How Green Is My Mansion?

THE NEW YORK TIMES. MARCH 10, 2010. By Fred A. Bernstein

MITCH KAPOR, the software mogul and philanthropist, has given millions of dollars to environmental groups. Now Mr. Kapor wants to build a 10,000-square-foot house, complete with a 10-car garage, in Berkeley, Calif.

When the house won planning approval earlier this year, many neighbors were surprised — not so much by the size of the house, or by its sleek design, but by the fact that, under Berkeley regulations, the house will qualify as “green.” In Berkeley, building proposals are evaluated on a “green point” scale, earning credit for such eco-conscious features as low-flow shower heads and insulation. A house with more than 60 points is labeled green, regardless of its size.

Gary Earl Parsons, a Berkeley architect and a member of that city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, called the designation of the Kapor house as green “absurd.”

“That the staff, the owners and the architects indulge in this kind of greenwashing only serves to make a joke out of Berkeley’s environmental aspirations,” Mr. Parsons wrote on the Berkeleyside blog.

Greg Powell, the city’s senior planner assigned to the project, defended the point system. “True, the greenest house is the house you don’t build,” he said. “But we assume people are going to build new homes, and we encourage them to make them better.”

But the system’s failure to account for size enrages some environmentalists, who note that a 10,000-square-foot house is likely to require four times the resources of the average new American house, which, according to the Census Bureau, is under 2,500 square feet.

In an appeal of the Kapor decision to the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board, a group of neighbors, including Susan and Chuck Fadley, who live about 200 yards from where the Kapors hope to build, wrote that “green building begins with using ‘just enough’ and preserving what already exists. Clearly the idea of ‘just enough’ is not part of the design concept.”

Donn Logan, Mr. Kapor’s architect, wrote in an e-mail message that he and Mr. Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp., were too busy to respond to questions. But Mr. Logan, of the firm Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects, said it is unfair to describe the house as having 10,000 square feet; its living area is 6,500 square feet. (The garage accounts for 3,500 square feet.)

Mr. Logan said the Web site of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, MKF.org, offered proof of Mr. Kapor’s commitment to environmental causes. The foundation has given grants to dozens of environmental programs in California.

But the controversy over whether a large house can be green has implications far beyond the wooded lot on Rose Street, where Mr. Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, a nonprofit that promotes fairness in educational and workplace settings, hope to live.

Nationally, some 10,000 buildings have been certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program of the United States Green Building Council.

Like Berkeley’s green designation, LEED certification relies on a point system. Buildings get credit for specific eco-friendly features, some of which can be rewarded with tax credits or abatements. The LEED for Homes system “reallocates” points if a house is much larger than average, according to Scot Horst, the green building council’s vice president for LEED. But that reallocation doesn’t prevent very large homes from achieving LEED designations, he said, so long as they include enough green features.

“In other parts of the world, there are government mandates for building performance,” Mr. Horst said. “But we don’t do that in the United States.”