Boston mayor suffers another setback in greener building bid

The outcome of the case surprised advocates and real estate lawyers, who said it is rare for the Zoning Commission to go against the mayor.

“We expected it to be a certainty,” said Hessann Farooqi, executive director of the Boston Climate Action Network.

But there were signs Tuesday afternoon that the vote might not go as expected, after City Councilman Ed Flynn submitted a letter calling for a “stronger community process… as this zoning change could have profound impacts on the development landscape in our city.”

Flynn said he sent the letter because he had heard from “residents and businesses” that their voices had not been sufficiently taken into account.

Tamara Small, executive director of NAIOP Massachusetts, an association of commercial real estate developers, said her organization is concerned that the new zoning initiative will raise costs for developers. “There’s a real slowdown in development right now in the industry, so anything that adds significant costs is a real concern,” she said.

But city officials and advocates say it’s unclear whether the zoning code will actually add any new costs. Because new buildings are already subject to strict requirements from a recently adopted building code that shifts buildings away from fossil fuels, “we’re very close to what’s already being proposed,” city Planning Chief Arthur Jemison said at the commission meeting.

That’s confirmed by a recent report from Built Environment Plus, a green building advocacy group. The report found that Massachusetts not only increased the number of net-zero and net-zero-ready buildings in the state by nearly six-fold in the past three years, but also did it economically.

According to the report, 80 percent of net-zero-cost completed buildings for which cost data was reported were built with a margin of less than 1 percent, including high-rise buildings.

The Zoning Commission’s decision “runs counter to growing evidence that builders and designers are moving toward cleaner, more resilient construction practices,” said Lisa Cunningham, director of ZeroCarbonMA, a nonprofit that advocates for reducing the use of fossil fuels in buildings.

In response to the vote, Wu’s administration said it is not giving up. “We plan to go back to the Zoning Commission to address some of the concerns that the commissioners have raised,” a city spokesman said. Emma Pettit.

The zoning initiative was in itself, in a sense, Plan B. Wu’s administration had hoped to participate in a state pilot program that allows 10 cities and towns to ban fossil fuels in new buildings, which is otherwise not allowed under state law. The city withdrew its application last year after learning it was unlikely to be selected.

As climate advocates expressed frustration with Wednesday’s decision, they admitted There has been at least some progress in their movement recently. The city has adopted a new, optional building code that encourages fossil-free construction, making it more expensive to build with oil or gas by requiring the building to be prewired to go all-electric and include on-site power generation with solar panels, among other requirements.

But while building codes have made fossil fuels less attractive, they haven’t made them illegal. That’s where the zero-carbon zoning initiative was supposed to come in.

Now, after the failure of the zoning initiative, “some of the remaining developments will still be built with much higher emissions, and for those particular buildings and their owners and tenants, that’s a huge deal,” Farooqi said.

Sabrina Shankman can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @shankman.