Hey, there! Log in / Register
Yoon: Tax abatement for green roofs
By adamg on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 1:55pm
Sam Yoon proposes giving a tax break to building owners who retrofit their roofs with waterproof membranes on top of which they pour on dirt and then plant vegetation:
These roofs promote energy efficiency, reduce storm-water runoff, improve air quality, lessen the urban heat island effect, reduce noise, promote productivity, beautify rooftops, and extend roof life. They also create new markets and jobs for rooftop garden products.
He also calls for weatherizing older homes and creating "green neighborhoods" by encouraging farmers' markets and community gardens and expanding bike lanes.
Neighborhoods:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Reality check
Is he also going to pay for inevitable roof cave-ins?
I am sure the owners insurance companies will just love this too.
Reality check
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Someone didn't pay attention in physics class
A roof isn't structurally much different from the intermediary floors inside a house. You realize that people put things with a much higher load per square inch than soil on second and higher floors, right? Think stoves, washing machines full of water, grand pianos, bathtubs full of water, obese humans, etc. Imagine stacking four 40-lb bags of topsoil. There's 160 lbs on about a 3x2 foot space of floor or roof, and would be enough soil depth (bags removed of course) to grow grasses and veggies and shrubs. If 160 lbs in that space came even close to stressing the supports in a house, then the house should be shaking and creaking when I walk around, putting that same weight on the size of my foot. But I'm not remotely stressing it when I walk around, since the people who built it were so forward-thinking as to design it to hold my weight plus a hell of a lot more.
snow?
Roofs fall in all the time from snow.
Hot tubs?
My upstairs neighbor has exclusive roof rights and wanted to install a hot tub. The engineer said no way unless she wanted a new skylight. Answer - it depends.
You are forgetting the added
You are forgetting the added weight of water when that soil is wet. Point loads are significantly different from having a large amount of weight uniformly spread across an entire surface.
Planted green roofs aren't that green anyway, a white rubber membrane roof with a ground water recharging drainage system is actually far better in more respects.
Ye white roof
I was thinking about a white roof. It stands to reason it would reflect more heat in the summer. But then I thought a moment and realized that there wouldn't be any energy savings, because I, like many people in Boston, don't have AC.
In the winter, on the other hand, I burn a lot of oil keeping my house warm. A white roof would then reflect more heat than a black roof and... increase my energy consumption.
So I think I'm going to stick with grey. Though painting the whole damn thing green would sure impress my faddish aunt.
Snow on top of roofs in the
Snow on top of roofs in the winter time acts as insulation.
And...how is this going to
And...how is this going to help unemployment, lower taxes, fix the T, adjust the budget?
It is just a smoke screen. All the bleeding hearts out there want nonsense like bike lanes, and other nonseense most people care about. Would you rather have more bike lanes, or less police and fire fighters on duty due to budget cuts? Who is going to protect you from having your bike shorts wearing ass being robbed for your iPod when the budget can't pay for cops?
How about we MAINTAIN first, do some road repair, invest in community (I bet the kids in Roxbury and Mattapan would rather have a park free of crack vials vs some douches in cambridge biking through cambridgeport) - greens roofs my ass.
Send this guy back to quincy!
Seriously, Adam?
Seriously?
Another argument in favor of non-anon on UH (not WGGtBE)
adamg, approving anon comments, shouldn't have to weigh the possible value of viewpoints against the idiocy of the manner in which they were spouted.
I see anon's point
... in that with all the financial issues facing Boston, I just don't see what Yoon is trying to accomplish here, other than the fact that he can come up with "new ideas". The fact that this idea accomplishes nothing except reduce city revenue seems to escape him.
Anyways, I would have liked it if anon had expressed himself/herself more intelligently. I don't want UH to become another boston.com in regards to comments.
actually probably not
The article curiously didn't say what the tax was a discount "from" - my guess is that it's probably property tax as there are very few other taxes large enough and universal enough to give the discount. Typically these are not actual tax holidays - they are set up as exemptions - like the residential exemption many are familiar with. What most don't realize is the city doesn't forego any revenue - they redistribue it. In the case of the residential exemption the taxes get pushed mostly onto landlords (one reason it's very expensive to rent in Boston) and the rest gets pushed on homeowners of higher value homes (homes valued over $825k or so at last count). If it's set up this way - basically as a redistribution it's kind of useless - you get the break the first year, but then you have to chip in to subsidize other people's roofs the following year - if you don't or can't put up a green roof - then you are forever sudsidizing those who do. If it's set up as a true discount and the city foregoes the revenue that the city supposedly needs (Yoon says we need an extra sales tax to pay for violence prevention programs) then he seems to be proposing conflicting policies. Nice idea - but if we don't have the money to pay for it we need to prioritize - either keep the money for Youth Violence prevention or "spend" it on green roofs.