For the third year in a row, Chicago has been named the greenest city to work in the United States by the 2019 Green Building Adoption Index. According to the index, nearly 71 percent of Chicago’s office space is green certified – up from 66 percent the previous year. Chicago is followed by San Francisco at 67.5 percent, Atlanta at 59.3 percent and Minneapolis at 57.1 percent. 

Chicago’s ranking is particularly impressive when compared with the index’s finding that only 42.2 percent of office space across the 30 largest U.S. office markets are either Energy Star or LEED certified.

Chicago also ranks in the top 5 on the 2019 Multifamily Green Building Adoption Index, with 19,645 units of 331,687 units are either Energy Star or LEED certified. This accounts for 5.9 percent of Chicago’s multifamily units. Denver tops that list with 7 percent of its units certified green.

CBRE and a consortium of Maastricht University and the University of Guelph began publishing the Green Building Adoption Index in 2014. This year marked the first year of the Multifamily Green Building Adoption Index’s publication, which was completed in collaboration with Yardi Matrix and supported by the Multifamily Housing Council.