LEED-ND: NEW RATING SYSTEMS FOR GREEN NEIGHBORHOODS IS INAUGURATED

NEW RATING SYSTEMS FOR GREEN NEIGHBORHOODS IS INAUGURATED


By Steve Wright


In a short decade, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) has become the standard for measuring the sustainability of a building. With everyday people fighting soaring energy costs and striving to spend their dollars efficiently in a bad economy, LEED has gone from an obscure movement to a clear concept in the vocabulary of mom and pop consumers. But a number of leading urbanists began to realize that if applying LEED standards to a building is good, developing a system of LEED standards for every aspect of neighborhood development would be great. And that is exactly what a herculean effort by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and the Natural Resources Defense Council has achieved. Born of a balloting process among planning and sustainability experts, the LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating System (LEED-ND) integrates the principles of smart growth, urbanism and green building into the first national system for neighborhood design.