The primary objectives of this research are to identify the relation between
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria regarding sustainable
site credits and the appraised value of land parcels in the City of Houston, and
additionally to analyze the effects of detail components which leverage the sustainable
credits regarding the Public Transportation Access (PTA) in terms of economic issues.
To accomplish these objectives, the approach to estimate sustainable ratings of specific
parcels using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was established.
Green construction must be one of the most powerful trends in the construction
industry. One of the main concepts to underlie the basis of this green construction is
sustainability. This sustainability has to be considered in the process of the site selection
prior to the actual activities to construct a building. Recently, the U.S. Green Building
Council (USGBC) has suggested the modified guideline with "LEED 2009 for New
Construction and Major Renovations". According to this metric, it is clear that this
principle endeavors to block environmental abuses related to land development or
restoration projects. On the other hand, it is not easy to check the serviceability of these rules to guarantee continuous economic merit through sustainable land development or
restoration encouraged by these criteria.
The criteria regarding the sustainable site selection in this LEED metric are
Sustainable Site Credit (SSC) #1: Site Selection, SSC #3: Brownfield, and SSC #4.1:
Public Transportation Access. Linear regression methods were used for predictive
analysis. In this model, the unit appraisal value of the land was used as the dependent
variable to reflect the economic values of the land, and LEED-sustainable-site criteria
were used as the categorical independent variables.
According to statistical results, the models to predict the appraisal parcel value
using sustainable site components have relatively low R-square. Moreover, SSC #1 and
SSC #3 were not significant factors affecting the unit value of land. This outcome means
that there are no statistically significant effects of SSC #1 and SSC #3 on parcel value.
On the other hand, SSC #4.1 was highly significant. Furthermore, the detail
components of SSC #4.1 regarding the bus stops and railroad stations were also
significant. These results can lead to improved environmental preservation by avoiding
development which is far from the PTA as well as increasing economic value while
enhancing the development density near the PTA corridors.
Finally, GIS was used to determine the LEED ratings of individual parcels. The
methods established to do this can be applied to other projects for the other regions, or
the same region at different times.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-12-7341 |
| Date | 2009 December 1900 |
| Creators | Park, Young Jun |
| Contributors | Woods, Paul K., Miranda, Valerian |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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