LEED® Homes and LEED® for Neighborhood Developments: Status of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Residential Programs

Ann V. Edminster, Design AVEnues

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Abstract

The U. S. Green Building Council has been enormously successful with its LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) commercial building rating program. Now, several years into development, the residential and neighborhood development counterparts of this program are poised for market launch within the near future. LEED® for Homes anticipates initiating a pilot program in late 2004 and LEED® for Neighborhood Developments will be close on its heels.

The LEED® Homes development team is working with local, regional, and national stakeholder organizations, including several federal agencies, to winnow the best of existing and proposed draft standards, and then package and market the resulting product in areas not yet served by residential rating programs. LEED® for Neighborhood Development is being developed in collaboration with the Smart Growth and New Urbanist communities to establish a definition of “green” neighborhood development that will be implemented nationally to foster the design of exemplary green developments.

These programs in tandem provide an integrated set of tools to assist designers, builders, and developers in creating efficient homes and mixed-use developments in efficient communities. LEED® and the USGBC have demonstrated the potency of a community unified in promoting green building. These initiatives will further leverage that power through the involvement of a wide array of knowledgeable, influential, and credible stakeholders in this new arena. This paper addresses the status and scope of the two programs and how they interact, the participants in the programs’ development, and an overview of some of the key features of each program.