Insulation isn’t generally considered glamorous (it is, after all, wedged between walls most of the time), but its moment has finally come. Brooklyn, that most eco-conscious of boroughs, is getting two new passive house apartment buildings, Curbed reports. Read More
Mayor Bloomberg has said that mayors should give up living at Gracie Mansion, which makes sense when you have not one but two multimillion-dollar townhouses of ones own. Still, it is comforting to know that the policies the mayor preaches take hold at home. At an announcement today about the city’s growing investment in solar power and other green technologies, the mayor took a moment to show off his own green credentials.
“We’ve got a green roof at the foundation and a white roof on my home,” Mayor Bloomberg told reporters Read More
Politicians are good at coming up with plans, proposals and white papers. The Bloomberg administration has been surprisingly good at enacting them.
PlaNYC begat 127 ideas for making New York more sustainable and cutting its carbon footprint by 30 percent. This begat the Green Codes building proposals, released almost two year ago, with 138 specific proposals for improving the city’s environmental profile.
The challenge has been enacting those ideas, which the City Council has been doing in bill after bill for the past year. Now, the Department of City Planning is getting in on the act, and yesterday it released a handful of new zoning amendments that will make certain sustainable building practices easier to do without seeking special approvals. Read More
You’d think it would be obvious. To save energy, to save fossil fuels, to save the planet — and not to mention to save money — turn the lights out. But it’s not that simple, as the city’s building codes — in their byzantine, decades-old ways — can actually make that a hard thing to Read More
