Overview

West Hollywood, a small city of less than 40,000 residents surrounded by Los Angeles neighborhoods and the city of Beverly Hills, features a very dense, compact urban form with small lots, mixed land use, and a walkable street grid, uncommon in California. The city offers a wealth of attractions, including the famed Sunset Strip, a vibrant nightlife, thriving arts and design community, and rich diversity of residents. It also illustrates a commitment to sustainability and green building practices established more than 10 years ago, before the foundation of CALGreen. Most recently, this commitment resulted in a comprehensive update of the City’s green building program as well as the adoption of a single-measure reach code.

“Sustainable Roofs”:

West Hollywood’s Single-Measure Reach Code Goes Vertical

West Hollywood’s Senior Sustainability Planner, Robyn Eason, notes, “the City has a long history of constructing green buildings that are responsive to its unique physical characteristics. With this program update, we identified an opportunity to extend our capability in a way that reflects the City’s unique construction profile.” West Hollywood focused on rooftops as a key way to continue driving optimal building energy efficiency performance while encouraging energy efficiency and development of additional green space in the dense urban landscape. The City is “park-poor” with primarily small, urban-style parks and only a limited amount of open green space. By developing a reach provision that focuses on roofs, the City turned its challenging built environment into an opportunity for continued improvement.