Hundreds of energy raters, home inspectors and green building practitioners gathered in Cleveland the week of April 23, 2007 for the national ACI Home Performance conference. ‘Internationally acclaimed building scientist’ Bernd Steinmuller delivered the keynote about his sustainable designs used to build 10,000 “passive” homes in Europe since 1991.
Passive is a combination of orienting a building to invite more sunlight to heat interior spaces, super insulating walls with ‘grass’ or cellulosic material, and supplementing with renewable energy from plentiful wind and solar farms in Steinmuller’s native Germany.
“Sustainability in Germany is closely linked to how you manage the forest,” Steinmuller said. “We follow the saying, ‘you shall not cut more wood than you use.’”
To stem global warming, our ecological footprint cannot exceed 1 ton of carbon dioxide per person/per year. “We are currently passing this by a factor of 20 in America. We need to reduce consumption by a factor of 10 in the West.”
Housing generates 40 percent of the energy we use, mostly through heating, so building passive homes, which operate there on 1 watt of heating demand per year, should be imperative in the U.S. The first demonstration passive house in the U.S. was built a few years ago in Urbana, Illinois, and the second one was built in Minnesota.
The passive house costs $6/sq. ft. more than a conventional home to build, but energy savings have been calculated at 50 Euro/sq. meter.
Conference organizers mentioned that Congress is considering an extension of the housing tax credit with a provision for a performance standard that would increase tax benefits.
Meanwhile, Austria has set a goal to build 12,000 passive homes. Frankfort, a city in Germany, just regulated that no house will be built unless it meets the passive house standards.
I attended the affordable green homes sessions (the conference is a mix of nuts-and-bolts technical reviews and more general presentations on energy efficient development) of the first day.
Brian Coble and Arnie Katz of Advanced Energy in Raleigh, North Carolina have consulted on 1,250 green, affordable homes built by Habitat for Humanity and community development corporations. Essentially, they developed a system of quality control during and after construction on Energy Star homes with a two-year guarantee to the homeowner—if it doesn’t heat and cool for a set price, they pay the difference and fix the problem.
Last year, they built 350 homes that sell for around $120,000, use 30 percent less energy, cost $1/sq. ft. above conventional building, and only 6 percent of owners called in the guarantee.
“Developers want a clean process, without having to think about how to do it, and a stable funding stream,” Coble said. “They also want an accessible oversight agency and proven benefits to their customers.”
Other housing guarantee programs are out there, such as Environments for Living, but theirs is the only one focused on affordable housing, Coble said. It got off the ground with $1 million windfall from oil company lawsuits, and continues with assistance from the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency. A quick web search of the Ohio Housing Finance Agency shows no similar program for green, affordable housing development.
In the second session, Bill Duncan of Enterprise Foundation explained the "Green Communities" program, which has invested $350 million in grants, loans and technical assistance for 150 affordable, green housing projects in 23 states.
Green Communities is similar to LEED for Homes, which the U.S. Green Building Council is piloting, but has more mandatory requirements and less points, Duncan said. The list of requirements is impressively long and encourages smart growth. Development must be within .25 mi of at least two community or retail facilities, meet Energy Star standards, use native plantscapes and capture the first .5 in. of rainfall, and spec low VOC and formaldehyde free interiors among others.
“We arrived at this with an eye toward affordability and to build something really green,” he said.
The Ohio Housing Finance Agency is matching Enterprise’s grants up to $2,000 per unit, Duncan said. Enterprise currently has plans to develop 200 units in four projects in Ohio, including CMHA’s 102 mixed-income apartments at Valleyview and Famicos Foundation’s Emeritus House project, a rehab of 56 units of multifamily housing in a historic building in Cleveland.
Community Development Block Grants can be earmarked, and the city of Cleveland's Housing Trust Fund can now add to a grant if it meets certain energy performance criteria, Bill Whitney, who runs Enterprise's Cleveland office, added.
