The Durst Organization has enlisted its apartment tenants to launch the city’s first leftovers recylcing plan.

The landlord is offering residents of its Helena apartment building a food scrap collection program that takes “organic materials” such as food scraps, soiled paper and plants out of the trash stream, and recycles them.

By  Andrew Padian, vice president for Energy Initiatives,
The Community Preservation Corporation
 Just as April 15 is synonymous with Americans as Tax Day, all New York City multi-family building owners should remember May 1st as Benchmarking Day. May 1st is the deadline for all owners and managers of multi-family buildings over 50,000 square feet to report their buildings’ energy and water annual usage to the City or face fines. Developed under Mayor Bloomberg’s Greener, Greater Buildings Plan in 2009, Local Law 84 (LL84) was created to boost the quality of life for …

By Steven J. Schleider, MAI, LEED-AP BD + C
president, Metropolitan Valuation Services
Lighting consumes about 18% of the electricity generated in the U.S. with another 4% to 5% used to remove the waste heat generated by those lights.
In commercial buildings, lighting accounts for close to 71% of overall electricity use in the U.S. with approximately 35% of the cost of electricity used in a commercial building consumed by lighting.
With those statistics, it’s obvious a reduction in lighting costs will reduce the net operating cost of a building.
That reduction is, of course, …

Utility costs represent the single largest controllable expense in a multi-family housingcommunity, consuming 25 to 35% of most operating budgets.

With the U.S. Departments of Energy and HUD working aggressively to improve energy efficiency in public and privately-owned housing communities, affordable housing managers trying to rein in energy costs have a new ally: the SEE The Light Property Manager’s Energy Toolkit.

The Rust Belt city of Buffalo, N.Y., is recasting itself as a home for high-tech industry and green infrastructure.

Central to this makeover is a new home for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at University of Buffalo, which is drawing attention from design, industry and government circles alike.

MerrittView, Malkin Properties’ trophy office building in Norwalk, Connecticut, has earned the Energy Star designation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a third time, announced Jeffrey H. Newman, executive vice president for Malkin Properties, the marketing and managing agent for the building.

Con Edison today honored building owners, property managers and contractors who led the way in 2012 in making energy- and money-saving efficiency upgrades in multifamily buildings.
Con Edison’s multifamily program provides owners of residential buildings with five to 75 units free energy-efficiency surveys and incentives for heating and lighting upgrades to common areas.
Once a building is enrolled, residents can receive free compact fluorescent bulbs, smart strips and water-saving devices.
“Our multifamily energy-efficiency program is at its most successful when owners and managers work with our installation contractors to upgrade to modern lighting, …

By Steven J. Schleider, MAI, LEED-AP BD + C
President, Metropolitan Valuation Services
Back in the day, which wasn’t that long ago, everyone thought going green was the right thing to do, even if we didn’t quite know what to do or how to do it.
Whether going green provided benefits in addition to good corporate citizenship was, at that point, unknown.
With corporations adopting a sustainability policy, enter corporate real estate executives who manage the real estate activities of corporations whose core business is not real estate.
Many productivity and cost studies later, the …

By Orlando Lee Rodriguez
The Community Preservation Corporation has secured $250 million in financing from Citigroup, the New York based financial services company for low and moderate income housing.
One Citigroup’s largest one-time affordable housing investments, the cash infusion will create 6,000 units of affordable housing.
Half of the units and $100 million of the financing will be specifically designated for projects within the five boroughs of New York City.
An undisclosed percentage of the Citigroup funding will also be set aside for the Storm Recovery Loan Fund, a pilot program providing rehabilitation loans …

ChargePoint, Inc. unveiled the first of more than 80 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations it will install around New York at The Solaire in Battery Park City earlier this month.

It is ChargePoint’s first installation of what will be part of a “significantˮ NYSERDA EV charging station investment.