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Sitting between Apple’s Infinite Loop headquarters and the spaceship-like Apple Campus 2 in Cupertino, California is the failed Vallco Shopping Mall.

Vallco Shopping Mall 5Now Architect Rafael Viñoly has unveiled a proposed $3 billion plan for Sand Hill Property Company that starts with renaming the property The Hills at Vallco. The ambitious project will transform the old shopping mall into a sustainable and walkable LEED Platinum mixed-use community and include the largest green roof in the world.

Vallco Shopping Mall Green Roof 5The new neighborhood will feature a highly walkable and bikeable downtown anchored by two town squares. Parking will be hidden away underground and a transit center may be built at the shopping center. The complex will cover 15 blocks filled with 625,000 square feet of retail, 2 million square feet of office space, and 800 residential units — including 680 market-rate apartments, 80 affordable apartments, and 40 apartments for seniors.

The Hills at Vallco will turn the current shopping mall into a downtown-style street grid anchored by two town squares surrounded by a mix of retail, office, residential and entertainment. Sand Hill plans to integrate a 30-acre community park and nature preserve into the site. Rendering courtesy Sand Hill Property Co.

The Hills at Vallco will turn the current shopping mall into a
downtown-style street grid anchored by two town squares surrounded by a mix
of retail, office, residential and entertainment. Sand Hill plans to
integrate a 30-acre community park and nature preserve into the site.
Rendering courtesy Sand Hill Property Co.

Adding to the family friendly atmosphere, the development will include plenty of restaurant and entertainment options, such as an AMC movie theater, ice rink, bowling alley, and fitness club. The town squares may be used to host farmers markets and outdoor movie nights.

Vallco Shopping Mall Green Roof 4The Hills at Vallco’s crown jewel will no doubt be its $3 million, 30 acre green roof designed by Olin Landscape Architects. It will be an unprecedented engineering feat that is “at least twice as big as anything attempted before it.” The elevated community park will include 3.8 miles of walking and jogging trails along rolling hills, orchards, vineyards, meadows, organic gardens, children’s play areas, and a sanctuary for native fauna and flora.

Vallco Shopping Mall Green Roof 6The sustainable green roof will help The Hills at Vallco achieve LEED Platinum certification by growing native, drought tolerant and climate responsive plants; reducing the building’s energy demands with natural ventilation and insulation; improving air quality; and counteracting the heat island effect. Recycled water and recaptured rainwater will be used to irrigate the park.

“There will be nothing like it when we are done,” Reed Moulds, Sand Hill’s managing director tells the Mercury News. “We believe its community focus will make this a remarkable place to live, work, dine, play, learn, and recreate.”

Approval by the City of Cupertino is pending, according to Tree Hugger.

 

Source: Green Building Elements

A growing number of cities are paying multifamily building owners to add green roofs to their buildings. That’s helping to motivate more owners to plant their rooftops.

The condominiums at The Visionaire in New York City start at $690,000. The amenities include a 2,075-sq.-ft. rooftop garden with more than 160 species of ornamental plants, including vertical screens for climbing vegetables and a fruit orchard with dwarf trees.

Adding an extensive green roof that covers most of a building’s roof space adds between $10.30 and $12.50 per sq. ft. to the cost of the roof, compared to a conventional, black roof, according to a study by the U.S. General Services Administration. Annual maintenance for a green roof is typically higher than for a black roof, by $0.21 to $0.31 per sq. ft. Of course, those costs are for the most basic green roofs. Apartment developers can spend millions to create and maintain rooftops gardens for their residents, with plants ranging from trees to roses.

“There are lots of benefits to having a green roof—the short-term benefit is having a usable amenity space,” says Steven Peck, president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.

Some cities offer cash incentives to help owners pay for green roofs. In Washington, D.C., owners can get a rebate of the cost to put a green roof on their buildings, though the District of Columbia Department of the Environment’s green roof rebate program. The rebates start at $10 per sq. ft. of green roof, rising to $15 per sq. ft. in targeted sub-watershed areas.

The word “sub-watershed” is an important clue to the city’s motivation to pay for green roofs. Older cities like Washington, D.C., often have sewer systems that combine water from rainstorms with waste. During large rainstorms, the systems often overflow, effectively poisoning rivers and streams. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has ordered cities solve this problem, but it’s not easy. Chicago has spent over $3 billion starting in 1970 dig a series of massive underground reservoirs to keep toxic waters from flowing into Lake Michigan. The latest phase of the Chicago Deep Tunnel Project is now expected to be complete in 2029.Infrastructure like green roofs can help by slowing rain water as it races from rooftops to sidewalks to storm drains. That gives a city’s water treatment systems time to handle the water from storms and prevents flooding.

Chicago is another city that provides cash incentives for green roofs, not surprisingly, since the Chicago Deep Tunnel project still isn’t finished. Portland, Ore.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and New York City also offer cash incentives. These programs are constantly changing as cities expand or start new incentives. San Francisco and Pittsburgh, Pa., are both on the verge of creating green roof programs.

“The best thing to do—the easiest thing to do—is call your local government and ask what incentives are available,” says Peck.

Local also require developments to create infrastructure to keep storm water from pouring off their properties. To please local officials, residential developers in many localities build storm water retention ponds and underground storage tanks.

The Solaire, New York City

The Solaire, New York City

Green roofs can be a relatively inexpensive alternative to other forms of storm water abatement. A green roof can save a building owner $14 per sq. ft. of green roof in local storm water fees or in the cost of other storm water improvements, on average, over the 50-year life of the roof, according to the GSA. The green roof also saves owners an average of between $6 and $8 in the cost of energy per sq. ft. of green roof over the 50-year life of the roof—mostly because the green roof shields the rooftop from the harsh beating of the sun during air conditioning season.

Washington, D.C., is the number one city for green roof installations according to the 2014 Green Roof Industry Survey, from Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, the green roof and green wall industry association.

Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, Denver, Baltimore, Montreal, Seattle and Boston rounded out the top 10 cities when it comes to the number of green roofs. Not surprisingly, many of those are older cities with aging storm water systems that are prone to flooding, and therefore offer generous local incentive programs for green roofs.

 

Source: NREI

The most recent initiative makes it a goal for the costs of solar to continue their trend downward to meet those of conventionally generated electricity by the end of this decade.

This comes with the announcement by the White House reinvigorating solar energy through the Department of Energy’s SunShot initiative.  These goals don’t only come from government offices.  Laboratories too are leading the way. Technological advances are helping along the trend, as silicon may be able to be replaced as the main ingredient in solar panel construction.  A recent discovery that a light-absorbing material known for a century may work in solar panels and dramatically increase their efficiency has the industry talking.  Thanks to the combined developments, the cost per watt of solar-generated electricity may fall to the 10-20 cents per watt range where fossil fuel-generated electricity resides.

All that said, the opportunity for commercial space users to take advantage of these new technologies and for commercial landlords to convert their properties into energy-producing ones remains mired in the financial barriers and customs of an industry that views (and pays for) property improvements for multi-tenant buildings in very specific ways.  To answer the question of how the costs and benefits of solar improvements are apportioned usually needs to begin with how such improvements are paid for.

One California company says they have used real estate legal forms to address this problem. Working with a leading law firm, EPR Squared, a real estate firm specializes in cracking the tough problem of opening commercial rooftops to solar.  In solar improvement,  as with most other features of commercial property usage, the all-important capital source is the third party financier.  But the territory is new and forms and deals have little precedent to work with.  Establishing revenue flows on a tenant or space subdivision basis to cover construction costs and to apportion energy-generation benefit requires a new kind of real estate deal. EPR Squared says they’ve constructed such a boilerplate.

According to real estate research firm data cited by Energy Producing Retail Realty, Inc. Founder/CEO, Chris Pawlik, 90 percent to 95 percent of commercial building rooftops remain essentially beyond the reach of third-party financing, “When you have a commercial building with multiple tenants,” Pawlik said, third parties “can’t technically finance those unless the owner takes it on, and commercial owners won’t do that.”

Third-party financiers, he explained, “can get an agreement signed or financing in place because they have the credit of the off-taker that takes care of the risk.” With a twenty-year commitment, third-party financiers have certainty that their loan will repaid. But, Pawlik said, “owners typically own properties five to seven years and tenants are typically in properties five to ten years. You can’t have a ten- to twenty-year agreement in situations like that.”

EPR Squared’s idea is to create a real estate interest on the property and have it be a separate interest from the improvements and from the land. It is similar to agreements with property owners for cell tower and billboards, though, Pawlik stressed, the solar legal structure is not identical. DLA Piper, which Pawlik called “the gold-standard, top-tier law firm” for commercial real estate, “has finalized the form documents we need to take to the owners to show them how this structure would work.”

EPR2 has “a dozen or so deals in the pipeline with groups that have either portfolios of properties or single properties,” Pawlik said. The first deal, he explained, must be one that demonstrates to the 60,000 California real estate brokers, agents and mortgaging agents that “this is almost identical to a real estate transaction.” When they see commissions in it for themselves, he said, “we can really scale the idea and bring it to a size at which pension funds and insurance companies will start looking at it.”

 

Source: Commercial Source