Green Economy:
A Third Way (to Profits) for Greening Buildings
So far, the consensus on how to make money from
retrofitting existing buildings has involved
an unsustainable logic: you need government money
and you need to work at small scale. That logic
is about to change.
Bill Clinton invested his foundation dollars
and Mike Bloomberg invested his political capital
in the idea that we must tune up the buildings
we already have to keep our cities going in the
climate we expect to confront. Yet since Clinton’s
$5 billion retrofit fund announcement in 2007
and Bloomberg’s retrofit law earlier this
year, we’ve seen bupkis from the private
market to encourage retrofitting on a broad scale.
In part, the silence has reflected the financial
system’s hesitancy to make any commercial
loans. But it’s also reflected a deeper
perversity in commercial real estate: mortgages
keep owners from borrowing money to make big
efficiency upgrades, and leases keep owners from
realizing cost savings from the upgrades they
can afford. Steve Gossett is peddling a remedy.
I don’t know enough about real-estate finance
to grade it, but I know it deserves a slow look.
Here’s the idea:
