۱- Introduction

۲- Literature review

۳- Materials & methods

۴- Results

۵- Discussion

۶- Conclusion

References

Abstract

The adoption rate for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) projects has varied considerably across the United States. Local governments and developers face variation in the incentives and barriers while implementing LEED-ND projects across four key dimensions – economic, policy, public awareness, and organizational. This paper investigated the drivers of variation using a mixed-methods approach including a two-stage Heckman model, a survey of Texas subdivision developers and interviews with local planning officials. Results indicate that initial public funding may lead to more LEED-ND projects being completed, but with a diminishing return as these projects become established within the region. Support for local programs including tax abatement, public-private partnerships, and other incentives were also demonstrated to help facilitate LEED-ND project adoption. Overall this paper underscored the important role, especially early on, the public sector and local governments play in initiating local LEED-ND projects to inform and motivate the land development industry.

Introduction

As the U.S. and larger world population trends towards living in more urbanized cities and neighborhoods, reduced environmental quality, urban sprawl, and social segregation have become increasingly salient challenges for planning and design professionals (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine, 2016). The intersection of prioritizing environmental considerations in land-use decisions within the United States began in the late 1960s after the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and took shape globally within the UN’s Our Common Future Report in 1984 (UN, 1984). Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit’s Agenda 21 in 1992 (Lafferty and Eckerberg, 2013) stimulated local sustainability actions, leading to the expansion of planning movements such as New Urbanism and Smart Growth (Smith, 2015; Wheeler, 2013; Luederitz et al., 2013) and the development of sustainability assessment tools from individual buildings to whole neighborhoods in scale (Retzlaff, 2009; Berardi, 2012). One of the major assessment tools to emerge was the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System that the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) established in 2000 (Shutters and Tufts, 2016). LEED has provided a comprehensive set of guidelines and qualifications to recognize green building projects that take additional steps of source-reduction, energyefficiency, and sustainable design in their construction (USGBC, 2017). In 2009, LEED launched an additional program for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) that looked beyond the impact of individual buildings to consider the sustainability of entire communities in their development (USGBC, 2014). The LEED-ND framework asks developers to incorporate important site selection-based considerations in the planning process such as the walkability and compactness of the neighborhood, its proximity to possible transit options, as well as its development impact on surrounding wetlands, wildlife, and agricultural uses. The LEED-ND framework, when compared to other neighborhood-scale certifications, also provides stronger emphasis on the resources, environment and location of site selection. (Sharifi and Murayama, 2015). Within the growth and sustainable development practices that LEED-ND projects aim to implement, there remains widespread variation in which areas of the country have more robustly pursued and completed such projects (see Fig. 1).