Editorials

As Earth Day approaches, Berkeley’s ever-growing Earth Day celebration is scheduled to take place this Saturday in newly-renovated Martin Luther King Park, right between the two city halls, Old and New, and next to the Farmers’ Market. It’s a perfect location to consider a few facts about sustainability, today’s buzz word for doing whatever we can not to harm Mother Earth any more than we already have. 

The New City Hall, more formally the Civic Center Building, the former Federal Land Bank building, a substantial edifice from the 1930s, stands witness to the enormous benefits of adaptive re-use of existing buildings. This topic was covered in exhaustive and entertaining detail in a recent lecture, Sustainable Stewardship:Historic Preservation’s Essential Role in Fighting Climate Change, which was delivered in Berkeley by Richard Moe, the President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. You can read the whole thing, complete with elegant illustrations, at http://berkeleyheritage.com/speeches/richard_moe.html.  

But the national organization has posted a tight summary of the facts on which Moe’s talk was based on its website, under the title is “Facts about Preservation and Sustainability: Why Our Existing Buildings and Neighborhoods Matter.”  

The key statistics bear repeating here verbatim: 

The Costs of Building Construction and Demolition: 

• The United States is responsible for 22 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, though we have only 5 percent of the world’s population. In the United States, building construction and operations account for 48 percent of Greenhouse gas emissions.  

• It takes a lot of energy to construct a building—for example, building a 50,000 square foot commercial building requires the same amount of energy needed to drive a car 20,000 miles a year for 730 years.  

• We are much too inclined to think of our buildings as disposable, rather than a renewable resource. A 2004 report from the Brookings Institution projects that by 2030 we will have demolished and replaced 82 billion square feet of our current building stock. Since it is estimated that there are about 300 billion square feet of space in the United States today, that means we anticipate demolishing nearly one third of our building stock in the next 20-25 years.  

• It will take as much energy to demolish and reconstruct 82 billion square feet of space (as predicted by the Brookings study) as it would to power the entire state of California—the 10th largest economy in the world with a population of about 36 million people—for 10 years.  

• If we were to rehab even 10 percent of this 82 billion square feet, we would save enough energy to power the state of New York for well over a year.  

• Construction debris accounts for 25 percent of the waste in the municipal waste stream each year. Demolishing 82 billion square feet of space will create enough debris to fill 2,500 NFL stadiums.  

Energy Efficiency of Historic and Older Buildings: 

It is often assumed that older and historic buildings are “energy hogs” and that it is more environmentally friendly to demolish these buildings and construct new energy efficient buildings than to preserve these existing buildings. However, recent work indicates otherwise. 

• Recent calculations indicate that it takes about 65 years for an energy efficient new building to save the amount of energy lost in demolishing an existing building.  

• Far from being energy hogs, some historic buildings are as energy efficient—or more so—than buildings constructed in later decades. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency finds that buildings constructed before 1920 are actually more energy-efficient than those built at any time afterwards—except for those built after 2000.  

• In 1999, the General Services Administration examined its building inventory and found that utility costs for historic buildings were 27 percent less than for more modern buildings.  

• Not all historic and older buildings are as sustainable as they should be—indeed, many are not. But an increasing number of case studies demonstrate that historic buildings can go green. 

None of this is hard to understand. So why do some otherwise progressive politicians seem determined to defy green logic by voting time and again to throw away valuable older stuctures in favor of new construction? The Berkeley City Council members, who rejoice in trying to appear greener-than-thou at every juncture, have even passed a revisionist version of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, which, if it’s not overturned by referendum voters next November, will substantially weaken protection and re-use of existing buildings.  

Other politicians try the same thing: “He is criticized by the left for his coziness with property developers and by the preservationists for his willingness to transmogrify the traditional ...skyline with new highrises—both of which policies he defends as levers for prying affordable housing out of developers.”  

Sound familar? No, it’s not Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, it’s London Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone, described by Calvin Trillin in a recent New Yorker. There’s a peculiar blindness which some—though not all—who would like to call themselves progressives demonstrate when it comes to the very urgent environmental topic of conserving our urban heritage and taking advantage of the sunk energy cost which the built environment embodies.  

Others, thank goodness, do seem to manage to be real environmentalists, even advocates of the much-abused smart growth concept, while still working diligently to save and reuse older buildings. Richmond Councilmember Tom Butt is a good model, in business with a green architecture firm and at the same time a prime mover behind saving treasures great (the Richmond Plunge) and small (a modest railroad building now adapted as a bank office.) Berkeley School Board President John Selawsky, who ran for office as a Green, should take a leaf from Butt’s playbook and figure out how to adaptively re-use Berkeley High’s old gymnasium and the warm pool it houses. 

But some self-described progressives just don’t get it. We got a letter recently from an old-line Berkeley leftist, now working with the Progressive Caucus inside the Democratic Party, which illustrates the other side of the coin: “Organized in 2005, we have put into the platform of the C[alifornia] D[emocratic] P[arty] single payer health insurance, out of Iraq, public financing of elections, and other progressive measures. We are proud of our accomplishment in a few short years, but realize we have a long way to go. If the D[aily] P[lanet] were less fixated on Berkeley land use, KPFA and Bates-bashing, it might have noticed the caucus.” 

KPFA fans and critics will have to take care of themselves, but we wish that the old-school progs, both Red Ken and our local critic, could understand that urban land use issues, not only preservation but zoning and density, are every bit as important for modern progressives as health insurance. For many of us, our homes are our only financial asset, and if an awful development next door reduces the value of this investment we’re in serious trouble. Ignoring this fact is elitist at best. And Livingstone’s idea that highrises are levers for prying affordable housing out of developers has been disproven time and again, most recently in San Francisco, where the affordable housing advocates are up in arms about their city’s failures in that respect. 

As for the Bates-bashing, the mayor makes his own record and has to answer for it. He loves to wrap himself in the green mantle, but seems entirely ignorant of the facts quoted above. The emasculation of the LPO was his baby, and he’s still its biggest fan. His developer buddies are undoubtedly building their war chest for the fall referendum already.  

His most recent gaffe was his attempt to keep the city council from hearing the very crucial report on how to correct Berkeley’s problems with the state’s density bonus, which was produced by an improbable consensus of Zoning Adjustment Board members and planning commissioners who seldom agree on anything.  

Cooler heads seem to have prevailed, so the council will get the report on Tuesday after all. Alas, it comes too late to save the neighbors of the Trader Joe’s monstrosity. They will have to pay for this massive intrusion into, yes, their backyards, with loss of some of the value invested in their homes and some of their precious sunlight.  

But at least the council will now have the opportunity to hear what the commissioners have learned. Perhaps, just perhaps, at least five councilmembers will be paying attention on Tuesday, and maybe they can do something to prevent the same thing from happening again. But don’t count on Bates being one of them. After all, it’s not easy being green.