Photo: Gardens Under Glass

In the former Galleria at Erieview mall, a project called Gardens Under Glass is taking root, part of a grand plan to transform malls into greenhouses. It’s just one of many Cleveland-based projects, suggesting that this rust belt city might have a few sustainabilty tricks to teach urban centers everywhere.

Vicky Poole, who heads up marketing for the Galleria, conceived this project after looking at a photograph of plants growing in a cafe window. Hmmm, she thought, imagining a retooled version of the food court. The mall was already scrambling to find innovative uses for itself in a flagging economy, primarily as a wedding hall, but also as a farmers market. A greenhouse, she discovered, could thrive in the building’s climate controlled environment under the tremendous glassed-in atrium that runs like a spine down its emtpy center.

Poole and her partner-in-green Jack Hamilton (who manages Artist Review Today magazine and gallery, located in the Galleria) won a $30,000 grant to set up the greenhouse project. The money came from Cleveland’s Civic Innovation Lab, which funds ideas for growing the local economy (other projects include a recycled glassware company and a renewable energy group).

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In February, spinach, tomatoes, and strawberries were started in a composted soil system produced by a local company. This week, a hydroponic system was delivered that will exponentially increase output. They also added artificial light to supplement the daylight streaming through the glass ceiling.

Poole’s vision for the mall is both a master marketing tool — this one, like so many of its mid-80s brethren, was in dire straights not long ago, with dozens of vacancies in its 200 stores — and an inventive way to promote sustainability in what has proven to be a largely unsustainable architectural dinosaur. It’s pretty hard to find alternate uses for 100,000-plus square feet of mostly windowless space. “I don’t look at us as a mall anymore,” she says. “We really serve the downtown business community.”

Already, the farmers market is growing in popularity. The grander plan calls for the entire mall to become a retail ecovillage: vegetarian restaurants, health food stores, garden supply outlets, more farmers’ stalls and shops selling recycled goods. There are other ecovillages in Cleveland and a whole slew of green initiatives that we detailed in 2008.

What’s great about this mall project, though, is that it comes from the private sector, from one woman with a big idea and a big enough space to realize it. “I hope it’ll bring this building back,” she says.

In the meantime, malls are struggling to find new uses. Perhaps dead malls will become centers of local live produce?

Remember when modular homes were going to be part  of the “green” future?  In the post-Dwell, post-postmodern architecture era, pre-fab was going to be cheap, green, hot and hip.  Yes, finally, an antidote to McMansions and an affordable alternative to ballooning home prices.  As if that were not enough,  these stylish boxes were set to erase our previous connotations, where modular meant mobile home and pre-fab equaled Lubbock double-wide.

Photo: Heather Lucille FlickrExcept it didn’t happen.  Modular homes, like all homes, suffered the housing crash, though as we reported last year, there never was quite enough demand to make modular modern homes tumble off the production line; they’re only affordable if they’re mass-produced.

But apparently a new demand has sprung up for modular homes, only it’s not among the green set, or the young, or first-time homebuyers. And it’s not for the modestly sized versions of pre-fab. Rather, according to the Washington Post, mansions are increasingly going modular.

In less than a day-and-a-half, a six-bedroom, six-plus bath, 7,200-square-foot home can appear on a slab of land in any number of charming styles: Prairie, Arts and Crafts, French Country. The one profiled in the Post ran the owners a cool $2.5 million, though an estimated 15 percent less than traditional stick-built homes of that size and level of luxury (replete with elevator shaft).  Nice for them.  And because these Lego-Mansions are raised so quickly, the  construction loans are shorter, and therefore cheaper.

It’s true that  even pre-fab XXL can contain green features, like geothermal heat pumps and pre-cut walls that defend against mold and mildew.

Yet their very size precludes these homes from being truly green;  it’s just plain environmentally unfriendly to build a home with 10 times as much living space as actually needed. That sentiment recently bubbled to a boil in Berkeley, where a software mogul is building a 10,000-square-foot mansion that is classified as green by the city’s standards; they measure things like water use and building materials for the designation, not size.

The trend of modular mansions isn’t completely new; there’s a 2005 book on the subject that showcases 12,000-square-foot monstrosities.  Presciently, perhaps, even that book predicted these would be “the homes of the future.” While they account for only 3% of newly built homes, their popularity seems to be on the rise.  They are a recession-friendly luxury. 

Don’t blink, the new “green” house next door could go up overnight, and it could be ginormous.

Photo: FrankMaurer Flickr

No buyers for Hummers plus no buyers for homes in far flung suburbs equals The End.  NPR’s Marketplace recently reported that “drive-until-you-qualify” suburbs are facing a rash of foreclosures because high gas prices make them undesirable; even a decent mortgage rate can’t compete against $3-a-gallon gas.  Ghost Town Suburbia, a made-for-TV movie in the making.

Which is why I was surprised to read that driving is on the rise again. In 2007, as the economic crisis began, driving declined for the first time in decades. According to USA Today, a study by traffic-watchers INRIX “found that driving increased by 0.3% in September, 0.2% in October, 0.3% in November and 0.2% in December over the same periods a year earlier, according to federal data.”

Increased driving is partly the result of an as-yet unfulfilled promise to put public transit back on the front burner; many of those outer suburbs would be more feasable digs if trains or busses or rapid transit reached them. But it’s also a sign that the economy is slowly on the mend. Retail sales are higher, and fewer people are filing for unemployment (although the latter may have more to do with Congressional delay on the unemployment benefits extension).

Sadly, the best thing for reducing traffic congestion, in the absence of a comprehensive public transit system, is a sour economy. Rick Schuman of INRIX told USA Today, “As the job situation goes, so goes congestion. If we have a recovery and we start seeing employment starting to grow, congestion will grow along with it.”

Here’s the question:  if the existing,  largely empty suburban greenfield developments (products of wayward policies though they may be) will inevitably fill back up as the economy eases, wouldn’t it be better for mass transit to trundle their denizens back and forth to work?  Of course it would.  It’s time to front-burner public transit to the foreclosing far-out lands, a better way to  tackle congestion and the housing crisis at once.

And now is the time; cars are on the comeback. While Toyota and GM are both suffering from recalls, it turns out that the Hummer brand might have a buyer after all.

Photo: jgrimm Flickr

In municipalities across the country, parking lots are getting reincarnated as everything from outdoor food markets to condos. But those are individual projects. In Long Island–itself a region so caked with traffic that people refer to its central highway, the Long Island Expressway, as one long parking lot–an ambitious plan to convince developers to infill thousands of acres of parking lots is underway.

The Long Island Index, an advisory group that gathers information about local problems, and suggests ways to solve them, has decided that already dense, trafficky, overpriced and overbuilt Long Island has as its most untapped resource the parking lot. In their 2010 report, “Places to Grow,” the LII has charted specifically where houses and shops could replace lots that stand simply as temporary housing for cars.

They found that “there is enormous potential for development and growth in existing downtown and railroad station areas — roughly 8,300 acres of unbuilt land in over 150 village downtowns and rail station areas.” In other words, why drive to the train station, or downtown, when you can live there? And, in theory, if you already live close to transit and commerce, then you need fewer cars, thus fewer parking spots. And with fewer cars, less congestion, less pollution … you know the drill.

One interesting note is that this effort aims to promote infill development, increased density, and yet maintain the suburban character of Long Island. “The region must find a way to achieve this balance,” asserted LII spokesperson Nancy Douzinas.

The trick, perhaps, is to build housing, but not too much, too fast. As they note, there are about 90,000 acres of greenfield — totally undeveloped land — left on the island. Traditional suburban development would add 90,000 new homes atop it. Instead, they could fit 90,000 units of housing on less than 5,000 acres if they were townhouses, small apartment buildings and the like.

The LII provided this interactive map to help developers — the potential heroes in this scheme — envision where their projects could rise. 

The sooner the better, in Long Island and elsewhere,  growth waits for no strategic plan; we don’t have unlimited time to unpave parking lots and put up paradise.

Your idling could light this sign!Not only does it encourage laziness and obesity by tempting fast-food fans to stay seated in their automobiles during both purchase and consumption, there’s the whole car idling issue. By one estimate, every fifteen minutes of idling consumes 0.175 gallons of gas, resulting in as much as 58 million tons of CO2 dispersed into the atmosphere annually. The Sierra Club says that fast-food customers alone burn up some 50 million gallons of gas each year.

But at least one company believes that there is tremendous environmental potential in the drive-thru. New Energy Technologies Inc., which describes itself as “a next-generation alternative and renewable energy developer,” has designed a gizmo to green this American institution. It’s called MotionPower Kinetic Energy Harvester, and it promises to capture energy currently wasted beneath a car’s tires.

The technology, the company says, is the cousin of that used in hybrid cars, but it’s installed on the street, soaking up the heat generated by an idling automobile and transforming it into electricity — possibly enough to power 250,0000 homes daily, if they could trap the heat generated by all 250 million cars on the road. And what better place to grab that heat than the drive-thru?

The company announced recently that it will install a prototype of the technology in a suburban New Jersey Burger King. The start-up is so small and next generation that the one person authorized to speak about MotionPower couldn’t be reached to comment for this story — he was out of the country, apparently convincing other nations that they can transform suburban environmental flaws into potential green gold mines. The Burger King franchise owner, Andrew Paterno, says some 150,000 cars pass through the Hillside, N.J., drive-thru annually, and could simply cruise over an energy-capturing strip as they do so, with nothing getting between them and their Whoppers.

But MotionPower has popped up concurrently with an onslaught of anti-drive-thru sentiment (and not just from my dad), coming in forms as informal as blogs and as formal as legislation. Cities from Madison, Wisc., to Hamilton, Ontario, have considered banning drive-thrus altogether, though powerful restaurant coalitions tend to fight them with force, and with success; San Luis Obispo, Calif., is one of the few cities to successfully ban drive-thrus, which they’ve done since 1982.

Last year, the Canadian donut company Tim Horton’s — which has been steadily making its mark in America, transforming 12 New York City Dunkin’ Donuts just this month — commissioned an environmental engineering firm to evaluate the emissions generated by drive-thrus. According to the report, the snail’s pace of parking lot drivers searching for a spot creates more pollution than the continual line of cars. “Assuming the same volume of traffic, a parking-only store would produce about 20 percent more smog pollutants and as many as 60 percent more greenhouse gases than a location with drive-through service,” wrote their director of public affairs in a newspaper editorial based on the report. According to them, drive-thrus are already good for the environment.

If you side with the restaurateurs and believe the drive-thru isn’t so bad, MotionPower’s premise is still a win. The technology, should it prove to be both profitable and viable, can be used anywhere that slow driving occurs: highway tollbooths, stoplights, residential zones with traffic calming, our nation’s borders, and, yes, the lots of parking-only stores. My father might have to find a new scapegoat for climate change and the decline of the modern world.

You know those words you’re sick of, the little bits of lexicon used and abused so frequently that they’ve been drained of meaning: green, natural, eco-friendly? Well, now you can add the word “LEED” to the list.

That’s right, the world’s most ubiquitous green-building term is becoming a mot de greenwashing. Increasingly, companies and developers are using “LEED” to describe buildings that haven’t been certified by the program. Heck, the buildings might not even be that green (or natural or eco-friendly, for that matter).

The Piedmont deck: LEED claims are the least of critics’ complaintsUrban Hiking AtlantaTake, for instance, the highly controversial parking garage plopped in the middle of Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. Conceived and championed by the Piedmont Park Conservancy and the Atlanta Botanical Garden as a way to raise funds and provide parking space for folks attending the park’s special events (like the upcoming “Green Concert” starring Sir Paul McCartney), this “built to LEED standards” structure has been largely derided by neighborhood groups, including Friends of Piedmont Park (FOPP), as being a decidedly improper use of park space.

“We’re upset about the conversion of more public green space to cement and concrete,” says Jack White, a FOPP board member. The six-and-a-half story parking deck holds 765 spaces and charges up to $15 per day, and required the creation of new roads bisecting the park. No amount of neighborhood opposition could stop it; in fact, the Conservancy and Garden are suing FOPP’s leader, Doug Abramson, for the legal fees accrued in toppling FOPP’s objections, some $273,000.

But the pro-parking deck forces point to its green attributes, and even named it “SAGE” — for Safety Access Greenspace and Expansion. Per the Conservancy’s website, the garage was built to LEED standards, with shaded areas for cars to reduce heat island effect; increased access to the park for visitors; a “virtually invisible” structure within several years, when the potted trees finally blossom; special parking spots for hybrids and such; a top-level bike rack; and rainwater capture to irrigate the gardens. 

Hm. Other than the last two ingredients, pretty much none of its touted green factors are particularly green, nor are they part of the LEED system. In fact, the U.S. Green Building Council has no record of the SAGE parking facility—it was neither registered (the first step toward certification) nor certified. And a parking garage isn’t eligible for LEED certification—a building, says Scot Horst, senior vice president of LEED, must have at least one resident to even be considered.

Foes of the parking deck weren’t mollified by the LEED claims—”Putting trees in pots on a concrete monstrosity didn’t transform the essential nature of the beast,” says White—but the even more troubling thing, at least to the folks who oversee LEED, is the misuse of their carefully crafted system. LEED has endured a lot of criticism in its 13-year history—for being too complex, not accounting for regional differences, costing too much to achieve, etc.—and has responded with a user-friendlier version, dubbed LEED 3.0, this year. But, says Horst, if a project isn’t officially certified, “you have no idea what [developers] mean” when they use the term. (The Piedmont conservancy did not return email requests for comment.)

The Atlanta garage is not the only example of such LEEDwashing; take the new KFC/Taco Bell in super-crunchy Northampton, Mass. The USGBC also says it has no record of such a building being certified*, though a press release detailed its LEED elements: 30 percent energy and water use reduction, rainwater capture, solar panels. Harvested rainwater or not, the building’s function as a purveyor of industrial food does plenty of climate harm, not to mention its drive-thru window. Who knew LEED would grow to be a tool of architectural irony?

Still, says Horst, even a falsely claimed LEED building might be an improvement over business as usual; surely the Northampton KFC bests its non LEED-inspired counterparts. “At what point is being better good enough?” he asks. Horst can’t say for sure, but he does know this: “Saying I’m an Olympic athlete doesn’t make me one if I’m not in the Olympics. And no building is LEED unless we say it is.”

*CORRECTION: The USGBC contacted the reporter after publication to report that its records had not been updated when an interview for this story occurred earlier in the week, and that the Northampton KFC in fact achieved gold certification.

UPDATE: The USGBC has written to tell us that they made a mistake, and the KFC/Taco Bell is indeed certified gold. But there are plenty of projects throwing the term around incorrectly — like this Chicago high-rise, which advertised itself as LEED-certified before it was even built; here are even more examples of companies including Best Western and Chrysler jumping the LEED gun. “Overzealous marketing teams sometime claim that projects are certified when they’ve only just registered with LEED,” Horst says. “USGBC publishes detailed guidelines to help projects make the right decisions about their marketing, and we follow up on each and every report of misuse.”

California’s East Bay — the collection of towns, cities, and suburbs across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco — has a lot to boast about. There’s the perpetually great weather, enlightened inhabitants, and a halfway decent, if in my opinion overpriced, public transit system in the form of BART. Yet despite BART’s 43 stations spanning 95 miles, most folks in the area find they need a car, too.

Sherman LewisBut one man thinks his town, Hayward — or at least a part of it — can make the leap to automobile-free. “I want to live a lifestyle that’s less dependent on cars,” says Sherman Lewis, a retired poli-sci professor at Cal State East Bay and president of the Hayward Area Planning Association since 1978. But, he admits, he’s chosen a relatively difficult way to achieve it, “by trying find 950 other families who want to live the same way.”

Lewis has developed plans for Quarry Village, a 1,000-unit development about a mile from the Hayward BART station and a short skip from the Cal State campus and downtown Hayward. It includes townhouses, condos, walking paths, shuttle buses to the rail … and no garages. It would fill 22 acres on a former rock quarry (hence the name) currently owned by Caltrans, the California DOT; the land is not yet for sale, but Lewis says the agency is supportive of his redevelopment vision. The residences will be officially affordable, at least by Hayward’s definition: studios to six-bedrooms between $250,000 and $650,000. Lewis believes the larger units will appeal to telecommuters, who can use the extra bedrooms as offices.

Today a quarry, tomorrow a car-free revolution?QuarryVillage.comInside the development, residents would be able to walk to basic amenities — a restaurant or two, a well-stocked grocery store. For other needs, they could take an on-site shuttle to BART, use the shared or rental car services that would be available, or, if they really want, rent one of the 100 or so parking spots along the perimeter of the neighborhood. Those spots would be auctioned off, starting at perhaps $125 a month, to help subsidize the shuttle service. No one need fear being judged for not giving up his or her car, Lewis assures. “They’re going to be congratulated, ” he says,” because their money will go to pay for everyone else’s bus.”

The Quarry Village vision is inspired in part by the Vauban development in Freiburg, Germany, a 6,000-resident suburb where parking is limited to the perimeter and a space goes for $40,000. Some seventy percent of Vauban-ers don’t own a car, and by all accounts they seem to have adjusted quite easily.

But that’s Europe. Are Americans — some of whom say their car represents them more than their friends of clothes — ready for the car-free experience?

Well, maybe. Car-sharing, it was reported last week, is on the rise, with city policies and real estate developments encouraging the practice. (I find ZipCar, at $120 per weekend day here in New York, to be prohibitively expensive, but perhaps I’m spoiled by my bicycle and my $2 subway). Quebec-based CommunAuto asserts that every shared car knocks eight off the road — that’s about 1,800 fewer miles driven per person each year.

So the political climate is ripe for Quarry Village, and perhaps the mindset of many Americans, still stinging from our brief foray into $4 per gallon gas, has properly adjusted. “We have more than 100 people [ready] to sign up to buy these units when they become available,” says Lewis.

But when will that be? At the end of May, the Hayward Planning Commission gave the thumbs up to new zoning, permitting higher density and less parking, and Lewis expects the city council to overwhelmingly approve SMU zoning — sustainable mixed-use — at the end of June, which Lewis says was created with Quarry Village in mind.

If you lived here, you’d be ooh-ing now.QuarryVillage.com“The city council is unanimously supportive, but all of us are concerned about getting investors and selling units fast enough,” says Lewis. That’s right, they’re still lacking one key component: the money to actually create the neighborhood, despite plenty of interest and excitement. The tagline displayed prominently on the Quarry Village website sums up the current state of the project: “If you’ll come, we can build it.”

Back around 2006, when the American Dream of home ownership was still intact and green building was officially transferred from the domain of hippies to yuppies, folks got very excited about prefab. Here in New York City, my friends and I felt our second-home prayers had been answered (not that we could afford a first home): we’d buy a plot of land in the country and plop down a bunch of panelized, pre-fabricated high modern houses for well less than $100,000 each–something stylish and healthy and affordable that would re-create the bungalow colony model. Online message boards like FabPreFab exploded with instant architecture and a generation of excited potential buyers for it: the weeHouse, the NowHouse, the b-line.

Michelle KaufmanPerhaps the most celebrated of those creations was the Glidehouse, Michelle Kaufman’s factory-built, site-assembled energy- and water-efficient home that channeled the aesthetic of the Eamses and the systems of an Earthship. Though it ended up on fewer plots than anyone following the prefab frenzy would have thought–her firm has manufactured and sold about 40 models since 2004–the Glidehouse did land at a green building exhibit inside the National Building Museum and firmly in the hearts of architecture aficionados.

So many were shocked last week at the announcement that Michelle Kaufman Designs would close–a victim, she says, of the recession: lending problems, manufacturing issues, and just not enough demand. (The FabPreFab boards were silent on the matter; they haven’t been updated much since 2007, the beginning of the end of the real estate madness.) No one was more shocked than Kaufman herself. “I thought we had gotten lean and strong,” she told me when I caught up with her this week. “It took me by surprise.”

Part of the problem, she says, was scale. The affordability part of prefab is rooted in mass production; you need to have big orders, even if they’re from different buyers, to make manufacturing financially viable. You can’t do prefab and one-off housing, both.

But Kaufman is optimistic, despite shutting her doors; the recession, it turns out, will give her designs a second chance. “There’s another path, and in this economy it might be a more successful one,” she says. That path is multi-family housing — and it involves working with developers. Yes, the very creatures who were cut out of the previous prefab dream, and with good reason; but now they’re being forced to reform. “In the past 15 to 30 years, developers could build whatever crap they wanted and people were buying it,” Kaufman says. But the weak economy is making consumers more discerning, so developers “have to be more thoughtful about what they build.”

So Kaufman, in partnership with two different sets of developers, is melding prefab with multi-family, building in the demand that failed to materialize last time. She’s creating two communities-in-the-making, one in Denver with Urban Ventures LLC and another with Ponte Vista at San Pedro, near Los Angeles. Both will have multiples of Kaufman’s mkSolaire townhouse (also a museum piece — you can see it on view at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago right now), a structure with open, loft-like spaces and many of the Glidehouse’s features: energy- and water-saving fixtures, natural air circulation and daylighting, mold-resistant ingredients.

The mkSolaire will populate Kaufman’s multi-family developments.Michelle Kaufman DesignsDesigning communities, she says, is different — better, in fact — than designing houses. Kaufman now considers much more than an individual building. She thinks of how units will piece together and what goes between them, as well as who lives in them. “I’m designing for diversity,” she says, so the communities will appeal to people of different ages and economic backgrounds, suitable for older folks interested in aging-in-place, for young families, for single folks buying starter homes. And these won’t be merely collections of buildings but communities, with group gardens and communal endeavors such as bike sharing, car sharing, and even garden tool sharing.  

Pricing is still unknown, though both communities should have a mixture of market-rate and affordable. Construction costs, Kaufman hopes, should be less than $160 per square foot, not including the land.

Essentially, she is making the bungalow colonies that my friends and I have been dreaming of for the last few years. One reason more such developments aren’t readily available is the firmly entrenched zoning that makes it hard to cluster small homes and maintain shared, commonly owned spaces. Many municipalities want houses on a minimum of an acre or so, or have minimum house-size standards. But Kaufman says that hasn’t been a problem for her in these endeavors. The real problem, she says, is getting mortgages for the homeowners themselves. “Lending remains a big hurdle for them,” she says, “but hopefully that will change.”

On paper, the biggest U.S. export is capital goods–aircrafts, semiconductors, medical equipment, and such. But we’ve been exporting something else in force to developing countries: the suburban lifestyle. From American Village in the Kurdish area of Iraq to “Napa Valley,” a development outside Beijing, the McMansion and its watered lawns are making their way around the world.

Meanwhile, back home, suburbia is falling out of favor and small houses are becoming more popular — at least to gawk at and be inspired by, if not yet to inhabit. So perhaps the next big thing in international architecture will be on the small side: the suburbia of affordable homes.

A new kind of plan.Tata HousingThat’s the premise behind Shubh Griha, the architectural version of the Nano, world’s cheapest car at $2000 a pop or so. In fact, Shubh Griha — housed in the Mumbai suburb of Boisar — comes from the Nano’s parent company, the Tata Group, which works on everything from painted steel to natural gas exploration. Yes, they’ve got a division for pretty much every ingredient of home building and development; think of them as the Viacom of the engineering world.

While they’ve previously created American-style luxury towers and gated communities–the tallest residential towers in Bangalore, they say, and luxury apartments with Jaccuzzi tubs and mountain views in Gurgaon–Shubh Griha will be a modest affair, with 1,200 units ranging in size from 283 to 465 square feet. The luxury housing sector has taken a hit in India just as it has in the U.S., and India, at least, seems to be responding with creative development. Forget the re-creation of Desperate Housewives‘ Wisteria Lane; this is the Indian version of Levittown.

What makes these units attractive–clearly not capaciousness–is what surrounds them. They are marketed as green, luxurious, and affordable, all the buzz words of modern real estate, with new schools, playgrounds, and a hospital; a rail station to take suburban dwellers into Mumbai; a water harvesting station; community center and shopping and “hawking” zones; and, perhaps most luxurious in the concrete maze of Mumbai, landscaped courtyards. “Green here is seen in a very literal sense,” says June Williamson, author of Retrofitting Suburbia.

The apartments will sell for between 390,000 and 670,000 rupees, something like $8,000-$14,000; somehow, they’re managing to build at about 700 rupees–$14!–per square foot. But the ticket price is still a handy sum in a country where some 500 million Indians live without electricity, and the gross national income per capita is somewhere around $2,460, with millions earning only a fraction of that. “India is in desperate need of affordable housing,” says Williamson. Part of Tata’s market is the huge class of migrant workers who travel to cities, live in cramped rental pads, and send remittances back home. Tata estimates that almost half of the people in the “lower segment” stay in rentals.

So they seem to have figured out what American developers are stubbornly ignoring: that there are many more people on the low end of the economic scale in need of decent housing than there are in the luxury sector, and that low-end buyers are just as susceptible to a green marketing pitch as those at the other end of the spectrum.

“The idea is to understand that opportunity lies at the bottom of the pyramid,” is how Tata Housing’s managing director, Brotin Banerjee, put it at a press conference earlier this month. “This is the safest bet, as there is a huge shortage at this end of the market.”

Of course, this is an easier bet in India, where cheap labor and virgin land abound–$14 per square foot construction costs are impossible here, even if you’re building a cob earth hut with your bare hands. Christopher Leinberger, a land strategist at the Brookings Institution, points out that the most expensive rooms to build are the kitchen and bathroom, and with such tiny units you have ten times the number of them on a small piece of land.

So will these Nano houses make their way to American soil? Not likely, says Williamson: “If you could make money doing it here, people would be doing it.”

It’s a cliché of life in New York: on even the chilliest winter days, windows are flung open to let free the over-cranked, inefficient steam heat. “We literally blow money out the window,” says Nancy Biberman, founder of the Bronx-based WHEDCo, a family and affordable housing non-profit. About a third of New York’s building supply was built before 1939 — long before sustainability and greenhouse gases were on anyone’s radar screen — and very little of it can be classified as green. That’s true of the newer housing stock too, for that matter; a recent study showed that New York trails many other major cities in its number of LEED buildings and green housing options.

Find out what Bloomberg and other big-city bigwigs are up to in our list of green-leaning mayors.PlanNYC 2030Which means that nearly 80 percent of New York City’s carbon footprint comes from its energy-guzzling buildings. Thus the mayor announced last month that buildings bigger than 50,000 square feet would undergo a major overhaul, joining cities like Los Angeles and Seattle in a massive green building retrofit. Following the lead of the federal government (and inspired in part by stimulus funds), New York will now attempt to make existing buildings energy-efficient, lower their greenhouse gas emissions and remove their toxic innards. If all goes well, it will shrink that footprint 5 percent by 2022. Five percent may not sound like much, but it equates to cutting the carbon emissions of Oakland, Calif.

It would all begin, naturally, with a law, or several of them. The City Council is now weighing legislation that includes a new energy code—a kind of local LEED that existing buildings will have to adhere to after any renovation; a requirement that buildings larger than 50,000 square feet undertake energy audits every decade and make the necessary adjustments to meet that code; and a requirement that such buildings switch to energy-efficient lighting (an improvement, they say, that pays for itself almost immediately).

The new plan will be financed in part by $16 million in federal stimulus funds, starting sometime around 2013, with changes to be made within a decade or so to 22,000 buildings. The city estimates it would reduce energy costs by $750 million a year and create 20,000 or so of those green jobs we’ve been hearing so much about, from construction workers to energy auditors, who track down everything from air leaks to inefficient boilers to inadequate windows.

Of course, after such an audit, it’s the owners who have to pay for the improvements. What’s to prevent the powerful real estate lobby from rabidly opposing the legislation? Biberman, whose WHEDCo non-profit owns and operates several properties in the Bronx, says the investment is worth it, and quickly: “If you replace an old boiler with an efficient one, the payback is immediate.”

WHEDCo began re-renovating a 10-story, 132-unit building in 2005, primarily to reduce operating costs. “Some of the things we found were relatively easy to remedy — just plug up the holes,” Biberman says. The windows, that infamous leaky heat, the air whooshing out the doorjamb — that’s the “low hanging fruit.” Boilers, though quickly offering a return on investment, require more cash up front. After spending $200,000 on that retrofit, WHEDCo has seen tens of thousands of dollars of savings, and expects to recoup the bulk of its investment within four years.

This is the kind of model the city wants to promote. Property owners, suddenly responsible for monitoring their buildings’ carbon footprint and then making changes to shrink it, can borrow a chunk of that federal stimulus money, translated into real estate loans. Spend the cash to replace those things, the philosophy goes, and landlords will make it back in utility bills within five years — if it’ll take longer than that, the city won’t insist on the repairs.

The real mystery is how to police energy efficiency — will those energy auditors become covert green building spies after their work is through, or will there be enough stimulus money to create a continual auditing office? Will we someday see closed windows in the winter in all New York buildings? “Financing the upgrades is not really problematic,” says Biberman. “How do you enforce it — that’s the heart of the matter.”

The buildings department, says City Council spokesperson Andrew Doba, will have that task added to their building inspection duties — but government staffers don’t think it’ll be too hard to push, what with the unreliable price of oil and stale real estate market. Says Doba, “We don’t think it’s onerous enough to get a lot of backlash.”