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Janine Shea

How Patagonia Makes More Money By Trying To Make Less | Co.Exist: World changing ideas ... - 0 views

  • Thus, Patagonia’s audience trusts the brand, admires its values, and aspires to live by the same principles. Very few brands can compete on quality and price alone. Your brand doesn’t necessarily need to invest in the environment or take such risky maneuvers. However, it can’t be built exclusively through great products and great advertisements. That model is antiquated. Consumers have too much information and too few dollars. They want to invest in brands that have similar values to their own. Perhaps that simply means your product has more advanced engineering, is more user-friendly, or has better customer service. Those are all viable brand elements that create a powerfully rational connection with consumers. Ideally, your brand would also embody behaviors that elicit an emotional connection, such as investing in social, educational, or environmental responsibility. Building a brand platform like Patagonia’s is difficult, expensive, and somewhat risky. But, when brands reduce the amount they spend on paid media, they can invest in building a brand which will help their paid media work significantly better, and more importantly, create brand evangelists.
Janine Shea

Metrics for Responsible Property Investing: Developing and Maintaining a High Performan... - 0 views

  • To date, however, the industry has yet todevelop standards to evaluate ESG datathat compare to its traditional evaluation o portolio perormance.
  •   5 Responsible Property Investment [RPI] is anemerging investment strategy and disciplineconcerned with integrating environmental,social, and governance [ESG] data intoinvestment decision-making
  • Real estate investment plays a undamentalrole in determining how society usesresources, how the built environmentshapes social lie, how economic activitycan be sustainable over time. As an assetclass, real estate oers especially tangibledemonstrations o the importance o ESGanalysis in creating value or investors andsociety alike. We believe that a robustmetrics system can help shape the marketto better create sustainable outcomes or allstakeholders
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  •   6 Institutional real estate is in the midst o a major downturn
  • growing awareness among investorsthat environmental and social analysis canenhance their ability to assess building andportolio perormance over the long term.
  • Energyuseingreenbuildingis29to50 percent less than non-green counterparts. •Greenbuildingsuseanestimated40 percent less water. •Carbondioxideemissionsingreen buildings are reduced by 33 to 39percent. •Solidwasteattributabletogreenbuildings is reduced by 70 percent
  • In practice, these issues havebeen treated as vital by many investors – RPIoers a means to bring them together into acoherent ramework
  • SmartGrowth
  • SocialEquityandCommunity Development
  • UrbanRevitalization
  • size o the US commercial real estate marketat $5 trillion, with approximately $2.5 trillionin assets owned by institutional investors.
  • EnergyConservation
  • EnvironmentalProtection
  • WorkerWell-Being
  • HealthandSafety
  • LocalCitizenship
  • CorporateCitizenship
  • Figure 2: “Market standard” fund performance characteristics
  • The increased global and 2.2  Impacts o Sustainability on Institutional Real Estate Table 1: Sustainability Impacts on Real Estate social awareness about sustainability ingeneral has sharply impacted institutional realestate in several interrelated ways,
  • Global Reporting Initiativeand Principles or Responsible Investing
  • Ideally, a unied approach could also be takento visualizing, analyzing, and managing thedata obtained or individual metrics, buildingupon the action items mentioned aboveto create a dashboard or monitoring andimproving portolio perormance in the contexto RPI and investor and stakeholder interests.
  • The eld o RPI lacks a powerul, standardizedset o portolio-level metrics which isrecognized and used by investors andmanagers across the real estate industry,thereby dening and giving credibility to thepractice o RPI
  • The scope o RPI is broad. It includes, orexample, “deep green” projects that ocuson poor communities or environmentallyragile areas, energy ecient buildings thatoer clear nancial advantages throughreduced operating costs, aordable housingprojects that draw upon local tax credits,and now carbon reduction projects thathedge risk and result in renewable energycerticates.
  • we have developed a seto 26 quantitative metrics that can helpinvestors to nd, create and articulate valuethrough improving the economic, social, andenvironmental prole o their investments.
  • Thesemetrics were selected or their ability to allowreal estate proessionals to better addressrisks and identiy opportunities or long-termvalue creation.
  • Table 2: Proposed RPI Metrics
  • Measuring the walkscore or a property isa simple as putting in the address into thewalkscore calculator (www.walkscore.com)
  • the premiums suggesthigher rents, occupancy and general marketdemand or walkable properties.
  • By trackingthe ability o properties to create jobs andprovide services or underserved areas,investors can lower risks associated withregulation and community opposition as wellas setting an example o social sustainability
  • Buildings – even green buildings – oten lacka close connection to their surrounding areaand community. Developing CommunityEngagement plans on a site-by-site basisallows projects to be sensitive to the needso the citizens and areas in which they areconstructed
  • ensures that negative impacts and publicopposition to projects will be minimized.
  • These plans should also include provisionsor the public use o private space, which haswell-documented success in San Franciscoand other cities. Across a portolio, investingin projects that positively contribute to thecommunity in which they are anchoredcreates a positive image, minimizes, risk, andimproves social sustainability
  • Table 3: Portfolio Characterization
  • Several categories contain RPI metricswhich investment managers could directlytie to value either through their indication o decreased operating expenses or indirectlyaid in obtaining higher rents, lower vacancy orselling the property at a higher price. Othercategories do not link directly to asset value,rather allow the investor to property determinethe correct ESG measures which must bein place in order to achieve maximum RPIbenets
  • Prudent portolio managers will look toenter into portolio wide contracts orcommissioning, eciency, renewables, andother measures to improve perormance,and use RPI metrics to track the value o improvements portolio wide
  • Environmental metrics are perceived as havingmore direct links to value, however socialmetrics are seen as helpul in characterizingprogress on advancing the social agenda o the und, while maintaining nancial returns
  • Environmental metrics are more malleablethan social metrics—in other words, mostenvironmental metrics can be improved overtime across the portolio, whereas socialmetrics are oten determined at the point o acquisition, and remain static (walkability, CBDproperties, etc.)
  • To ensure ease o collection and interpretationo the additional data, systems should be putinto place to ensure the metrics are trackedat each property and easily aggregated to theportolio level.
  • Portolio managers, property managers,and stakeholders will be able to engage ina dialogue regarding value created acrossthe triple bottom line through responsibleinvestment practices
  • CBRE Standardso Sustainability
  • There are many useul sotware tools on themarket- rom EnergyStar Portolio Manager(mentioned previously) to proprietary systemssuch as Tririga (www.tririga.com). Tririgacombines portolio management tools withportal views or property managers, andacilities management unctionality. Thishelps to integrate goals and establishcommon metrics rom asset to asset
  • In a changing and volatileinvestment environment, there is a uniqueand urgent need to better understandthe benets o making a commitment toresponsible property investing. The potentialor improvements at the portolio level isgreat, with benets accruing to investors,the industry, and society as a whole, and thepotential or these considerations to improvethe industry as a whole is even greater.
  • •Long-termvaluecreationthrough increases in assessed value o property •Greatlyreducedoperatingcostsbydriving environmental metrics •Minimizationofriskinseveralkeyareas during acquisition •Improvedpublicimageandinvestor condence •Improvedrelationshipbetweeninvestors and asset managers •Increasedvisibilityandtransparency•Demonstrationofvaluesinpractice
  •   26  The benets o committing to RPI arepotentially signicant, but a lack o uniormmetrics which can be adopted industry-wide has hindered the potential impact o RPI on the real estate sector.
Janine Shea

creative class struggle - 0 views

    • Janine Shea
       
      Serve the Creative Class and the cities looking to attract them, but through SUSTAINABLE development so you don't create these mutually exclusive, inequitable scenarios that are not only morally conflicting with our values & brand ideal but also potentially obstructive to our business goals
  • Creative People? Collaborative Spaces? Innovative Places? According to the event’s website – politicians, private consultants, architects, community development advocates, culture workers, and public space activists are meeting to plan the future of urban policy.
  • Hamilton Joins the Fight Against the Creative City!
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  • Check out the great new flyer from Hamiltonians Against Neighborhood Displacement (HAND) about how creative city policies are causing displacement in Hamilton, Ontario.  If you are interested in contacting them please let us know.
Janine Shea

Project for Public Spaces | Place Capital: Re-connecting Economy With Community - 0 views

  • To put public space at the heart of public discourse where it belongs
  • tying culture change to economics
  • “We can shift the paradigm of how we build our cities; thinking about economics is a great way to do that because it cuts through the political divide.”
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  • Place Capital, which posits that the economic value of a robust, dynamic place is much more than the sum of its parts.
  • Great places are created through many “investments” in Place Capital–everything from individual actions that together build a welcoming sense of place, all the way up to major physical changes that make a space usable and accessible.
  • Project-driven processes generally lead to places that follow a general protocol without any consideration for local needs or desires.
  • public space projects
  • tend to fall into one of four types of development
  • project-driven processes; top-down, bureaucratic leadership
  • At its core, Place Capital is about re-connecting economy and community.
  • design-led process.
  • eliance on the singular vision of professional designers and other siloed disciplines can often make for spaces that are lovely as objects, but not terribly functional as public gathering places.
  • place-sensitive. Here, designers and architects are still leading the process, but there is concerted effort to gather community input and ensure that the final design responds to the community that lives, works, and plays around the space.
  • Finally, there are spaces that are created through a place-led approach, which relies not on community input, but on a unified focus on place outcomes built on community engagement. The people who participate in a place-led development process feel invested in the resulting public space, and are more likely to serve as stewards.
  • They are involved meaningfully throughout the process
  • turn proximity into purpose
  • concept of Place Capital is ideally-suited to guide the cooperation of so many individual movements that are looking for ways to work together to change the world for the better. Place Capital employs the Placemaking process to help us outline clear economic goals that re-frame the way that people think not only about public space but, by extension, about the public good in general.
  • surge of interest in Placemaking in the United States over the past few decades.
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