San Francisco Considers Green Building Mandate

"San Francisco will impose the nation's most environmentally rigorous building standards if officials agree to new recommendations from a task force convened by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Many local governments require publicly funded buildings to follow some environmental guidelines. But San Francisco's proposed standards, which will be announced at a news conference today, also would affect private developers and commercial projects.

Boston is the only large U.S. city that has mandatory environmental standards covering private construction, although those requirements aren't as sweeping as the ones proposed for San Francisco.

"We recognized the need to improve the quality of buildings, and we wanted to focus on green building," said Phil Williams, chairman of the task force and a vice president at Webcor, one of the city's largest private builders."