says, Adera’s commitment to building green often costs the company hundreds of thousands of dollars on a multimillion-dollar project. “We do it because, one, it’s the right thing to do and, two, we’re going there anyway, so why not be a leader rather than a follower?”

Not that he expects many followers these days. “When the economy was doing well, people were more interested in copying us. But I have a feeling that some of them are backing off now.”

Peter Simpson, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association, notes that there’s little consumer demand to drive any sustained surge in green residential development. “There was never an overwhelming number of people who were willing to pay a premium for a green home,” he says. Even when the real estate market was hot, new homebuyers almost always chose esthetic upgrades over green ones. “Granite wins over green every time,” he says, referring to our collective love of genuine stone countertops.

To underscore his point, Simpson recalls a trip he made to the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in June 2008. Although Canada’s real estate industry was still buoyant at the time, the conference was held in the U.S., where there was already a severe decline in real estate values.

“There were two concurrent seminars running across the hall from each other. One was called Where Do We Go From Here? and it was all about the state of the economy. The other was about green building. It was standing room only in the first, but you could have shot a cannon through the green-building seminar without hitting anyone.” The fact is, he says, “when it comes to choosing survival or green building, builders will choose survival every time.”