Free Republic

The Biden administration on Thursday offered up a definition for what is considered a zero-emission building, as part of an effort to reduce building emissions around the country. The new definition is completely voluntary — but seeks to help industry figure out how to move toward cutting the structures’ contributions to climate change. “The National Definition of a Zero Emissions Building will support the sector as it advances innovative solutions essential to creating resilient communities and high-quality jobs,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a written statement. In order to be considered zero emission, a building must be energy efficient,...

The owners of 64 New York City office buildings are eyeing a drastic transformation: turning their commercial properties into housing, according to fresh data from the Department of City Planning. In an interview with Gothamist, City Planning Director Dan Garodnick revealed that these owners or their reps have reached out to the city’s Office Conversion Accelerator Program to do so. This initiative aims to simplify the labyrinth of rules and building codes, assisting owners in repurposing their spaces. It’s a key part of Mayor Eric Adams’ bold plan to create 20,000 new apartments over the next decade, easing the Big...

The city Buildings Department has eliminated a quarter of its budgeted workforce since 2022 — and many of the jobs were held by inspectors who are supposed to identify issues with structures before a potential collapse. The troubling revelation surfaced Tuesday during a meeting of the City Council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings — and panel Chairwoman Pierina Ana Sanchez said data shows that the DOB is falling behind in identifying problematic buildings as the number of inspectors falls. “We see the impact,’’ she said. In the first four months of this year, the DOB issued 2,225 stop-work orders —...

resident Biden is facing criticism after a bombshell report revealed that all federal agencies are less than 50 percent occupied - wasting billions in taxpayer dollars - over a year after he declared the COVID-19 pandemic over. According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) memo to Sen. Joni Ernst, obtained by DailyMail.com, not a single federal agency has over half of its workforce in the office. That's a staggering statistic since federal agencies spend about $2 billion taxpayer dollars per year to operate and maintain federal office buildings - and over $5 billion annually in leases. The shocking findings comes...

The deterioration of our major cities has been a matter of concern for some time now. While we write a lot at RedState about the left-coast cities of Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles as examples, and those are pretty compelling examples, now we turn our attention to the East. If you own or have an interest in a historic building in downtown Baltimore... Urine trouble.Many of downtown Baltimore’s buildings are slowly being washed away. The problem is less flooding and rain, more golden showers.That’s right, pee is eroding thousands of historic buildings downtown, the exterior bases corroding with every...

With just days to go before the start of the new school year, more than 100 schools in England have been told to shut buildings made with a certain type of concrete unless they put in place safety measures. Here is what we know so far about the material at the centre of all this. What is RAAC? Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) is a lightweight material that was used in roofs, floors and walls between the 1950s and 1990s, mostly on one and two-storey buildings. It is a cheaper alternative to standard concrete. It is quicker to produce, and...

Surging interest rates and the rise of remote work have combined to create a nightmare scenario for commercial real estate investors. Just ask Barry Sternlicht, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, a real estate investment firm with $115 billion in assets under management. “There’s a hurricane over real estate right now,” the billionaire investor told ​​David Rubenstein, co-founder of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group, in an interview for Bloomberg Wealth taped June 28. “We’re in a category 5 hurricane, and it’s sort of a black cloud hovering over the entire industry until we get some relief...

The Denver metro area is a study in real estate contrasts. Many office buildings now sit with high vacancy rates, but cranes mark where new apartments are rapidly being built. At the corner of 6th Avenue in Simms Street in Lakewood used to be an office building. For a dozen years, it sat empty and now it's been turned into something unique. It is now an apartment building that has struck the right note.

Inflation in the new era of remote work is creating a global commercial real estate “apocalypse” where zombie properties sit vacant and owners with loans coming due hand their keys back to lenders, according to experts. “The apocalypse that’s facing commercial real estate at this moment is all about interest rates and debt maturities,” Harold Bordwin, a managing director at Keen-Summit Capital Partners, a New York firm specializing in assisting distressed properties, told The Post.

NYCHA will announce on Wednesday a $1.5 billion plan to demolish and redevelop two massive and crumbling public housing complexes in Manhattan, City Hall confirmed. The sweeping redevelopment deal calls for the construction of more than 2,000 new public housing apartments at the Fulton Houses and Chelsea-Elliot Houses, enough for every resident currently residing at the existing buildings, officials said late Tuesday. “This is how you create new public housing for the next generation, this is what we need,” said Miguel Avecedo, president of the Fulton Houses Tenant Association. The new units would include amenities rarely seen in public housing,...

Nearly $1 billion from the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act will go toward climate-friendly upgrades for federal buildings, the Biden administration said on Tuesday. According to a press release from the General Services Administration (GSA), $975 million will go toward electrification or energy efficiency upgrades to make the buildings more climate-friendly. About 20 percent of the buildings in the GSA’s portfolio will be impacted. Twenty-eight of them will become carbon neutral and 100 more will become all electric. The effort — which is also expected to incorporate additional private funding — is expected to avoid 2.3 million metric tons of greenhouse...

A top central banker has warned of the damage the rush to ‘Net-Zero’ risks doing to Europe’s economy, and illustrates the point by noting erasing Europe’s built heritage would be necessary to meet extreme green demands. Among comments by Paolo Angelini, deputy governor at the Bank of Italy about European Net Zero targets which, in his opinion, risk doing more harm than good, the central banker articulated what level of change would actually be needed from Europeans to meet those demands. While saying pushing Europe to net zero risks destabilising the continent’s economy and undermining Europe’s ability to lead on...

The New York City Council on Wednesday voted to ban natural gas lines in new buildings as a way to combat so-called climate change. Outgoing Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to sign a bill into a law that will ban new gas stoves, boilers, and heaters. “We’re making it clear that the next generation of buildings will be electric buildings,” Ben Furnas, de Blasio’s director of climate and sustainability, told Yahoo News. “We’re sending a message to the world that if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.”

San Francisco’s 11-member Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Monday to ban the use of natural gas in new buildings as a measure to fight climate change. Ironically, the state relies on natural gas for electricity generation, and the city does to some extent as well.

The small industrial buildings and blighted homes that once dotted the landscape of Detroit's Delray neighborhood are gone for good as demolition and site-cleaning work for the Gordie Howe International Bridge is in full swing this summer. The long-anticipated bridge construction project is starting to take shape on the Michigan side of the Detroit River, as cranes have been working along the riverfront in recent weeks. The cranes were drilling test shafts into the ground that will determine the final design of the new span and its towers rivaling Detroit's 73-story Renaissance Center, said Aaron Epstein, CEO of Bridging North...

He’s fired — or at least his name is. Three Upper West Side buildings that bear Trump’s name will soon be scrubbed of any trace of the president-elect, according to Equity Residential. The company said that rental buildings at 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Blvd. will no longer be called “Trump Place.” Instead, they’ll be referred to by their street addresses. “We are removing the [Trump] name on those buildings,” said Equity Residential spokesman Marty McKenna. “The decision was to brand the buildings with a more neutral building identity that will appeal to all current and future residents.” The changes...

(CNSNews.com) - As job growth lags in the sluggish economic recovery, the Obama White House is pointing to climate change policies as a fix: Efforts to reduce carbon pollution, far from costing jobs, will create them, a White House spokesman told reporters on Wednesday: "Retrofitting buildings and modernizing them is one way to create jobs," Josh Earnest said. "It saves companies money in terms of their energy costs, but it also creates jobs in terms of people who are installing updated lighting, modern heating and cooling systems, and other things that make buildings more efficient." Earnest noted that President Obama...

Ugghhh. Via The Hill: President Obama on Thursday urged Congress to “do even more” on conservation projects after signing legislation protecting a 35-mile stretch of Lake Michigan’s coastline.“There are currently dozens of conservation proposals before Congress — many supported by Democrats and Republicans — that would protect important lands across the country and help grow our economy,” Obama said in a statement.The Sleeping Bear Dunes conservation law was the first public lands designation by Congress in more than five years — the longest lawmakers had gone without making a wilderness designation in nearly 50 years.While urging lawmakers to take up...

MADISON – A complete failure. That’s how the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty rates city of Milwaukee’s policy of giving Milwaukee Public Schools the authority to sell or lease the district’s unused school buildings. Beyond the failing grade, WILL, a conservative, public interest law firm based in Milwaukee, asserts the school district is playing “shell games” and the city is violating the spirit of a 2011 state law that gave Milwaukee the power to move idle buildings. “Our report shows that MPS is preventing numerous charter schools and private schools in the choice program from purchasing empty, unused school...

Some architects believe that in order to build the sustainable cities of the future, we need to look back to the log cabin era and build “skyscrapers” out of wood. Just over a century ago, the architects and engineers who invented the skyscraper set us on the path to becoming an urban world. Tall buildings of concrete and steel helped make urban density—and the increased sustainability that comes with it—possible. But the buildings themselves come at a heavy, and often hidden, environmental price. Concrete and steel are some of the most energy-intensive materials on the planet. The manufacture and transport...