The Green Garage, a renovated historic Model T showroom in Detroit, typifies a growing green building culture in that city, using as many sustainable design elements as possible. The building weathered one of Detroit's snowiest winters and rainiest summers with built-in stormwater management, high-resistance insulation, UV-light-blocking windows, solar panels, radiant heat, and other features that enabled the building to use just 15 percent of the energy of a comparable office building. Another historic Detroit building, 71 Garfield, was retrofitted with geothermal heating and cooling, foam insulation, and a rooftop solar array, among other improvements. It uses one-third of the energy it used before the renovation. Meanwhile, Detroit-Wayne Joint Building Authority president Gregory McDuffee renovated the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center with simple and inexpensive changes that are expected to save approximately $1.8 million a year. Some of the changes included cutting energy for lighting by having cleaning staff clean during the day rather than at night, using single-stream recycling to reduce waste, and retrofitting 4,000 cooling boxes to save energy. More efficient insulation and windows are "relatively simple changes that pay for themselves within a year," says EcoWorks' Jacob Corvidae. Making buildings more energy efficient enables businesses to use saved capital for business expansion. "It gets back to our competitiveness as a city and as a nation," says Green Garage owner Tom Brennan. "If we have high infrastructure costs that have to be born in our products and services, then we're setting our businesses up for failure."
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