Does green building make cents? It depends

"Because we are thinking about hanging onto the building for the long term, we really felt like it's in our long-term interest to create as sustainable a building as we can," Case, the owner of Seattle-based Case Design & Project Management said Tuesday.

Case plans to build a four-story building with five apartments and six live-work units at 2705 S. Winthrop St., in the Rainier Valley. More interestingly, he plans for it to meet a strict set of green-building requirements, including that it produces at least as much energy as it consumes, reuses the water that falls as rain on the site for toilets and laundry, offsets the carbon footprint of its construction, uses local materials, diverts nearly all construction waste from landfills and includes "design features intended solely for human delight and the celebration of culture, spirit and place appropriate to the function of the building."

There are at least 60 proposed Living Buildings in design or under construction in North America, including Case's project and a house under construction on the Eastside.

A new study says the Living Building Challenge criteria pay back their added cost within a reasonable period in most cases, compared with buildings with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification, which is the second-highest level in the U.S. Green Building Council's rating program.

Another new Washington study, however, says new green schools do not save enough energy to recover their extra costs.

The Cascadia Region Green Building Council's created the Living Building Challenge in 2006 in "the belief that our society needs to quickly find a state of balance between the natural and built environments," according to the challenge guide.

"The Living Building Challenge is attempting to raise the bar and define the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment, using a benchmark of what is currently possible and given the best knowledge available today," it says. "Projects that achieve this level of performance can claim to be among the 'greenest' anywhere, and will serve as role models to others that follow."

The new Living Building Financial study tries to put a price on the challenge by calculating how much more it would have cost to build nine different types of LEED Gold buildings in four U.S. cities to Living Building standards, and how much those buildings would save in the long run.

The study looked at different types of buildings in different climates, with Portland coming closest to Seattle. It found that Portland had a slightly higher energy use than warmer cities like Phoenix and Atlanta, but its lack of extreme temperatures and relatively abundant rainfall saved on systems, reducing the extra cost.