Greenbuild’s New York moment

Greenbuild, the largest annual conference for green building professionals, is coming to New York City for the first time, running Oct. 20 to 23 at the Javits Convention Center. This is an industry event for professionals rather than a program homeowners can sign up for, but it reflects a push happening in New York and other cities to make older buildings more energy efficient. Existing buildings cause nearly two-thirds of New York City's emissions, and the city's Local Law 97 requires cutting emissions 40% by 2030 and reaching net zero by 2050 — a preview of the kind of rules and retrofit expectations that may eventually spread to other cities.

The conference includes tours of buildings that show what deep energy upgrades look like in practice, including Rubin Hall, described as the world's largest residential Passive House retrofit (a standard for very airtight, highly insulated buildings) and an all-electric redevelopment of a historic Brooklyn industrial building. These examples give a sense of what large-scale retrofits can achieve, even though they involve big commercial and institutional properties rather than single-family homes.

The event also spotlights the Billion Oyster Project, a Governors Island nonprofit restoring oyster reefs to improve water quality and protect shorelines from storm surges, which will receive $10,000 from Greenbuild to support its shell recycling work. For homeowners, the main takeaway is less about direct action and more about the direction cities are heading: tighter efficiency requirements and more retrofit examples for aging buildings.