The AIA and dwell Magazine have announced the winners for their “How Green Are You?” contest. (For background on the contest, see “The AIA and Dwell Magazine Team Up to Spread the Word about Sustainability,” published on Green Building Elements last April.)
The contest recognized affordable home designs that achieve sustainability in creative ways. Juror Robert M. Rogers, FAIA, of Roger Marvel Architects states in a press release on the AIA website, “We were especially intrigued with projects that executed beautiful design ideas and were inherently green by concept. From small ideas for the kitchen, to a way of life, the winners embodied these principles.”
When we think of recycling in association with the construction industry, we generally focus on construction and demolition waste materials. Recycled content has become popular for certain building and finish materials, as well. But the Sienna Architecture Company is experimenting with recycling on a different scale for their project for the Portland Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. The sorority, an organization of two hundred and fifty college-educated women who are committed to public service, is expanding its June Key Delta House in North Portland.
In 1993, the sorority purchased an abandoned service station and, using volunteer labor, made it into a functional gathering space. Expanding the building will create additional meeting rooms, as well as areas for after school programs and daytime programming for senior citizens. The community center will serve as a demonstration project, using 50-70% recycled materials. In addition to using salvaged and recycled materials obtained from companies and businesses, the building will incorporate surplus metal cargo shipping containers into its structure. The Portland Office of Sustainable Development explains, “Once products are shipped across the ocean, the steel containers that keep materials safe are usually left behind at the port to be recycled or reused for other applications.” And according to literature made available from the sorority, “Metal cargo shipping containers are an international salvage source that can be used for environmentally sensible building materials.”
“Workforce housing” is a term being heard more and more, used place of the more familiar “affordable housing”. It differentiates between housing that is intended to accommodate people from the lowest income brackets, and housing for the lower middle class, people who have steady employment but have been priced out of the housing market in many areas.
According to Wikipedia, workforce housing has four defining elements:
Affordability
Home Ownership
Key Workforce (in other words, composed of critical members of a community’s workforce such as police officers and teachers), and
Proximity (to employment centers)
The Pacific Northwest has always been progressive.
For Seattle in the spring of 1950, that meant the opening of the country’s first mall. According to HistoryLink, Northgate Mall, located on 62 acres outside the city limits, was built to accommodate a total of 80 stores clustered around a “wide shopping walkway,” although it was not fully enclosed and climate-controlled until 1974. (Confused shoppers reportedly parked in the mall space itself when the center first opened.) By 1968, 50,000 cars a day were using Northgate.
In the face of global warming and climate change, however, planners and designers are redefining ‘progressive’. The Northgate neighborhood is currently at the center of a major revitalization effort which was set in motion in 2003 by Mayor Nickels and the Seattle City Council. A major portion of the project, Thornton Place, is scheduled for completion next spring (with condominium sales beginning as early as September of this year). Created by real estate development and management company Lorig, this will be a sustainable, mixed-use village which will combine retail and residential zones with parks and green space.
Infill housing.
Drive through Seattle and this term will begin to seem synonymous with plain woodframe structures that crowd the streets like like weeds.
According to an article in the Seattle P-I,
Townhomes don’t have to be ugly and dampen the human spirit. But so many of them are eyesores that townhomes have become a lighting rod in the local debate over housing. They’ve been blamed for the decline of community and called a threat to single-family neighborhoods. Their rapid proliferation has even prompted recent City Council-led community forums… [But] townhomes aren’t the problem. … Bad design and laziness are the real problem.
There is also growing concern that the new crop of townhomes is not sustainable (for a discussion of this, as well as a thourough recounting of Seattle’s recent forum on townhomes, see Smarter Neighbors: Seattle Land Use Blog, Seattle Channel’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee, and the West Seattle Blog).
Residential applications for solar panels have been making news for several years. But as rising fuel prices spur consumers to look for alternate energy sources, another clean power source is beginning to get attention: wind energy.
Even though the residential wind power sector has seen tremendous growth over the last decade, an article in The Arizona Republic estimates that there are still only 4,000 residential wind turbines nationwide. The primary reason that wind energy has been slow to take hold is that wind turbines are fairly visible, and therefore highly controversial, installations. According to the American Wind Energy Association, small wind systems (100 kilowatts or less) need to be at least 30 feet above barriers which might break the force of the air currents reaching the turbine. Right now, the industry recommends wind turbines only for sites that are at least one 1 acre in size. Consequently, wind turbines in urban areas are still quite rare. (In a September 2007 post, earth2tech featured a San Francisco home which sports a turbine, and pointed out that this may be the first urban wind turbine in the country.)
Unfortunately, individual efforts to experiment with wind power, even in outlying areas, have encountered a lot of roadblocks. Proposed turbine installations are usually evaluated by local governments on a case by case basis, since most city zoning laws have height restrictions which would implicitly prohibit turbines. Oftentimes, even if permission is granted and a turbine is erected, neighbors unite to fight the decision. (For individual turbine projects that have made news for seeking exceptions to local codes, see these articles on Wayne, New Jersey and Atlanta, Georgia).
The Top Ten Cities for Green Roof Installations
In April, the not-for-profit industry association Green Roofs for Healthy Cities released its 2007 lists of the Top Ten Cities for Green Roof Installations. The Top Ten cities in the U.S. are as follows:
Chicago IL
Wilmington DE
Baltimore MD
Brooklyn NY
Virginia Beach VA
Royersford PA
Washington DC
Philadelphia PA
Amery WI
For lists of 2007’s top ten cities in North America and Canada, see the Final Report of the Green Roof Industry Survey.
Pacific Northwest Needs to Get Back in the Running
While Vancouver made the list for the Top Ten Green Roof Cities in Canada, the Pacific Northwest was not represented in the Top Ten for the U.S. (Portland was 9th in 2006). Cities in the Pacific Northwest (Portland and Seattle, especially) are regularly included in ‘Top Ten Green Cities’ lists that are compiled using broader criteria.
“When will I find a green home in my price range?”
It’s a question often heard from sustainability devotees who have been keeping an eye on the growth of the green housing market, yet still find themselves priced out due to the amount of up-front investment that is required when building green.
LEED ND Addresses Affordability
But the subject of affordability has finally entered the green building dialogue. The LEED ND rating system, which will go public early next year, has established a definition of sustainability that goes beyond energy savings. In addition to awarding points based on urban planning criteria such as utilization of infill sites and proximity to public transit, LEED ND also awards points based on affordability. Its Pilot Version Rating System awards 1-2 points (out of a possible 106 total points) for making “Affordable For-Sale Housing,” and offers three options for obtaining those points:
Option 1: At least 10% of for-sale housing is priced for households up to 80% of the area median income (1 point),
Option 2: At least 20% of for-sale housing is priced for households up to 120% of the area median income (1 point), or
Option 3: At least 10% of for-sale housing is priced for households up to 80% of the area median income and an additional 10% of for-sale housing is priced for households at up to 120% of the area median income (2 points).
A Portland Neighborhood Earns Points for Affordability
Helensview Homes in Portland, OR, which recently received LEED ND Gold certification, is an example of a neighborhood that earned points for being affordable. The Helensview neighborhood was created by non-profit developer Home Ownership a Street at a Time (HOST); HOST’s homes are marketed to low- to moderate-income families, with the intention of helping renters become first-time homeowners. HOST has built more than 300 affordable homes in the Portland area since 1991. The Helensview neighborhood is presently under construction, and the current price range for one of these 2, 3, or 4 bedroom houses is $189,000 - $244,000. According to a May 2008 article in Sustainable Life, the median price for a home price in Portland is $339,900.
Renovating and ‘re-using’ older homes may be one of the greenest forms of construction. But fixing up an old house tends to be a highly individual endeavor, and the lessons learned while retrofitting a single home are difficult to adapt to larger-scale applications.
In spite of this, Lorraine Gauthier, co-founder of the socially-conscious Toronto design studio Work Worth Doing, has identified a housing type which offers a high degree of consistency across a large number of homes: post-war housing. Post-war homes, built to accommodate returning WWII veterans, are still a part of the landscape throughout Canada and the United States, and many of these aging homes have poor energy performance. By assembling a team of designers and other sustainable building experts to retrofit a single home in the Toronto area (as part of an undertaking known as the Now House™ project), it is hoped that a formula can be created and then applied to literally millions of homes.
In 2006, the Cascadia Region Green Building Council announced its Living Building Challenge. (For a description of the challenge, see Moving Beyond LEED.) Its goal is to move green building practices beyond LEED Platinum, aiming for buildings that have zero impact upon their environment. So far more than 50 Living Buildings across the United States are in the design or construction phase.
To augment the Living Building Challenge, Cascadia is developing a companion program known as Living Building Leader. This program will provide a venue for members of the building industry to share knowledge and develop green building skill sets. Living Building Leader is launching a series of sessions covering green building topics which will be taught by experts from fields relating to sustainable building; the sessions are intended for professionals who already have experience in green building.
