New York City Buildings Largely Missing Green Roof Mandate

New York City passed its NYC Climate Mobilization Act in 2019 to stiffen rules, with “long-term and wide-ranging fiscal and operational impacts for building owners, buyers, sellers, lenders and tenants,” as law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan described.

Part of it included the need for new buildings or those facing specific types of renovations to include either a green roof — using vegetation to make buildings less susceptible to hear — or one with solar panels to general electricity. Except a that proptech company Archipelago recently verified a study from last fall suggesting that hardly any building has complied.

Last fall, a study in Ecology & Society by researchers from The Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, The New School’s Urban Systems Lab, and CIESIN at Columbia University, used publicly available aerial imagery looking at the rooftops of the buildings that make up approximately 20% of the landscape. Out of more than 1 million buildings in New York City, they could identify only 736 with green roofs, less than 0.1% of the total, although they noted there could be others they hadn’t been able to identify. Most were in midtown and downtown Manhattan. Other areas had “few to none.”

Recently, Archipelago, a self-described AI-driven commercial property risk platform, did its own analysis based on having as customers “close to 300 buildings” in New York City, meaning easy access to a lot of surrounding data.

The company examined what it had from the view of understanding what they might learn about green roofs from what is still limited as a self-selected sample. They expanded from “green roofs,” which means foliage that can absorb stormwater and air pollution and provide homes for wildlife, as the original study described. Archipelago looked at the use of solar panels to provide power, offsetting electrical costs.

Among all the buildings, 96% reported details on their roof system. Only 81% noted whether they had photovoltaic solar cells mounted on the roof. Of them, every one reported “no solar panels were installed.”

Again, this was a small and self-selected sample, so not statistically representative of the city at large. However, it does seem to suggest that many buildings in New York City — and who knows how many other metro areas — haven’t installed PV cells.

Given potential tax breaks, the interest in addressing aspects of ESG, and the chance to reduce operational expenses, it seems surprising that none of the 300 seemed to have installed PV cells.

PV arrays aren’t a trivial cost, but then again, neither is power. For buildings already looking at technology to better control heating and cooling costs, installing solar power to offset at least some operating costs would seem an easy decision to consider.