The Ecocenter at Heron’s Head Park.

In San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill requiring all new construction to meet green building standards starting in 2012, the city’s chief building inspector, Laurence Kornfield, says it’s not just in California where things are changing. Building codes across the country are undergoing a sea change.

“Every aspect of the building code is currently up in the air,” Kornfield says. Starting at a national level and reaching all the way down to local municipalities, building codes are being examined and changed, often in an effort to require that new construction be built to green building standards.

While 2007 and 2008 proved big years for the widespread adoption of stricter green building standards by major cities—including Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle—the coming year is expected to bring even more. And while the trend has traditionally applied to government-owned buildings, the early adopters of green building standards, such as San Francisco and Portland, are starting to build green building measures into code for all commercial buildings. 

But updating building codes is not an easy task. In Albuquerque, N.M., for example, a new green building code set to become effective Oct. 1, 2008, was placed on hold when the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute and several distributors sued Albuquerque, alleging the code would have created energy efficiency standards for furnaces, water heaters and air conditioners that were more stringent than those allowed under Federal law.

“Codes have worked fine for years,” says Diane Sugimura, director of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development. “But there’s all sorts of new things coming [down the pike] that may or may not work within existing code.” She points to increased interest in curbing global warming and investing in green building as factors that are bound to change code.

About half of the nation’s built environment is expected to be constructed between 2000 and 2030, according a 2004 report released by The Brookings Institution. This means some 213 billion square feet would come online by 2030. If the numbers are correct, it’s an unprecedented opportunity to change how buildings in the United States affect the environment. “This is the biggest thing in the building code world right now,” Kornfield says. “It covers every area from plumbing to the electrical code and the mechanical code and the building code.”