Thursday, November 03, 2005
LEED for Neighborhood Developments
In a post about LEED Residential, a reader, Jerome Alicki, asked if neighborhoods can be LEED or otherwise "green" certified. Well, seems he was on to a good idea:USGBC, in partnership with the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), has brought together stakeholders from across the country to establish a consensus-based standard to address the impacts of development projects. The LEED for Neighborhood Developments (LEED-ND) Rating System, currently under development, will integrate the principles of smart growth, urbanism, and green building into the first national standard for neighborhood design. ...
Right now, they are still putting together research for it, and it is planned to be released in 2007.
This is probably going to be even more controversial than LEED Residential because of the addition of smart growth principles. A previous post on the Smart Growth Debate outlines a few opinions. Hopefully, the LEED-ND development crew can address the concerns of smart growth opponents.