Talk:Green building in the United States

Public Policies and Affordable Housing

Lhogberg and I would like to add a section in this article about Green affordable housing. The Washington standard (mentioned in the article) requires that all publicly subsidized housing must meet the sustainability standards. Examples of similar policies exist throughout the country, on the state and municipal level. Energy usage (and these standards) have a large effect on low income families.

Lhogberg and I will be working on this section in our sandboxes. Feel free to comment there! Thanks. G potestio (talk) 05:02, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

I added a subsection on Green Affordable Housing that I and G potestio will continue to work on as part of a school assignment. Lhogberg (talk) 21:39, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Peer Review by wkspeer

wkspeer (talk) 00:47, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Lots of great comprehensive info--my suggestions are mainly aimed at helping your section to be more concise and specific. My comments are divided by section.

Opening section

Replace the phrase "exhibits 'green' or 'sustainable' features" with a more specific explanation of what "green" affordable housing means. As the sentence stands, it seems to repeat the term (i.e. "black dog is a term that refers to a dog that is black") rather than offer a brief definition.

Definition

I don't think the "Definition" sub-section needs to be included: 1. The sentence about "Green affordable housing can be defined..." is already included in the previous paragraph. 2. The definition of a green building in general should either be placed at the beginning of the article or not included at all, since there is already an entire article devoted to green buildings. 3. The affordable housing paragraph is also unecessary for the same reason, which is that there is already an affordable housing article. I would recommend making your first mention of "affordable housing" in the Green Affordable Housing section a link instead. 4. The last sentence ("Given the higher exposure...") is the most relevant of the section. I would move this to the end of the section's opening paragraph after the "Potential benefits of green..." sentence

Background

1.The section seems to lack a topic sentence to tie the different ideas in the section together. The section appears to decribe how green affordable housing may be correlated to the triple bottom line concept, PHA missions, and reducing utility/medical costs, but doesn't seem to show how these ideas actually led to the development of affordable housing. Consider adjusting the tone to be more neutral (e.g. "making affordable housing greener is a logical step"). Adding sources to back up your claims will also help. 2. First sentence--add some words for specificity, e.g.: "economic stability, social equity, and environmental protection." 3. Restructure the sentence "Affordable housing already addresses..." to also be a bit more specific and sound a bit more formal. Maybe something like, "Green affordable housing fulfills the triple bottom line standard by providing low-cost housing to underserved communities in an environmentally friendly manner."

Utility expenditures for low-income households

1. This could also be a suggestion to consider for your section in general, but consider being more specific about "poor/low quality" housing, which can be vague. Consider using terms like "energy inefficient housing" where appropriate to define more clearly what "poor quality" means in terms of green housing.

Costs and benefits of Green Affordable Housing

1. Avoid terms that need to be put in quotes like "greenness."

Add Section on the Collaborative for High Performance Schools?

The Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) is a non-profit organization that oversees the United States' first green building rating program especially designed for K-12 schools. It seems that this would be a pertinent addition to the description of green building efforts in the United States.

While CHPS started in California, it has now expanded to other states. Should the section on CHPS be located under the main heading or under the California heading? Thank you! --Zucchini22 (talk) 22:16, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

CLASSMATE REVIEW BY WILL CHU

Sustainable Design Organizations and Green Building:

There is good information in this section, but I feel that it could be organized a little bit better. It seems as if you are trying to talk about the different types of non-profits, trade associations, and other types of organization that deal with sustainable design. Instead of grouping them all under one section, it might be easier to follow them if they were broken down into sub sections. For instance, you could do a different subsection for the “USGBC,” “NAHB,” and the “Green Building Initiative.” This might help a reader see the different government and non-government entities and what their roles are…

Campus Greening:

In this section you make a mention to a “Ms. Rappaport.” I am under the impression that for Wikipedia articles, you are supposed to just make an objective statement and then cite the source in the reference list. I don’t think that you are supposed to cite to the source in the actual article itself. You might want to look into this.

Federal High-Performance Green Buildings:

I like the fact that you link this part of your article to another article in Wikipedia. That should help readers understand what you are discussing and it also makes it easy for them to find the other relevant articles.

Background Section:

This section has some good information, but I think that it is not totally finished yet, so I think that once it is updated more it will be easier to follow and see what is going on.

State and Local Initiatives:

There seems to be a lot of good information on what is going on with the initiatives in California. You seem to have about 4 paragraphs in that section with information that does not have any supporting references. I am assuming that you are probably still working on this, but I was just going to suggest adding more references in that section because it refers to a lot of numbers. It would help a reader out to know where you obtained that information from.

--William Chu (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 03:53, 2 December 2011 (UTC).

Peer Review from mumadhay

Hey guys, my comments generally approach formatting concerns that will help the flow and readability of your article.

Add more wikilinks at least at beginning of each sub-section:

• Green (article is actually "environmentally friendly"
• Sustainable
• Biodiversity
• Ecosystem
• Carbon footprint
• Operating costs
• Etc.
  

You need more citations for the following sections:

• Sustainable Design Organizations and Green Building Programs - USGBC
• Background
  

Flow seems awkward w/ the "Campus greening" and the "Federal High-Performance Green Buildings" sections. My main suggestion is to actually create a new "Green Affordable Housing in the U.S. article". This would be achieved by doing the following:

• Keep the "Sustainable Design Organizations and Green Building Programs" in the existing article
  • Break each program down into a new sub heading (sub-sub heading?) to help break up the text
• Similar to those aforementioned sections, have an short summary paragraph on the "Green Building in the US" page w/ a link to a new main article
  

M. Umadhay (talk) 19:28, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Peer review from Protonk

Hi, I'm an online ambassador in the US education program and I have been asked to take a look at this article and give some general comments. Many of these will be only suggestions and you can (and should) click through to some of the style guides and policies I link to determine for yourself if my comments merit large changes in the article.

Style

• The individual references inside the notes sections can be improved somewhat. Bare URLs are subject to something called "link rot" where if the destination page is updated or removed it can be very difficult for editors to find the new page or otherwise maintain the reference. Wherever possible you want to include the title, the author and the name of the organization hosting the page. On a non-style note, some of the web references are either dead links or otherwise redirect/disallow browsers. I have tagged some of them with a script (you will see the "dead link" tag in the reference section) but there may be others which could not be detected automatically. Sometimes this can be solved by finding a better permanent link and other times it may be necessary to add a cached copy or remove the reference entirely if you believe the page is not coming back.
• The lede of this article has a few problems:
  • You should take care to avoid self references. Phrases such as "this article" or "on this page" may seem innocuous but because wikipedia can be re-used for a variety of applications we don't want degrade downstream functionality. Imagine if a phone app stored a database of wikipedia articles and served them up in response to searches. If you searched for green buildings you wouldn't want to see a sentence that describes the article on green buildings. Solving this may be as simple as saying "Green building in the United States encompasses a number of private and governmental initiatives to support green building in the United States" or something to that effect.
  • I would also argue that the lede is too short. An article like this on a relatively narrow topic where the subject doesn't have a strong coherent center (meaning that you are describing green building in the us and not a single historical event or concept) makes writing an executive summary difficult without recapitulating the content of the article entirely. But imagine a reader browsing through articles on green building and happening on this one. Rather than asking them to read the entire article before getting the gist of the subject, the lede should provide them with a working executive summary. After they read that summary they may decide to read the rest of the article or continue browsing.
• The title might not actually cover the subject matter presented here. As I read the article I get the impression that the material covered is green building initiatives rather than just green building. Actual building strategies may not differ across country (though they do across climes) but programs certainly do. How about "Green building initiatives in the United States"?
• Generally only the first word in a section heading should be capitalized. some of your section titles include proper nouns but those which don't should be changed.
• the article has a number of terms "wikilinked". This is good. In general it does have links where context demands and doesn't seem to overlink.
• The see also section and external links are good. If you like, you can prune the see also section to remove articles which are wikilinked in the body. This is pretty much up to you.
• The article features good use of hatnotes (the little indented italicized links to other articles in a section header). These kinds of links are especially useful for articles such as this which cover a subset of a much broader topic.

Tone/Content

• The article makes a number of tonal shifts throughout. For example, "Transformative work on American college campuses in the 2000s has done much to change the implicit evaluation of "progress" that green building attracts amongst academics" in the campus greening sections reads like it was closely paraphrased from an article supportive of campus greening. It feels boosterish. In contrast, "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has made available not less than $4.5 billion for measures necessary..." reads like it came from the Federal Register. There are a number of other places in the article where the text appears to take on the voice of the cited source. This is very hard to avoid, even for experienced editors. Unlike an essay or scholarly paper, wikipedia does not allow a lot of latitude for editors to assert conclusions or add their own voice. As a result it is common to stick closely to the cited material (which is not usually plagiarism but may come close). Sometimes the tone bleeds through. The best possible solution to this problem is to find multiple sources on a given subject. For instance if we have a section of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which relates to green building, don't just look at the text of the act for sourcing. Look for articles written on ARRA (of which there are thousands) to provide some context. Balancing multiple sources is a good way to build a strong article which doesn't suffer from an inconsistent tone.
• "The USGBC is best known for the development of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system and Greenbuild, a green building conference that promotes the green building industry." Who says they are best known for LEED? I'm not too skeptical, but remember that a critical reader may ask if this assertion was made by USGBC themselves or the author of the wikipedia article.
• "...USGBC has more than 17,000 member organizations from every sector of the building industry and works to promote buildings that are environmentally responsible, profitable and healthy places to live and work." The tone here is also problematic. USGBC may be a great organization but when an article says something without direct quotation it is speaking in the voice of the encyclopedia and must be balanced. We can attribute claims about their good works to a reliable source if we have one, but we can't merely state it in the text.
• In retrospect the whole second paragraph in the "Sustainable Design Organizations and Green Building Programs" is suspect. I'm not accusing anyone of plagiarism but it sets off warning bells in my mind.
• "...approaches that are environmentally progressive, but also practical and affordable for builders to implement." Again, who is making this claim? The Green Building Initiative?
• "H.R. 3021 was referred to the Senate on August 1, 2008." I assume from this statement that the bill died in the senate? Is there a news article noting the final disposition? Did it make it through committee?
• "San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom approved a green building ordinance in early August 2008..." Nothing wrong with this sentence, per se, but do we have more information? I assume the restrictions in SF were stricter than CA restrictions. Is that the case? Is there a news article on the subject comparing the two?
• The California subsection devotes most of its space to the SF ordinance. Maybe we could create a subsection for SF in order to more clearly delineate the path we are taking for readers?
• "Earning LEED credits within this framework is becoming cost neutral for most hotel developers..." this sentence has a citation needed tag and I agree with that complaint. I also don't understand what the sentence immediately following it means to say. Are we saying that prior to 2008 developers were inflating their expected costs in opposition to the legislation and afterwards the true costs (net tax incentives) began to appear? That is believable, primarily because it occurs in a number of scenarios (including SO2 restrictions enacted in the 80s). But the text could be clearer.
• "This presents a significant shift in construction and architecture..." In the VA section. What does "this" refer to. The immediately preceding sentence just mentions that Charlottesville enacted legislation and doesn't describe it.

Overall

Tone is arguably the biggest stumbling block for this article. Unfortunately using only the current references will make the task of editing the article to reflect a more balanced viewpoint will be difficult. The flip side to this trouble is that by adding only a few critical or comprehensive sources the article can be improved considerably. While writing this review I attempted to find comprehensive (or somewhat comprehensive) scholarly research on the subject of green building in the united states. I largely came up empty-handed, so I can't really blame the editors for relying on the sources they used, as there didn't seem to be too many helpful alternatives. One potential avenue may be to search for the various laws and ordinances (with the possible exception of ARRA) in google scholar or another citation engine and see which papers cite the law in question. Many of those papers may be helpful and that might offer a crude filter eliminating articles focused on the UK and Canada (which many of the "green building" articles do). I hope this helps. Protonk (talk) 23:09, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

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