Green Building and Redevelopment

What approaches can communities take to balance green building, infill development, and historic preservation?

The pairing of green building and historic preservation may present a strategy for communities to revitalize neighborhoods, preserve character, and bring back investment. Creative retrofits can preserve character, enable new uses, and reduce energy and water use. A community’s codes and ordinances need to balance the goals of development, green building, and historic preservation so that no one objective impedes the others.

What Communities can do

This chapter recommends ways that communities in the Miami Valley can encourage sustainable building practices for both new and existing structures. Complementary topics and suggestions related to compact development, mixed-use, and walkable districts can be found in the Land Use and Development chapter. The Energy chapter has resources on facilitating renewable energy. Finally, the Water Quality chapter recommends ways to reduce development impacts on surface water and groundwater.

  • As part of climate change planning, track and publicly report carbon emissions. Set a goal to reduce emissions from buildings in your community.
  • Integrate energy efficiency and healthy homes resources and programs to provide a one-stop approach for assistance.
  • Include green building, historic preservation, and healthy house tips in civic publications (newsletters, websites, etc.). Preservation Dayton provides guidance on historic preservation. The Bay Village Green Team provides an example.
  • Educate building occupants about how building materials impact their health from organizations such as mindful Materials and the International Well Building Institute.
  • Host educational seminars from U.S. Green Building Council, Ohio Community (USGBC Ohio) or Preservation Dayton on green building and/or historic preservation topics.
  • Share information about home energy saving opportunities from the US Department of Energy with community residents. 
  • Encourage your school district to adopt green building principles when building new schools or rehabilitating existing schools. The State of Ohio requires that new schools receiving state support achieve LEED-Silver status. However, districts can adopt their own standards for renovations or self-funded projects. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and is the leading green building standard.)
  • Show support for green schools projects by participating in a Green Apple Day of Service.
  • Where buildings are being demolished, encourage “deconstruction,” which reclaims building materials and recycles construction waste, reducing the amount of material sent to the landfill.
  • Share solar-ready construction guidelines with the development community and residents.

  • Adopt an energy efficiency program with targeted reductions in energy use in city buildings and operations. Cincinnati has a Climate Action Plan with an energy goal to be carbon neutral by 2035 and to reduce energy usage by two percent annually.
  • Set a minimum green building standard (e.g. LEED Silver, Enterprise Green Communities) for all new construction and major renovations in municipal buildings. Many standards exist, including EnergyStar, LEED, and WELL. 
  • Train building and planning department staff to provide technical assistance about green building.
  • Set healthy building and community goals using healthy building standards (e.g. WELL, Fitwel) for new construction and major renovations.
  • Maintain municipal buildings and grounds using safe, non-toxic products.

  • Create a sustainable building committee to explore opportunities and recommend policies.
  • Green building guidelines and certification — Encourage the development of green buildings with special guidelines and recognition. Orange Village’s Orange Goes Green Certification Program is an example of a community recognition program for green residential construction and commercial site development.
  • Healthy building incentives – Make wellness-focused buildings a priority for publicly financed projects.
  • Green building incentives — Make green building a requirement for public financial incentives. For example, Cincinnati offers increasing tax abatements for higher levels of LEED certification. Cleveland’s residential tax abatement for new construction and major remodeling projects requires developers to meet a green building standard (e.g. LEED Silver, the Enterprise Green Communities, Passive House, Living Building Challenge, or the National Association of Home Builders’ Green Building Standard).
  • Historic preservation — Sustainability includes renovation and adaptive reuse of older buildings to extend the life of the valuable materials in those buildings while preserving the historic character of the community. Communities can promote historic preservation and gain access to state grants by becoming a Certified Local Government under the state’s Historic Preservation Office and by adopting a local Historic Preservation Ordinance.
  • Create a tax incentive program - Offer tax breaks for investments that maintain historic homes and/or tax abatements to construct green buildings. Involve historic preservation advocates when developing strategies for vacant buildings and demolition. 
  • Housing management - To protect the quality of existing housing stock and promote healthy indoor air quality, develop and enforce housing management codes for maintenance, point-of-sale inspections, and rental registrations. Requirements can be tied to proactive, healthy home inspections and lead paint maintenance requirements. Also, require vacancy and foreclosure registrations.

  • Support the strengthening of state building codes to require better insulation, energy performance, water conservation, and other green building practices. Sustainable building codes would reduce the need for special green building certifications, which can be expensive to obtain.
  • Integrate the recommendations of the MVRPC Going Places Regional Land Use Vision into community comprehensive planning and encourage neighboring communities to do the same.
  • Be engaged with regional efforts to develop financing programs for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects — See Energy chapter.
  • Work with USGBC Ohio to expand programs to assist with upgrades of commercial and residential buildings. Forming a 2030 District is one such public-private partnership opportunity.
  • Support financing programs for healthy home interventions, such as medical insurer reimbursement for health-related home repairs.
  • Advocate for continued historic preservation tax credits and other preservation funding at the federal and state levels.
  • Advocate for tax abatements for green buildings that adhere to LEED standards (e.g. Cincinnati’s tax abatements has led to Ohio’s ranking as the #7 State with Green Homes).