Is Going Green Going Away in the Building Industry?
After the great building boom of 2005-2006 and the bubble burst, prosperity in the building industry fell to pre-1950 levels. For the first time in history, the most continuously growing market on the planet dipped off the charts and did a face plant. And it was just at the time when industry standards for green building were also at their highest in history.
I can remember in the early 90s, builders and subcontractors had to compete against one another for the best homes in a sea of similarity. This was how green building practices quickly become the mainstream way to showcase their homes and make them stand out from the rest. Although they often did this only to make a bigger profit, the gathering formula fueled further research for environmentally friendly building practices. By the year 2000, I had jumped on the bandwagon myself and began to tout as many green products and building standards as possible.
But it wasn’t just me and my competition. In the early 90s, real work began on stopping large scale building practices that were inefficient and environmentally unconscious. Late spring of 1993 the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) was created and in 1998, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building practices were beginning to be formed and established. By 2000, the project was ready for success and it was unveiled to the world. LEED building tax breaks and grants help to ensure the program’s success in both residential and commercial construction. Soon, contractors all over the country began following LEED practices to get the extra tax incentives – myself included.
Today LEED programs are funded by a multimillion dollar budget and work with millions of residential and commercial building projects around the country and are a growing environmental success story in the building industry. But with some states like Nevada and my home state of Florida, who are still devastated from the effects of the housing market crash, what will come of the programs that help keep the green in green building flowing?
With serious environmental situations like the 97.5 percent reduction in funding to Forever Florida and environmentally safe building tax breaks being cut after just two years of their enactment by the State Senate in Nevada, green building funding looks like it’s fading away fast. The very system that supports environmentally responsible building practices is also going to cause its demise if alternative funding for these projects, and similar ones to them, aren’t found soon. I always try to build as environmentally as possible, but when budgets are limited and times are tough, it’s the almighty dollar that sets the bottom line on environmentally safe building practices. We need these programs to survive if green building standards are to rise.
The good news is that with or without the government’s money backing up many of these programs, organizations like the Florida Green Building Council continue to be well funded by the private sector. This allows them to continue to force building standards to change for the good such as with Florida’s recent code change that requires new door installations to have a more energy efficient threshold installed that helps prevent energy loss.
As long as builders like me continue to put pressure on government officials and boycott the environmentally unsustainable building materials, we can change these troubled building sectors forever and continue with introducing environmentally sound building practices to the masses. Even when the lack of government green threatens to dry up, we can continue green building methods as long as we make our customers aware of the processes and channels that work towards sustainable building and environmentally safe materials.
