By Andy Chappell-Dick

The author was one of BCE's 2012 businss plan competition winners. 

Bluffton is a great place to live, and I have proof. According to the criteria of one national industry group, the US Green Building Council (USGBC), this community far exceeds the level required to achieve “exemplary” status.

To kick off our new contracting business, Small House Bluffton, Wendy and I are building a house here in town, and because of our interest in ecological design and efficiency we’ve registered the project with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, administered by USGBC.) 

This is a non-government certification system that inspects and ranks building projects on dozens of factors having to do with environmental impact, occupant health, materials used, and even the neighborhood in which it’s built.  Our goal is to achieve LEED certification at the Platinum level, the highest possible.

Points are awarded for meeting each of the criteria. Of all the points we get for building an ecological house, the easiest will come in a category called Community Resources. Here is where Bluffton shines.

Basically, points in this category are awarded based on how close a home is to places that we go all the time: stores, schools, churches, parks, community centers, hair salons, libraries.  These are the resources of a healthy community. 

LEED reasons that it is important for homes to be built in development patterns that allow for walking, biking, or public transit, reducing dependence on cars and their environmental impact. The category places a high value on building communities more densely, encouraging people to live close to each other--and their businesses and schools and churches--instead of in expansive and distant suburbs.

On a map of town, LEED draws a circle around the home with a radius of half a mile, representing a reasonable walking distance, and counts the number of “resources” in the circle. If there are at least seven, a project gets one point for “basic”. 

If there are 11 resources, that’s called “extensive” and it’s worth two points.  “Outstanding” is 14 resources, for three points.

Maybe “outstanding” doesn’t seem like a hard threshold to reach. Many homes in Ohio small towns easily could reach that. But it might be tough in most parts of Lima, or any city for that matter. Or consider a house just outside the edge of a town—a half-mile circle may exclude a number of important things, and you find yourself driving more and walking less.

In the central part of Bluffton, where our new house is being built, the half-mile circle contains many, many community resources. I quickly counted 14, so we’re “outstanding.”  But LEED provides an additional point for “exemplary performance”, which means the project has doubled the requirements. I kept going and easily reached 28. I stopped counting, still not done, at 56, which represents a quadrupling of what LEED considers “outstanding” community resources.

In their wildest dreams, the engineers and academics that teased out LEED’s point system did not anticipate a town as richly resourceful as Bluffton. We truly are off the scale.  A home’s impact on the environment isn’t just within its walls, but is also bound up in its neighborhood. 

LEED encourages developers to strive for what Bluffton already has in spades.  Three cheers for our downtown and our community resources!  (And four points for our new house!)