Episode 8: Investing in Sustainable Cities: Purpose and Profitability

Adele Houghton and Matt Kiefer think the real estate industry needs to do a better job of understanding the health effects of development. In a recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called “How Real Estate Development Can Boost Urban Health,” they propose using a public health method called health situation analysis to define, measure and address public health issues in a context-sensitive way, especially in low-income communities and communities of color who are often most at-risk. When applied to commercial real estate development, they argue health situation analysis can transform the public approval process by centering neighborhood health and well-being in ways that are clear to local residents and community members.Matt and Adele also suggest that their approach can reorient value creation in real estate from the property itself to a project’s broader effects on the surrounding neighborhood. They see health situation analysis redefining value so that the most profitable project is also the one that provides the greatest benefits to local populations and the planet itself.  Adele Houghton is president of Biositu, LLC, and a lecturer at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she earned her PhD. Matthew Kiefer is a director of Goulston & Storrs, a Boston-based law firm, and a lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Toronto was the first North American city to pass a green roof law, in 2009, requiring new buildings or additions that are greater than 21,000 square feet to cover between 20 and 60 percent of their buildings with vegetation. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s General Services Administration has over 80 buildings with green roofs, spanning approximately 2.2 million square feet, which is about 48 football fields of green roofs. This includes what is believed to be the second largest green roof in the world: the U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, DC, about as large as 10 football fields.Today in the US, there is more than 17.5 million square feet of planted roof surfaces, which is music to the ears of my guest, Alan Burchell.Alan launched his company Urbanstrong in 2014 to promote rooftop development strategies that integrate nature back into cities. Based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Urbanstrong provides finance, engineering, design, and construction services for green roofs and to date has installed hundreds of thousands of square feet of green roof and wall projects throughout the northeast, on schools, offices, restaurants, apartment buildings, and brownstones.Alan is an engineer by training, with an MBA and a masters in sustainability management from Columbia University. He previously worked for the wind energy company Siemens Gamesa and is cofounder of the New York Agriculture Collective.In this episode, Alan joins me to discuss the state of green roof installations in the US and abroad, the challenges as well as the most promising strategies to a greener rooftop future.

In our last three-person episode, we explored the future of work in the post-pandemic, climate age, about office space and commuting patterns. These changes are happening in real time, before our very eyes.The same can be said about the future of cities writ large, not just office buildings and commutes, but cities as a whole: housing, transportation, retail space, parks, institutions. All seem to be in a state of flux, at best, crisis at worse.Are we in a transitory part of the cycle or the beginning of a bigger transition, an evolutionary leap in urbanism and patterns of human settlement? And what does that mean for cities of different sizes and cultures, coastal, heartland, red, blue, and so on. Where do politics fit in? And what about the so-called “Urban Doom Loop?” Is it hype or reality?In this episode, we talk about these things, about the cities we think will thrive going forward and those that might struggle, the sink or swim of our urban future.

In his at once inspiring and dispiriting piece in the New York Times Magazine from November 2022 entitled “What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay,” Noah Gallagher Shannon writes:  “This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them. . . . [T]he problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. No model exists for creating such a world, which is partly why paralysis has set in at so many levels. The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?” Noah explores this pivotal question and more in this episode of the Sustainable City podcast. What’s the leap in imagination, if not logic, required from the Uruguay example of sustainable living to the US? And are we kidding ourselves as Americans to think that we could ever live with a carbon footprint less than our current generation enjoys, about 25 tons per capita, which would be a first and, to some, the beginning of the end of the American Dream, where more is better and most is best, especially our freedom to choose how we want to live, consume, travel. Don’t tread on me, or my 6000 pound SUV, seems to be our latest American credo. Noah Gallagher Shannon is a reporter and writer based in Colorado. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American and elsewhere. Noah’s stories have been cited for awards by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science Writers and others, and he’s appeared on The Daily, BBC and NBC Nightly News. Noah’s reported widely throughout the US, Latin America and Africa, and written about skateboarding, violent thunderstorms, cinematography, corporate private security and other subjects.He's currently at work on a book for Random House about track and field, 1970s West Texas and a group of young athletes from East Africa who changed the sports world. 

For this episode and the foreseeable future, we’re experimenting with a new podcast format, less linear, less binary, more conversational, informal, improvisational. We intend to focus on issues both of the moment and bigger picture, longer term, all related somehow to sustainable cities, this podcast’s soul’s purpose. We’ll still do more conventional episodes, with special guests, but will also mix it up with our alternative format. To help on this new leg of our podcast journey, we have an additional cohost, Devon Bertram, in lieu of a guest. Devon’s an old friend and OG in the sustainable built environment field, about 20 years worth. She’s the VP of Sustainability Consulting at Stok, where she advises clients on how to define, develop, implement, and manage sustainability programs and standards for their building portfolios that align with their corporate brand, values, and purpose.  Appropriately, given our new format, we figured we’d focus this episode on the topic of the “new work,” work from home, hybrid, return to the office and other matters, like essential workers – hospital staff, janitors, sanitation workers, police -- who, no matter what the office plan du jour, have to show up somewhere in physical form. There are no alternatives.  And what about climate change and the huge impact our commuter patterns have on GHG emissions? Transportation is now the largest source of carbon emission in the US, bigger than the energy sector, or buildings. It therefore stands to reason, and climate science, that reducing our vehicle miles traveled to and from work (the overwhelming majority of which are by automobile, not trains or buses, let alone electric ones powered by a clean grid) ought to be a priority climate mitigation strategy. It isn’t.  And will office/commercial real estate owners and brokers sit idly by as they watch their tenants opt-out and their office parks wither? We’re delighted to welcome Devon and to jump into our new format. We hope you enjoy it. 

Peter Plastrik knows cities. He was born in Paris, grew up in New York City, and lived in not one but four Michigan cities. He is cofounder and vice president of the Innovation Network for Communities, was a founding consultant to the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance and has worked closely with the Urban Sustainability Directors Network since its inception in 2008. Pete has also been the lead author on several national reports about cities and climate change and co-wrote the book, Life After Carbon: The Next Global Transformation of Cities, in 2018. Pete’s most recent book, Connect, Innovate, Scale: How Network’s Create Systems Change, with John Cleveland and Madeline Taylor, looks at over 20 case studies of people and programs, embedded in what Pete calls “networks,” that are actually, in Pete’s view, changing the world, that are making our places and our planet greener, juster and better in a discernible, measurable way.  We invited Pete to share his knowledge about and experience with cities and with these changemakers, the social innovators and social innovations that are having a real and positive impact on urban living today and what the future of cities, and the planet as a whole, might look like. 

Sheila is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Urban Law and Policy at Georgetown University. She holds a joint appointment with the Law Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy. During the 2021-2022 academic year, she served as the inaugural Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Law Center.Sheila also co-directs LabGov, an international applied research project that has pioneered a new model of urban governance and a path toward more equitable management of a city's infrastructure and services. From 2017-2020, she served as the chair of the advisory committee for the Global Parliament of Mayors and is currently co-chair of the Equity Workgroup of the New York City Mayor's Panel on Climate Change.

Law and urban planning professor and advocate Sara Bronin founded Desegregate CT to transform Connecticut’s zoning laws from tools for racial exclusion to instruments of social change and sustainability. Widely viewed as the poster child of the “suburban state,” whose old, industrial cities and communities of color have suffered decades of neglect and disinvestment, Connecticut is wising up. Bronin thinks her state can teach the rest of us something useful, even visionary, about how to build sustainable, equitable communities through land use and zoning reform.Sara Bronin is a Mexican-American architect and attorney whose interdisciplinary research focuses on how law and policy can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed and connected places. As a leading voice on historic preservation law and related land use practices, Bronin was recently nominated by the Biden administration to chair the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Bronin has written over two dozen articles on renewable energy, climate change, housing, urban planning, transportation, real estate development, and federalism. Her forthcoming book, Key to the City (W.W. Norton Press), will explore how zoning rules rule our lives. Through the Legal Constructs Lab, she created the National Zoning Atlas to translate and standardize tens of thousands of zoning codes across the country. She has advised the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Sustainable Development Code, has served on the board of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, and founded Desegregate Connecticut. Bronin holds a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, a master of science from the University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar), as well as a B.Arch. and B.A. from the University of Texas–Austin.

In her new book, Gray to Green Communities, Dana Bourland argues that we need to move away from a gray housing model to a green one, which values the health and well-being of residents, their communities, and the planet. Dana shows that we don’t have to choose between protecting our environment and providing quality housing for all. How can we achieve both climate goals and housing equity when residential buildings alone account for 20 percent of our carbon emissions? What are the inevitable trade-offs and challenges we need address? And where are the success stories we can turn to for inspiration and guidance? We’ll talk to Dana about these questions and the promise of her Gray to Green approach.Dana is Senior Vice President for the Environment at The JPB Foundation. Before joining JPB, she was Vice President of Green Initiatives at Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit dedicated to “making well-designed homes affordable”. She developed and oversaw all aspects of Enterprise’s Green Communities program including the creation of the Green Communities Criteria and Enterprise’s Multifamily Retrofit Program.

Money makes the world go ‘round, and what it doesn’t ruin it can nurture. In this episode, we talk about the role of investment and finance in advancing nature-friendly, equitable communities. From zero-carbon buildings and green roofs to EV charging stations and bike sharing, sustainable cities require a host of new technologies, infrastructure and sophisticated designs. Who pays for this, and who profits? What kinds of opportunities afford the greatest returns, not only financial, but environmental and social?Joining us to discuss money and sustainable cities are Stuart Bernstein, founder of Sustainable Capital LLC and a 30-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, and Paul Rabinovitch, former Principal of Real Estate at New Island Capital, a leading impact investment firm.