S.F.'s Daring District 2030 Game Plan
District 2030 just launched in S.F., and we caught up with the man charged with helping the SF2030 team get as many building owners, operators and community stakeholders on board as possible.
Woods Bagot director of urban strategies Riki Nishimura chairs the outreach committee for District 2030, a new high-performance sustainable building District for S.F. He tells us 23 S.F. buildings encompassing 9M SF are so far signed up to participate (ranging from Kilroy's 333 Brannan--aka Dropbox's future home, below, to Twitter's HQ at Shorenstein's 1355 Market). The district provides a long-term partnership between building owners/operators and local government, professional and community stakeholders. While it may take longer for the public sector to implement energy-saving endeavors because of regulations and policies, the process can be sped up under the district model since the private sector is stepping up.
Private sector leadership is key in keeping the District connected to market realities and solutions while the public partnership allows for states and local governments to help create new or modify existing incentives and government programs to support private sector stakeholders in collectively achieving the 2030 District goals. The goal of the effort is to track metrics and performance for building energy and water use, and transportation emissions, which will be reported on aggregated building and district-wide performance against set metrics and performance goals with incremental milestones.
Director of SF Department of the Environment Deborah Raphael spoke at the invitation-only launch event at the city's 25 Van Ness last Friday, another building on the list. (District 2030 director is RMW principal Stan Lew.) The district focuses on achieving the goals set by the Architecture 2030 Challenge for Planning to dramatically reduce energy, water consumption and greenhouse emissions for existing and new developments. S.F. is the eighth city on board (Seattle was the first). The next step is to search for an exec director in S.F. to oversee the larger initiative and build out a staff, he says.
