An interview with Matthew Blesso

Matthew Blesso, founder and CEO of Blesso Properties, designs buildings to fulfill the physical and psychological needs of those who live in them.  As a sustainable real estate developer, Blesso’s properties conserve water and continuously strive to reduce their carbon footprint. His process emphasizes passive strategies, an approach that harnesses the energy of the surrounding environs through building placement (relation to the sun), minimizing of technology, using materials that have a high thermal mass, and inclusion of plant life, particularly green roofs.

I met Blesso while heading a photography project on advanced uses of urban ecology in New York City. The green roof (designed by Balmori Associates, pictured above) atop his NoHo apartment  is undeniably among the best in the city: a verdant, multi-tiered garden that benefits his life practically and pleasurably. The foliage absorbs rain water, prevents flooding sewers, cools the building in the summer, warms it in the winter, produces oxygen and reduces pollutant gases such as nitrogen, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and ground level ozone. Blesso’s green roof demonstrates how sustainability can be achieved through smart design, a mindset embedded in his building practice. 

On two separate occasions Matt and I spoke on the phone about his projects, the financial incentives for building sustainably and how to push the green movement forward.  – Katie Bachner

THE BELIEVER: Green real estate development integrates social and environmental goals with financial considerations. What are some of the challenges to building green that you have experienced? 

MATTHEW BLESSO: I think first and foremost it’s getting other people to embrace it and unfortunately, that even includes design professionals. Green building is often more work and more money. So if you already have a budget and the design professional has to meet this budget they actually have to put in a lot more time on some things that are going to raise the costs and make your job that much harder – it is often harder to enlist them. Then you will have other cases where you will have professionals that simply haven’t done sustainable things before – whether it’s engineers or sub contractors – so it’s ultimately only the developer that can push the process. That’s one challenge, the second one is the lack of a cohesive standard. LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] has been the default standard and even that doesn’t have the respect that it did when it started. The third thing I would say is the lack of impetus by our political leaders to really embrace sustainable regulations. I think it’s better at the local level than it is at the national level. New York City is definitely more forward thinking in this...