In December 2014, The Year in the Life project connected Stuart Cowan, a Partner of Autopoiesis LLC, and a provider of strategy, modeling, and sustainable financing for restorative design projects with Ken La Roe, CEO of First Green Bank, to talk about a challenge Ken was facing. Ken wanted to support his lending officers in their goal to meet the ambitious targets the bank had set for them in 2015 to increase the bank’s green building loan portfolio. Stuart thought he could help.
"It would be really exciting to look practically at what you are doing with your building portfolio, dig in, and just together try to figure out what could these projects be worth in the deepest sense, in the triple bottom line sense,” Stuart said. “How can we begin to solve for the gap between what appraisers can and cannot value today in these projects, versus what that underlying deeper sense of value might be? Can we see if there are bridges to be built to at least acknowledge some of the extra value that green projects are creating?”
Stuart thought it might be possible to show one of First Green Bank’s real estate development borrowers that by investing a bit more upfront to get, say, that LEED Silver designation, that they would be saving considerably more in the long run.
"It would be really exciting to look practically at what you are doing with your building portfolio, dig in, and just together try to figure out what could these projects be worth in the deepest sense, in the triple bottom line sense,” Stuart said. “How can we begin to solve for the gap between what appraisers can and cannot value today in these projects, versus what that underlying deeper sense of value might be? Can we see if there are bridges to be built to at least acknowledge some of the extra value that green projects are creating?”
Stuart thought it might be possible to show one of First Green Bank’s real estate development borrowers that by investing a bit more upfront to get, say, that LEED Silver designation, that they would be saving considerably more in the long run.
Stuart wanted to raise the bar further. What if, he wondered, one of First Green Bank’s developers could be persuaded to build a “living building” like Seattle’s Bullitt Building, a building even "greener" than LEED? Stuart had been on the team that helped prove out the longer-term financial value of that ambitious, deeply green commercial building project and he was eager to see other developers across the country replicate the Bullitt model.
Stuart understood that First Green Bank was not likely to have a lot of projects coming through the door that were designed to be green. “So it will not so much be an underwriting challenge as helping developers who might be open to tweak their projects,” Stuart mused. “If you are seeing them even a few months before construction, there might still be time to influence the design process and kind of mentor them along.”
Stuart understood that First Green Bank was not likely to have a lot of projects coming through the door that were designed to be green. “So it will not so much be an underwriting challenge as helping developers who might be open to tweak their projects,” Stuart mused. “If you are seeing them even a few months before construction, there might still be time to influence the design process and kind of mentor them along.”
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