The City of Portland & Portland State: Sustainable Together

We live in the great state of Oregon whose largest city, Portland, was voted one of the most sustainable cities in the world. So being a forefront in sustainability, the city has set some standards for others to follow.

One big step initiated by the city is all new public buildings MUST be LEED certified. If you don't know what LEED is, we'll explain this in detail in a later post. In a nutshell, LEED certification is a rating of how "green" a building is. The ratings range from a certificate for just one portion of your building to the whole building itself. When a whole building is rated it can receive a medal ranging from: silver, gold, and platinum with the latter being the highest rating possible. LEED certification is expensive so not all property owners want to fork over the $30,000 average it costs to obtain LEED certification. There are many properties that instill LEED practices and standards without paying for the actual certification.

Portland State is a public school in the city of Portland, therefore the LEED standard is applied to all new construction and remodels constructed for the school. A large majority of Portland's LEED buildings are clustered around Portland State's campus. We felt the school is wholly integrated into the fabric of Portland, not only by it's presence and location, but by the care and interest generated toward the school from those interested in LEED and sustainability. To further promote this cohesiveness we've gathered information about Portland's sustainable sites and combined it in an easy to use map. Even better, the map is actually a self-guided walking/biking tour of sustainable sites in Portland. We've tried to add all the sites, but have omitted some that aren't accessible to the public AND there are a long list of buildings waiting to be certified in the city of Portland alone. Hopefully one day, we'll have to make a number of sustainability maps, one for each area of Portland!!