The neighborhood scale and the usefulness of LEED-ND
Last fall I wrote that the two most important scales for thinking about a sustainable built environment are the metropolitan region and the neighborhood. Revitalization happens at the neighborhood scale, where increments of development take place and where most people connect with their cities, their environments, and each other on an everyday basis. This is where change in our built environment occurs and is experienced most immediately.

Over the last decade, NRDC made a major investment to help improve the shape and character of American development at the neighborhood scale. With two very able partners in the Congress for the New Urbanism and the US Green Building Council, we conceived and developed LEED for Neighborhood Development, the first set of consensus-based national standards to guide new development to the right places with the right sustainable design. The goal of the program has been to define what is smart about smart growth and what is green about green neighborhoods, so that the private sector, reviewing public officials, and citizens alike will be able to evaluate and encourage the right kind of development. (The US Green Building Council now manages the program.)
LEED-ND was designed from the very beginning to be especially supportive of revitalization and infill development in our inner cities and older communities. We hoped to provide a boost for good proposals while they were being considered, along with a set of model standards that could be adapted by governments and others who were also seeking to encourage sustainability.

To our immense satisfaction, that is exactly what has been happening, notwithstanding continuing turmoil in the real estate and development industry. Over 100 neighborhood-scale projects have now been certified under LEED-ND, from Vancouver's urban Olympic Village (now a mixed-use community), to green affordable housing in Savannah, to a revitalizing arts district in Syracuse. In addition, while LEED-ND was intended primarily to influence the private sector, we are extraordinarily pleased that the program is earning increasing government recognition, from a state incentive program in Illinois to new city plans in El Paso and Bellingham, Washington, to the discretionary grant programs of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is now using LEED-ND criteria in its evaluation process.
Green revitalization of distressed neighborhoods
LEED-ND can be very useful in helping inner-city developers - including nonprofit community development corporations - to guide smarter, greener, and more inclusive development in America's distressed urban neighborhoods. At NRDC, we are particularly excited to be partnering in an effort to do just that with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, one of the nation's leading sponsors of urban community development, with offices in 30 regions across the country. In 2010 LISC invested over a billion dollars in community development, leveraging a total of $2.4 billion for over 10,000 affordable homes and nearly 3 billion square feet of retail and community space.