When it comes to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified (LEED) projects, North Texas is a bright spot in the state.

Dallas, Fort Worth, and Arlington have more than half of the 6,945 LEED-certified residential construction projects in Texas, according to an ABODO analysis.

“Texas is one of our best markets for LEED building. The residential sector in Texas has the second most LEED-certified single and multifamily residences in the country,” U.S. Green Building Council Project manager Nick Brousse told Anna Clark for her GreenBiz opinion column in June.

The LEED rating system was created by the USGBC to evaluate a building’s environmental performance, and to encourage transforming the market toward sustainable design.

Thom Powell, architect and director of sustainable design at the Dallas-based design firm GFF, told Clark the road to green growth has not been an easy one because building owners tend to focus solely on construction costs and have a tendency to pass along operation costs to the end user.

“When I joined the USGBC North Texas Board of Directors in 2009, our collective goal was market transformation,” Powell said. 

Since then, the green building movement has been doubling globally every three years and currently, there are about 1.3 million residential square feet of green construction in the U.S. alone, according to ABODO’s analysis. That’s enough to cover about 89 percent of Staten Island or about 23,000 football fields.

By 2018, LEED-certified construction is expected to contribute nearly $30 million to the nation’s gross domestic product — a number that is likely to grow as the USGBC certifies more than 2.2 million new square feet of LEED space daily.

Get on the list.
Sign up to keep your eye on what’s new and next in Dallas-Fort Worth, every day. 
And, you’ll be the first to get the digital edition of our new Dallas Innovates magazine: 
The annual edition publishes in January.

One click and you’re done.