On May 25th the Sustainable Sites Initiative™ (SITES™) announced the selection of Habitat for Hope’s Barn Raising Project as one of the first landscapes to participate in a new program testing the nation’s first rating system for green landscape design, construction and maintenance.

The Barn Raising Project will join more than 150 other projects from 34 states as well as from Canada, Iceland and Spain as part of an international pilot project program to evaluate the new SITES rating system for sustainable landscapes, with and without buildings.  Sustainable landscapes can clean water, reduce pollution and restore habitats, while providing significant economic and social benefits to land owners and municipalities.

SITES, a partnership of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden, selected Habitat for Hope’s Barn Raising Project based on its extensive environmentally friendly elements. These sustainable elements are currently being designed by our team of world-renowned consultants including planners, architects, landscape architects, ecologist and engineers.  Like the other pilot projects, the Habitat for Hope site will test the point system for achieving different levels of site sustainability on a 250-point scale, and the performance benchmarks associated with specific credits within the Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009.

The Barn Raising Project joins the Smithsonian Institution’s African American History & Culture museum, a New Orleans’ project to absorb storm water on the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward flooded during Hurricane Katrina, and other pilot projects that include academic and corporate campuses, public parks with hundreds of acres, transportation corridors and private residences of less than one acre.

SITES will use feedback from this and the other selected projects during the pilot phase, which runs through June 2012, to revise the final rating system and reference guide by early 2013. The U.S. Green Building Council, a stakeholder in the Sustainable Sites Initiative, anticipates incorporating the guidelines and performance benchmarks into future iterations of its LEED® Green Building Rating System™. Click here for more information.