Resources

The Green Values Calculator is designed to help plan green infrastructure solutions to prevent flooding for single buildings or larger neighborhood and community scale efforts. Below are resources that support and expand upon the Green Values Calculator.

Tour the Green Values Calculator

Webinar recording from February 4, 2021

Speakers:
Jen McGraw, Director of Sustainability Innovation, CNT
Peter Haas, Chief Research Scientist, CNT
Michael Lampl, S.B. Friedman
​Max Eisenburger, S.B. Friedman

Green Values Calculator Methodology

View the methodology behind the Green Values Calculator.

View Methodology

Green Stormwater Infrastructure Impact on Property Values

This report shows Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) adds value to homes. The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) worked with SB Friedman Development Advisors to model the impact of GSI installations, such as rain gardens, pervious pavement, swales, and planters, on property sales data in two cities and found statistically significant higher sales prices of homes near GSI. These findings add to a growing body of research that shows that nature-based solutions to storm­water management provide many benefits in addition to flood control.

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Green Values Strategy Guide: Linking Green Infrastructure Benefits to Community Priorities

Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) is proven to help places become more resilient in the face of increasingly intense climate change impacts, while addressing other community priorities such as improved public health outcomes, increased economic development, and safe transportation infrastructure. CNT’s new guide “Linking Community Benefits to Green Infrastructure”, a reboot of our 2010 report “Value of Green Infrastructure Guide”, highlights the quantifiable ways that green stormwater infrastructure provides broad benefits to communities.

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Increasing Funding and Financing Options for Sustainable Stormwater Management

Our country’s water infrastructure needs investment. However, funding and financing sources are growing increasingly competitive and communities are finding it difficult to secure adequate resources to make needed investments in their systems. In this report, CNT identifies innovative funding and financing mechanisms to support communities working to upgrade their infrastructure. We look to the energy and transportation sectors for funding and financing applications, take a closer look at the ways our state revolving loan funds can be better utilized, and explore how public dollars can be invested on private property to achieve distributed impacts and benefits.

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Additional Resources

View additional research on green infrastructure at Center for Neighborhood Technology.

View Research & Tools

Our Focus on Green Infrastructure

Green infrastructure is a critical part of a sustainable city and
region for a number of reasons:

Green Infrastructure Saves Money

  • Green infrastructure performs many of the same services as gray infrastructure, such as stormwater management, flood control and water quality, but often at a reduced cost and more reliably.
  • Cost savings is critically important, as the USEPA, General Accounting Office and American Society of Civil Engineers agree that the nation needs to spend between $300 billion and $1 trillion to fund drinking and wastewater needs over next 20 years.

Green Infrastructure Supports Sustainability

  • Wetlands, parks and other types of open spaces are a critical component of the sustainability of a region. Just try to imagine a neighborhood or community without a park or trees. Hard to do, isn’t it? And yet park districts and forestry and natural resources divisions face a constant struggle to obtain the necessary resources to fund these spaces.
  • If treated as infrastructure, however, open spaces and recreational areas could be treated as an investment, not an expense.

Green Infrastructure Better Uses Limited Resources

  • Governments not only spend less to install and maintain most green infrastructure, green infrastructure provides a host of ancillary benefits, such as increased recreation and open space, community building opportunities and better air and water quality.