Oregon ranks eighth among the top states for green building leadership, according to the U.S. Green Building Council‘s annual Top 10 LEED States.

In 2021, Oregon certified 26 LEED projects and 1.81 certified square space per capita. This is the fourth time Oregon has ranked among the top LEED states, previous placing in 2019, 2013 and 2010.

Washington state ranked second; Illinois topped the 2021 list.

“Oregon once again ranking among the top LEED states demonstrates a growing commitment from state leaders and the private sector to build more sustainable buildings and communities,” said Peter Templeton, USGBC president and CEO, in a news release. “The high number of certified LEED projects in Oregon reflect a longstanding commitment from both government and the private sector to find new and innovative ways to ensure more sustainable buildings and communities. People across the state benefit every day from the work that both the private and public sectors are doing in their communities to create healthier environments and minimize the impacts of climate change.”

The 26 certified projects in Oregon in 2021 include numerous single-family homes, government buildings and private businesses. Notable projects include the Multnomah County Central Courthouse in Portland, achieving LEED Gold certification; Portland Community College OMIC Training Facility in Scappoose, earning LEED Silver certification; The Porter Portland, earning LEED Silver certification and the first hotel in the United States to certify under LEED v4.1; Pacific One Square in Portland, achieving LEED Gold recertification; and a single-family home at Village Center in Salem, achieving LEED Gold and one of numerous private residences that earned certification.

The Top 10 list is based on 2020 U.S. Census data and includes commercial and institutional green building projects certified throughout 2021.

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�ճ����U.S. Green Building Council is expanding its LEED Earth campaign to homes, communities and cities.

LEED Earth is designed to bring LEED to countries where green building is still emerging and offers certification at no cost to the first project to certify. USGBC will also extend LEED Earth benefits to the first LEED Platinum project in any country to certify using LEED v4.1, the newest version of LEED. New projects will be considered for LEED Earth starting in March 2021.

Launched in 2013, LEED Earth has enabled global growth of green building, taking LEED from 140 countries to nearly 200 today. LEED Earth has incentivized project teams in countries where green building is not as prevalent and encourages them to take steps and adopt better building, construction and operations practices.

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An effort gathering momentum in Portland seeks to encourage development of high-performance buildings constructed by diverse project teams.

The initiative, named Sustainable Buildings for All, has brought together sustainability consultants, developers and building-industry professionals to lay the groundwork for new city policies. Organizers are considering a range of incentives – rather than requirements – to entice project teams.

The goal is to see more projects along the lines of the PAE Living Building in Old Town Chinatown or the June Key Delta Community Center in North Portland. The effort underscores that existing green-building programs have not enticed developers to make high-performance buildings the norm.

Sustainable Buildings for All (SB4A) aims “to help bring more projects to the table,” said Amanda Ingmire, one of the organizers. “We thought this was a really good opportunity to offer an incentive program that would incentivize folks to tackle these really high-performance buildings.”

Any new building incentives would require the City Council’s approval. SB4A members have had initial discussions with some city staff, but they cautioned that the coalition hasn’t landed on a policy proposal. SB4A is moving to present an incentives-laden pilot program to the City Council sometime in the next year.

“The core of this is the city has commitments to both climate and equity,” said Paul Vanderford, a steering committee member and Sustainable Northwest‘s director of green markets.

Steering committee members are considering possible incentives such as delaying or deferring system development charges to the end of a project rather than pre-construction, expanding expedited permitting assistance to green buildings, and providing zoning bonuses that could include additional allowable building height or square footage.

Supporters said they’re looking to structure the incentives in ways that avoid placing significant financial or staffing burdens on city bureaus. Among the options they’re considering is tying incentives to third-party certifications, such as those from the Living Building Challenge or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

“One of our goals is to not create additional review or regulatory requirements for the city,” said Kevin Kellogg, director of real estate development at Hacienda Community Development Corp.

Tiers would likely be set to encourage high performance, but also to reward lower levels of achievement.

“The tier structure allows you to say you’ve knocked it out of the park,” Vanderford said. “If somebody’s achieving at the lower level, that’s still meaningful.”

Equity targets could work similarly.

SB4A has invited to discussions a broad industry coalition that includes representatives of ZGF Architects, Colas Construction, Walsh Construction, Skanska USA Building, the National Association of Minority Contractors’ Oregon chapter, Hacienda Community Development Corp., Gerding Edlen and Downtown Development Group, among others.

The group will work to achieve consensus before presenting a policy recommendation to the City Council, Vanderford said.

“The buy-in is part and parcel to the product,” he said.

Stephen Goodman, vice president of Downtown Development Group, said he is participating in the SB4A effort to help ensure that any eventual policies are economically viable.

“In order for the program to be implemented and to be effective, it needs to work from a market perspective,” he said.

The group’s effort comes amid recognition that existing policies have fallen short. Climate change continues unabated, and equity is increasingly at the center of contracting discussions. In September, City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero released a report that concluded that there’s “substantial room for improvement” in the city’s construction contracting practices.

SB4A organizers said they’re motivated by a sense of urgency. During a panel discussion held Wednesday as part of Sustainable Building Week, Ingmire noted that Oregon cities had some of the worst air quality in the world during the September wildfires.

“Incremental change is no longer a viable strategy,” she said. “We are at a point where we need transformational change.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that SB4A supporters had discussed the project with city commissioners. The supporters’ discussions were with city staff members.

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It’s no easy task to transform a 105-year-old building into a modern health center focused on providing services to the homeless.

It’s even harder to make it sustainable.

Yet the proposed Multnomah County Behavioral Health Center is on track to be rated Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold, according to members of the project team.

A number of trade-offs and compromises were made for the sake of functionality. The lowest-flow toilets, for example, were a no-go. The county’s experience with other homeless shelters was that clients would use the toilets to wash items, or flush items that would cause plumbing problems.

Carleton Hart Architecture and Multnomah County also wanted to use showerheads with timers to save water; however, the timers weren’t available in the lowest-flow showerheads. The timers won out, paired with strong air pressure.

Those examples underline the trade-offs architects and other team members routinely wrestle with in complex projects in which an environmental certification is being pursued.

“The county has been very focused on we need this to work,” said Corey Morris, a Carleton Hart Architecture senior associate who is designing the project. “Let’s not compromise something (functional) for the sake of saying this is more sustainable.”

The Behavioral Health Center, which is still in the design phase, is meant to bridge the gap between homeless shelters and facilities such as the Unity Center for Behavioral Health, which provides acute care for patients in crisis.

“There hasn’t been anything sort of in between,” Morris said.

Multnomah County acquired the building at 333 S.W. Park Ave. in April 2019 from developer Tom Cody for $4.34 million. The county also purchased an adjacent parking lot for $1.5 million. In September 2019, the county’s Board of Commissioners approved plans for the project. The projected cost is $15 million to $20 million, including the property purchases.

The project will be subject to a Type III design review process before the Portland Design Commission. Mortenson Construction will be the general contractor.

The building presents a number of challenges that would be absent in ground-up construction.

“When you have this dilapidated existing building, how sustainable can you make it?” said Summer Fowler, president of ecoREAL Solutions, an environmental consultant on the project. “We focused on making it a super tight, super insulated envelope.”

With a tight envelope, air exchange becomes necessary. The building will have “way more ventilation than you would typically have,” Fowler said.

The building will have a 30-ton air handling unit providing 100 percent outdoor air.

Daylighting and photometric sensors will reduce the need for artificial light. In making design and equipment choices, the project team is trying to accommodate building users.

“It’s going to be a sensitive environment for people under high stress, or who have mental issues,” Fowler said.

EcoREAL Solutions has developed sheets that point contractors and others on the project team toward eco-friendly materials such as paints and finish materials low in volatile organic compounds and PVC-free furniture.

The project team studied but rejected installation of a solar array on the roof. The available area was too small and poorly oriented for solar, Morris said.

Instead, a green roof designed by NNA Landscape Architecture will be made solar ready in case an installation makes sense in the future.

The main floor and second floor are designed as a drop-in day center where users can shower, use restroom facilities, speak with staff and access additional services. The building will have 26 bathrooms and 17 showers.

The third floor’s group shelter space will be geared to serve users with persistent mental and behavioral health issues. The fourth floor will be dedicated to transitional housing.

A full seismic retrofit will take place to brace the building.

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A Sullivan’s Gulch apartment building has become Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum.

TwentyTwenty, with 162 units, was designed by Hacker for PHK Development. General contractor Andersen Construction completed its work in 2019.

The building received 85.5 LEED points; 80 is needed for platinum. Building systems that helped earn the rating include high-performance glazing and insulation, energy-efficient appliances and a highly efficient heating and cooling system that uses ductless mini-split units and heat pumps.

“We designed the units to optimize fresh air indoors and minimize exposure to airborne toxins and pollutants,” said Patrick Kessi, president and founder of PHK Development.

PHK’s most recent major project, The Windward in Lake Oswego, received a LEED gold rating.

Kessi said TwentyTwenty has hit its leasing goals to date. Coast Property Management is handling leasing for the building.

Advertised rents start at $1,599 a month for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit with 481 square feet. A 1,489-square-foot penthouse with two bedrooms and two bathrooms rents for $4,775. The building also has two levels of underground parking.

The units were originally built as condominiums, but PHK Development switched them to apartments.

TwentyTwenty is a 2020 91��Ƶ TopProjects finalist in the multifamily category.

Kessi said his next development project is a retail building in Scappoose.

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When Vy Duong, an assistant field engineer with Turner Construction, was asked whether she would like to spearhead a Women in Construction Week event, she eagerly accepted.

Duong received a degree in civil engineering from the Colorado School of Mines in 2018, and then joined Turner Construction’s Portland office a year ago as an assistant engineer. She learned about the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) and its annual weeklong celebration around the same time.

“I found out about NAWIC through some of my colleagues in the organization,” she said. “And after that they were like, ‘Hey, you’re on a cool project; do you want to lead this tour?’ So I said, ‘Yes, that sounds good.’”

The “cool project” is the expansion of Adidas‘ North American headquarters in Portland’s Overlook neighborhood. There, two mass-timber buildings are being constructed along North Greeley Avenue.

On Wednesday, a group of around 15 women working in construction in the Portland area, and a few men too, joined Duong and others with Turner Construction at the Adidas campus.

“People sometimes ask me why I decided to join Turner,” Duong said. “And I think what makes me the most excited about Turner is that they support things like this. It’s been nothing but support.”

The larger north building – with a hybrid structural system of precast concrete columns, heavy timber beams and cross-laminated timber panels – will be five stories and hold mostly office space, while the smaller south building – all heavy timber – will be three stories and provide amenities for Adidas employees.

“I think there’s a significant desire right now in the Pacific Northwest to utilize wood in structures,” said Colin Foster, a Turner Construction superintendent working on the south building. “I think it derived from the client, Adidas, saying we want to utilize resources from the Pacific Northwest in our new construction. So the design team’s challenge was: How do we do that? And we arrived at this.”

Crews led by general contractor Turner Construction installed the final glulam beams and cross-laminated timber panels a little over a month ago. LEVER Architecture designed the buildings, KPFF Consulting Engineers performed structural engineering, and Interface Engineering handled mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering.

Even some mass-plywood panels 12 feet wide by 48 feet long now cover an existing soccer field that is being used to host subcontractor job trailers, materials and deliveries. Sheets of plywood were laminated together to form a much larger piece of lumber.

“We laid this down to protect the existing waterproofing,” said Andy Kavanaugh, a senior superintendent with Turner Construction. “There are two inches of Styrofoam and these are two inches thick. We put this in last April and it’s almost been a year and it’s held up pretty well out in the weather with no protection.”

The south building is being constructed an existing three-level parking garage below grade. Over three months of work was required to prepare the integration of the garage with the new building. This included reinforcement and thickening of existing columns, as well as driving 28 micropiles and pouring new footings for each of them.

“We poured new, huge footings on these piles and we took two-foot-diameter concrete columns that were there and we made them basically four feet with shotcrete and rebar cages all the way up,” Foster said. “So these columns (in each new building) land directly on the columns down in the garage.”

A grand staircase dominates the entrance and lobby for the north building. It has three-ply CLT panels, unlike the five-ply panels in the south building. Also, the south building uses a structural steel building core with buckling restraint bracing for seismic resilience. The north building, meanwhile, uses precast concrete girders and beams for structural support, along with glulam beams and cross-laminated timber panels.

Over 700 CLT panels were used on the north building, Kavanaugh said.

“Typically we’d take four loads a day,” he said. “They were stacked four to a truck. We had the glulams attached at the factory, so they all came out like a stack of Legos.”

A Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold rating is being sought for the project. The team is looking to deliver the south building in May and the north building in October.

“That’s definitely one of the highest priorities of Adidas,” Duong said. “They told us that on time and on schedule and under budget is good, but if you don’t get LEED, then this project is a failure.”

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The largest affordable housing development to arrive in Multnomah County in the past half century is now open.

The Louisa Flowers is a 12-story, 240-unit mixed-use building operated by Home Forward in Lloyd, at 515 N.E. Holladay St. LEVER Architecture and LRS Architects designed the building to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold standards. O’Neill/Walsh Community Builders, served as the project’s general contractor.

The building has 88 studio apartments, 109 one-bedroom apartments and 43 two-bedroom apartments; all are affordable units. Ground-floor space is occupied by on-site property management and retail shops.

Louisa Flowers and her husband Allen were two of the leaders of Portland’s small African-American community in the 1890s, according to Oregon Black Pioneers. After first operating a farm in the Lents area, Louisa purchased land in lower Albina and built four homes there – not far from the new building named for her.

“The process we undertook to name this building is different than the way we’ve approached it in the past,” Home Forward Executive Director Michael Buonocore said. “We took our time recognizing that the contributions of people of color and women in this city are often disregarded in the naming of our buildings, streets and landmarks.”

Buonocore expressed gratitude to the Oregon Black Pioneers and YWCA for assisting the process.

“Their history, their contributions to this city will not be lost, and we will all understand ourselves a little better as Portlanders for knowing about the Flowers family,” Buonocore said.

Crews in late 2017 broke ground on the building that has provided the local market the most new affordable units since the 286-unit Hollywood East building opened in 1969.

The $74 million project was funded through a mix of public and private sources. The single largest chunk was $28.7 million via federal low-income housing tax credits. An additional $18 million came from bond funding, and $5.1 million more came from the city of Portland.

The Jim Smith Garden open-air courtyard, named in honor of Home Forward’s former board chairman, highlights the ground floor and connects the building’s lobby, commercial spaces and the building’s north and south sides, via covered walkways.

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The U.S. Bancorp Tower, Portland’s largest building, has earned a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum rating – the highest level of recognition from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Owner Unico Properties has continuously updated “Big Pink,” as the building is also known, since it attained LEED silver status in 2009.

“It’s been a decade-long effort,” said Brett Phillips, Unico’s vice president of sustainable and responsible investments.

Improvements included an elevator modernization – including a destination dispatch system that groups people together, resulting in fewer trips and reduced energy usage.

Unico also optimized the building’s boilers, allowing one of the two to remain turned off on most days. Natural gas usage has been “basically cut in half,” Phillips said.

The building, which was completed in 1983, has updated heating and cooling and LED lighting throughout. Data analytics allow building managers to adjust systems in real time and spot problems immediately, Phillips said.

Kimberly Lewis, a U.S. Green Building Council senior vice president, praised Unico for moving forward. Of 80 LEED platinum buildings in Portland, “very few have gone for recertification” under LEED version 4.1, the latest set of guidelines, Lewis said Wednesday at an event to mark the achievement. LEED standards are updated periodically to raise the bar.

The U.S. Bancorp Tower has approximately 1.2 million square feet of commercial space on 42 floors. It’s Portland’s largest building by area, and the second-tallest, behind only the Wells Fargo Tower.

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The notion of equity in design can have many different meanings.

For instance, the U.S. Green Building Council in 2013 introduced Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design social equity pilot credits. They address equity within the project team, equity in the community around a project and equity within the project supply chain. However…

“When folks questioned us about the human impact we found it was missing the people side of the framework,” said Kimberly Lewis, U.S. Green Building Council senior vice president for market transformation and development.

Six years later, the LEED social equity credits remain a work in progress. But Lewis believes the design community can do more to move the needle.

“We struggle with amplifying the message,” she told attendees at a panel discussion Tuesday at the Center for Architecture in Portland. “Our heart and our mission are as powerful as we want, and it’s a great social justice message. But to the people on the street all things are local, and engaging vulnerable communities is not easy. Trust takes time, and we have a responsibility to shift the conversation. It’s us – even here.”

The discussion was part of Portland’s second annual Sustainable Building Week, a weeklong event dedicated to sustainable design and construction.

Equity has to do with access and empowerment, said panelist Elaine Aye, a regional manager with RWDI Consulting Engineers and Scientists. A good example, she added, is the .

Created in 2009 by Prosper Portland (the Portland Development Commission at the time), the Lloyd EcoDistrict uses public money to prioritize projects and programs that address transportation, water, energy, waste and education. It’s all in the name of prosperity, environmental quality and social welfare.

It’s a unique framework for sustainable development that has seen its share of success, Aye said. She pointed to an effort to retrofit buildings with LED lighting as one example.

“The value of a framework is it creates a path for an individual, an organization, a building type,” she said. “We had two listening sessions in the community and it was fantastic. We asked about resiliency and climate change, and it’s diverse. It impacts everyone differently.”

The key point, Aye said, is that the discussion involved the community and not merely a project team.

“In the world of an eco-district it is the essential elements that have to be done,” she said. “There are resiliency, equity and sustainability; those are the essentials, and we have to address them systematically – not at the building level, but at the society level or at the city level.”

Money for such initiatives is always an issue, said panelist Dave Otte, partner and development director at Holst Architecture.

But Aye said the issues at hand go beyond mere funding. It’s also a matter of listening to the wider community before making critical design choices.

“I think we scale it up by having conversation, by listening and observing what’s in our communities and finding the touch points where we can effect change,” she said.

Panelist Afton Walsh, community outreach director for Walsh Construction, agreed and pointed to the passage last year of Metro‘s $652 million affordable housing bond measure as an example.

“If you live in the metro area, you passed a monumental affordable housing bill last November,” she said. “On top of the city of Portland bond from 2016 the community has really stepped up, and we need to now fix this. Implementation obviously is just getting under way, and that will be the real scorecard.”

To build equitably, Walsh said, means using new and more efficient materials to advance energy performance, indoor air quality and other areas.

But those are the places where developers often look to save money, Otte noted. That is particularly true with affordable housing projects, he added, especially those constructed with the expectation of profits from the sale of the building.

“The bond is a great step, but frankly we’re playing catch-up – and in some ways we’re going in the wrong direction,” he said. “There’s something to be said for a long-term investment in housing, and sometimes we lose sight of the fact these buildings will be around for 60 years, so much of it is based on the cost per unit and not based on the quality per unit.”

Otte added that he hopes this does not come back to bite public housing authorities in coming years when they make use of Metro bond dollars.

“Housing is not just a human right; it’s also health care,” he said. “So investment in housing will pay off in ways we don’t even understand yet. Look at the long-term benefits from an energy and social justice perspective, because every project out there will still have a (financial) gap; every project will struggle to find a way to get built. It’s a stop-gap and it is going to take everyone working hard together and having the conviction and drive to make it happen.”

Otte noted that designers and builders are in a strong position to guide the conversation.

“We are the trusted agents in society, more than politicians and policy makers,” he said. “People will listen to us, and that’s an exciting opportunity. It’s in this discomfort that we’re going to be able to move the needle. That’s where design gets exciting, is in that discomfort.”

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A former surface parking lot on the Portland State University campus is quickly becoming a seven-story, 175,000-square-foot mixed-use building.

The 4th and Montgomery Building is rising on three-quarters of a block bounded by Southwest Montgomery and Harrison streets, and Fourth and Fifth avenues. SRG Partnership designed the approximately $104 million project, which is being built by construction manager/general contractor Andersen Construction. The building will be occupied by PSU‘s Graduate School of Education, the joint Oregon Health & Science University-PSU School of Public Health, Portland Community College dental programs, and Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

Crews broke ground in December 2018, and substantial completion is expected by November 2020, according to PSU. The building will have ground-level commercial space, classrooms, a dental clinic, and both academic and nonacademic offices.

SRG Partnership’s design matches the curved streetcar path that clips the block’s northeast corner. All sidewalks and access to the building will be generous and open.

To accommodate a significant grade change, designers used landscape walks, stairs, walls, benches and planters to define a central courtyard space while offering multiple access points.

Inside, the ground floor will feature retail spaces and a lobby. A central staircase will bring people to classrooms and offices for tenants on the second floor and above.

The design’s aim is for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold rating. Sustainable features include a green roof with 62 percent coverage, a rooftop solar array, a large stormwater planter and a dedicated outside air system with radiant heating and cooling.

In addition, the building will have a high-efficiency envelope and exterior metal-panel cladding with punched window openings and bird-safe exterior glazing.

Currently, construction crews are gaining speed after a slow start that included additional excavation after the discovery of waste underneath the parking lot.

“We had an old building that they had torn down, and they buried quite a few things that we had to dig through and dispose of in the right manner,” Andersen Construction superintendent Paul Rovianek said. “It was nothing really crazy – just some roofing material, some bricks and different things like that. It’s surprising they buried all of that, but we sent it off and put it in the right spot.”

The new building will feature seven stories of post-tensioned concrete decks and reinforced concrete columns constructed around double building cores housing elevators and stairwells. The first two levels will feature oversized spaces, with ceilings ranging from 20 to 25 feet on the ground level and 16 feet on the second floor. Ceilings on levels three through seven will be 12 feet.

Andersen’s subsidiary, Andersen Structures Inc., is performing all of the project’s concrete work, and the firm’s carpenters are constructing formwork, installing shoring systems and stripping old formwork as the project moves forward.

“We just have the typical guys right now for this stage of the project,” Rovianek said, noting that concrete was being poured for the third level. “We have concrete and (mechanical, electrical and plumbing workers); the electricians and plumbers are here full time and the fire sprinkler guys are just in and out putting in sleeves and blue bangers.”

Excavation work is also wrapping up with installation of a communications vault, while ironworkers from Local 29 and R2M2 Rebar and Stressing are laying down rebar for the concrete decks.

“It’s a lot of the usual suspects,” Rovianek said with a laugh.

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