This assessment comes from Corporate Realty, Design & Management Institute; which was based on a survey conducted of registrants prior to its popular educational seminar series, Turning Green into Gold. Architects, engineers, designers, facilities managers, building owners, developers, and contractors attended these seminars to learn how to design, build and operate high performance and sustainable buildings.
Overall, 35 percent of those responding said "green building issues are well understood, and are a corporate objective." However, there‚s a wide disparity between markets. Los Angeles was at the top of the list at 56 percent. While the Chicago suburbs ranked at the bottom at 5 percent. It’s significant to note that the 20-mile drive from the Chicago suburbs to downtown reveals a different attitude as 41 percent said green issues were well understood and a corporate objective.
How do the individual markets rank? Seattle at 53 percent is a close second to Los Angeles. Followed by Washington DC (48 percent), Phoenix (46 percent), Boston (44 percent), Charlotte (43 percent), Chicago (41 percent) and Denver (38 percent). The remaining nine cities came in at 25 percent or less.
) Over the past three years there has been an upswing in the response to the benchmark question: How well are green building issues understood by your organization? This year, 35 percent said that "green building issues are well understood and are a corporate objective" which compares to 11 percent in 2002 when the Institute conducted the research project Measuring the Success of Green.
While the progress is encouraging," says Alan Whitson, RPA, lead presenter in the Turning Green into Gold programs and president of Corporate Realty, Design & Management Institute. "It’s clear more education about the advantages high performance and sustainable buildings is needed, and in some markets it looks like a lot more education will be needed."
"Somewhat," is still the most frequent answer to the benchmark question; at least 30 percent of respondents in every market responded "somewhat" with the national average sitting at 46 percent. This compares to 49 percent in the 2002 survey. Seven out of the 17 markets were above 50 percent on "somewhat."
A market about to reach the tipping point is San Diego, which has some of the highest energy costs in the nation. One-quarter of seminar attendees in San Diego said green building issues were well understood and a corporate objective. A third of the attendees said; "green building issues were well understood, but not a corporate objective." Another third answered "somewhat." Only 7 percent said "not at all".
A sign of how much progress has been made is those answering "not at all" dropped to 5 percent among 2005 seminar attendees compared to 14 percent from the 2002 survey. Half the markets surveyed in 2005 were at 5 percent or lower in the "not at all" category. The Chicago suburbs were the highest at 11 percent.
