Is Green Good for Real Estate?

Saving Energy... "Environmental leadership is critical to our future ability to grow and thrive as a company." That's Wal-Mart introducing its environmental strategy.

"We will design a store that will use 30% less energy and produce 30% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than our 2005 design within the next 3 years." Check out Wal-Mart's experimental stores in McKinney, TX, and Aurora, CO, for extreme environmental makeovers.

Wow, the world is changing. For years I've read about the concept of "sustainability" and various industry initiatives to encourage "green" development, like the U.S. Green Building Council.

Now I'm wondering if these concepts are generating a critical mass of support from developers, tenants and investors. Are corporate players willing to sustain higher initial costs to achieve longer-term savings? What do you think?

A quick Google search led me to this (perhaps idealistic) example. Vulcan Real Estate, a commercial and residential developer in Seattle (owned by Paul Allen), boasts that it is guided by a "triple bottom line" philosophy: making money, improving the community and building sustainable developments.

Want to do your small part to save energy? Go to TreeHugger and search for the AladdinPower Hand Generator (I'm not making this up). Your cell phone battery will never go dead. Just squeeze the grip and power up.

Now I'd like to visit my "local" Wal-Mart. But living in a very blue county in a very blue state means that it's a forty-mile round trip. Oops, not environmentally correct. I'll just walk to the corner market.

-- Peter Pike