NYC may ban glass towers

New York City's skyline may be in for a change if Mayor Bill de Blasio gets his way.

His "green new deal" aims to ban new construction of traditional glass-and-steel skyscrapers because they are too "inefficient".

"We are going to introduce legislation to ban the glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming," the mayor said at a press conference on Monday. "They have no place in our city or on our Earth anymore."

Noting that buildings are the No. 1 cause of greenhouse emissions in the city, de Blasio said that if a company wants to build a big skyscraper it can use a lot of glass, but only "if they do all the other things needed to reduce the emissions".

"But putting up monuments to themselves that harmed our Earth and threatened our future will no longer be allowed in New York City," he added.

DeBlasio said that New York City is "the first major city on Earth to mandate that our buildings must stop emitting so many dangerous pollutants".

He was referring to a law passed by the City Council on April 18 that will require all existing high-rise buildings like the Empire State Building and Trump Tower to sharply reduce their greenhouse gas emissions or face fines of up to $1 million a year.

Real estate owners and representatives of the city's real estate industry say that the glass and steel skyscrapers going up now embody the latest in sustainable technology and don't necessarily create a massive carbon footprint.

De Blasio singled out buildings at the recently opened Hudson Yards project as "examples of the wrong way to do things".

Joanna Rose, a spokeswoman for Related Cos, which built Hudson Yards, defended the massive project in a statement to China Daily. She said that the 52-story Ten Hudson Yards, a glass building that is the first one to open at the project, is "LEED platinum and one of New York's most energy-efficient Class A office towers".

LEED Platinum is the highest rating for energy and resource efficiency awarded by the US Green Building Council.

"It houses gas-fired microturbines that generate power, hot water and chilled water with twice the efficiency of standard systems — even in the event of a power outage — and a storm water retention tank to harvest rainwater that replenishes cooling towers and irrigates the building's terrace landscaping," she said.

"Most people assume that the majority of energy is being used or being wasted by these large glass skyscrapers," Chris Cayten, a member of the Building Owners and Managers Association of New York's sustainability committee and principal at Code Green Solutions, told China Daily.

"But a lot of the energy waste in the city is coming from older, multi-family buildings and residential buildings that are not properly insulated or not properly heated," he said.

"It's true that glass is not a great insulator, but a lot of these buildings do have pretty sophisticated systems within them to optimize energy use when people are in the building and turn the equipment off when people are not in the building," Cayten added.

"It's too simple to say, 'Oh well, glass skyscrapers are energy inefficient,'" Thomas Leslie, a professor of architecture at Iowa State University, told The Associated Press. "A smart glass building is more energy efficient than a not-smart building that's done in another material."

He said companies that want to move into New York City all want nice, shiny, glass office towers and the real estate industry is delivering what clients want.

"I do believe we will be seeing more glass skyscrapers in New York," Cayteen said. "They may be pushed to be more efficient than they have been in the past, but I don't think they're going away."

The mayor's new green deal plan also calls for powering all of the city's operations with clean electricity sources like Canadian hydropower, instituting mandatory organic recycling, congestion tolls on traffic and phasing-out city purchases of single-use plastic food ware and processed meat, according to a press release handed out at de Blasio's news conference.