Green Building: The Challenges Towards Widespread Acceptance by Home Builders

Energy savings, higher productivity and less waste. These are just a few of the many attributes for implementing green building concepts and practices. These days, due to programs like the US Green Building Council’s landmark LEED rating system for buildings, green building ideas and concepts have now entered the mainstream.

Currently, sustainable development analysts have noted that there are about 500 million square feet of green buildings in the process of being designed, developed and implemented, and there has been much success in LEED applications in different industries and sectors.

The challenges towards widespread acceptance of green building ideas

Despite the growing acceptance of sustainable building concepts, a major challenge remains towards widespread acceptance and long-term practice, and despite the growing awareness of sustainable practices, green products and high-performance technologies in building design and construction, many are concerned that there remains a lack of accurate, comprehensive, and quantifiable information on the financial and economic impacts of high-performance buildings within the homebuilding and construction industry. In addition, there are also obstacles in terms of cost perception, which has become an obstacle to the rapid acceptance of green building concepts.

According to some providers of sustainable development, there is a constant disconnect between capital costs and operating costs, since, for example, a building owner knows that there is a 40 percent return on investment in a green building, since that investments are taken from capital; however, year after year, the operating budget is not linked, and that represents a real stumbling block. Over the past several years, many entities have discussed and analyzed what it really costs to build green and the end value that results from building a high-performing, environmentally responsible facility in hopes of convincing the facilities industry to reconsider the budget and construction financing.

The attributes of green building designs

Home builders and developers who have embraced green building concepts say that the four attributes of green building design, which are greater ventilation control, better temperature control, better lighting control, and greater natural lighting, have been clearly and significantly correlated with higher levels of productivity.

Many point out that indoor air quality has also been linked to potential productivity and health benefits in workplaces and educational facilities, helping to explain why the biggest benefits of green building come in the form of benefits for the occupants. The other financial benefits of green buildings are more than 10 times the average initial investment required to design and build a green building. Building industry insiders say that for energy savings alone, these outweigh the average cost increase associated with going green, and the benefits and savings mark the true value of green building.

In these times when profitability, productivity and concern for the environment must go hand in hand, homebuilders and real estate developers have to choose between a building designed to be healthy and efficient or one that is not. . With a 50-year life cycle investment, green buildings are increasing at a rate of about 40 to 50 percent each year, experts say, and as global energy costs soar, the risks of simply doing a conventional design are increasing, as well as the risk of becoming obsolete has also quickly become a huge phenomenon.

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