ABSTRACT
Understanding the costs of green building is important, because the single most important factor in the development and construction world is cost. Construction costs are “hard,” but benefits such as projected energy savings, water savings and productivity gains are considered “soft” because they are speculative and occur in the future. Therefore, performing a cost-benefit analysis for each project is crucially important, to convince building owners, design teams and developers to proceed with both sustainable-design measures and the LEED certification effort.
