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A Perfect Match - Kaid Benfield

By John Lorinc

Like many veteran environmentalists, Kaid Benfield knows what it is like to be in the thick of a David-and-Goliath fight. As a director of the Washington, D.C.–based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an influential U.S. nongovernmental organization, the 60-year-old lawyer has gone to court to force the mighty U.S. Forest Service to improve its shoddy timber management practices. He has been involved in court proceedings against the U.S. Trade Representative to adhere to the environmental provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But to reform the bad habits of his latest and possibly most formidable opponent – the development industry – Benfield has devised a canny strategy that is more carrot than stick: reward builders for smart-growth development.

Indeed, as Ontario struggles to contain the sprawl throughout the Greater Golden Horseshoe, Benfield’s idea may be coming soon to a subdivision near you. Earlier this year, three leading U.S. smart-growth organizations – the U.S. Green Building Council, the Congress for the New Urbanism and the NRDC – unveiled an innovative certification system geared for builders who want to demonstrate their environmental credentials to residents, homebuyers and municipal politicians. The rating system is known as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighbourhood Development (LEED ND); an Ontario version is currently in the works under the auspices of Seneca College, the Toronto Region Conservation Authority and the Greater Toronto chapter of the Canada Green Building Council, and will be released next year.

It works like this: when a developer registers a project for LEED ND certification, accredited analysts will grade the plans according to an exhaustive list of criteria, ranging from location and transit friendliness to green building design and habitat preservation. (Subdivisions on farm fields are eligible but much tougher to certify because such developments, by definition, encourage sprawl.) Depending on the ranking, the project may receive a certified, silver, gold or platinum standard. The seal of approval, Benfield believes, will help smart-growth builders win zoning approvals, counter opposition to infill development and attract environmentally conscious buyers. “What LEED ND attempts to do is influence both the location and the design of development,” he says. “It is all about land-use patterns.”

The initial response from the development industry has been impressive. Last February, the NRDC invited developers to submit forthcoming projects for a trial run of the system. They received 390 applications, including 50 from Canada. “We were expecting 100 to 150,” Benfield said during a spring visit to Toronto, where he was promoting LEED ND at a smart-growth conference hosted by the Ontario government. “Developers definitely want this. They see the value.”

In the mid-1990s, the NRDC had become increasingly involved in lobbying the White House for new transit funding. Heading up that highly successful campaign, Benfield found himself paying more attention to conventional sprawl-related development. “I have long been an architecture buff and happened across the book The Next American Metropolis, by [the] visionary architect Peter Calthorpe. I learned that the architects – at least the progressive ones – were ahead of the environmental community on these issues.”

As it happened, Calthorpe was one of the founders of the New Urbanist movement, whose proponents – high-end architects, urban planners and critics like James Kunstler (see “The Kunstler imperative,” Spring 2007) – advocated traditional approaches to neighbourhood planning, such as pedestrian-friendly street grids, rear lanes and local stores. North American builders loved the aesthetic trappings of New Urbanism, but it did not slow the pace of sprawl. The result has been a proliferation of neo-traditional subdivisions that are just as car dependent as their predecessors, only prettier. As Benfield says, “New Urbanist designs were placed on developments that aren’t in smart locations.”

Around the same period, the eco-architecture movement, huge in Europe, was beginning to gain traction in the United States. In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Green Buildings Council introduced the LEED standard for environmental design – a ranking system for individual buildings. LEED-certified projects may include features such as recycled construction materials, energy-efficient heating and cooling, solar panels and systems for trapping and reusing rainwater runoff. While some architects have criticized the LEED accreditation system for being excessively restrictive, other critics have observed a failing similar to the one that bedeviled the New Urbanist movement. Eco-sensitive architecture is terrific, but if the building itself is located at the far end of a long drive, not much has been gained.

Five years ago, Benfield and Shelley Poticha, an old friend who was executive director of the Congress the for New Urbanism, found themselves talking about ways to reward both smart growth and good design. They turned to an NRDC colleague who had been intimately involved with devising the initial LEED standard for the U.S. Green Buildings Council. The three organizations decided to join forces, scrounged up funding for staff support and then set to work hammering out the fine details of the LEED ND standard (see sidebar).

One of Benfield’s primary objectives is to break the vicious cycle of leap-frog development and knee-jerk NIMBYism. “For 50 years, [people] have witnessed more and more ugliness and traffic congestion in their neighbourhoods, along with air and water pollution and global warming, and they’re saying, ‘Enough is enough. No more, at least not here.’ Who can blame them? Because they have learned the hard way not to trust development, they tend to be suspicious of all of it, with the result that even good development that would improve rather than harm communities is strongly opposed.” Faced with such roadblocks, developers buy up land that is farther and farther afield.

The dynamic is such that any sort of intensification can be met with hostility. Benfield, who lives in a leafy Washington, D.C., enclave with easy access to two subway stops, cites local cases in which his neighbours have vehemently opposed even modestly sized apartment projects located close to transit stops. “If we don’t build them, we will have even more sprawl and more of the things people hate.”

His hope is that the LEED ND rating will begin to help consumers and residents distinguish between good and bad development. Says Benfield, “I’d love to see neighbours begin to negotiate with developers and insist that they earn community support by achieving high levels of certification.”

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist who specializes in urban issues. He is the author of The New City (Penguin Canada, 2006) and a regular contributor to Toronto Life, Report on Business, and the Globe and Mail.

Sidebar

Highlights of the LEED ND Standard

After being vetted by LEED ND accredited assessors, development proposals must meet certain prerequisites and are then assigned points for a range of features, including:

• “smart locations,” such as brownfield sites (e.g., vacant or out-of-use industrial sites, defunct shopping malls)
• proximity to existing urban amenities such as water mains and sewer lines, transit, housing and schools
• conservation of wetlands, farms and habitats
• emphasis on pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, with parking areas minimized and situated away from the front of dwellings
• energy-efficient buildings, recycled construction materials and district heating/cooling systems

(Source: Pilot Version: LEED for Neighbourhood Design Rating System. The entire document is available at http://www.nrdc.org/cities/smartgrowth/leed.asp.)