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.

The high-density development is being built on previously developed land. Stormwater will be managed on-site. As with most green construction, homeowners are expected to pay lower monthly utility bills due to features such as extra insulation, energy efficient appliances, and tankless water heaters. Yards will contain drought-tolerant plants.

Is 1 to 2 LEED Points Enough?

The question that is now being asked is: do one or two optional LEED points really provide enough of an incentive for builders to offer affordable housing? Some say no; Smart Growth Online says some green development advocates would like to see the USGBC make affordable housing a LEED-ND prerequisite, or at least assign affordability more points.

Assigning affordability more weight in green design rating systems may in fact be more than just social engineering (a criticism that some LEED detractors have leveled), since “Drive ’til you Qualify,” has become a common term in real estate circles. The Affordable Housing Institute online article, “Driving to the Poorhouse,” states, “At some instinctive level, we all know that house prices and commute times are reverse-correlated: the price of a short commute is a high home price, and the cost of a low home price is a long commute.” If this is the case, then urban density will be difficult to achieve without a plentiful supply of affordable homes, and advances in sustainability will suffer.

Image credit: Helensview Homes

It seems evident that small houses, situated in walkable neighborhoods, are greener than large homes occupying automobile-dependent sites. The new LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) rating system draws heavily from principles of new urbanism and smart growth. New urbanism includes sustainability as one of its tenets (see Green Communities, Part 1: New Urbanism), and many of the primary elements of smart growth (as listed on their website) have become synonymous with green:

• Preserve Open Space, Farmland, Natural Beauty and Critical Environmental Areas
• Provide a Variety of Transportation Choices
• Strengthen and Direct Development Towards Existing Communities
• Take Advantage of Compact Building Design

But is density, in fact, a prerequisite for green development?

Wayne A. Lemmon, a planner and real estate economist, argued in his article, “Can Sprawl be Good,” that (among other things), “Concentrating development in areas already served by public facilities makes good sense, but only up to the point where available capacity is fully utilized.”  

The National Association of Home Builders takes particular exception to the assumptions that underpin LEED. Their online article, “New LEED Certification for Development Found Wanting,” examines LEED-ND, and proposes that it may actually be inhibiting the progress of green development.  

NAHB land use planner Edward Tombari explains:

Based on NAHB’s experience with smart growth and new urbanism design principles, a majority of the projects being built by developers today that incorporate Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND) principles might be able to achieve some lower-level LEED recognition. However, while the number of communities using TND principles is rising, the vast majority do not because TND favors higher density and most new development occurs in suburban and exurban greenfield locations. While this excludes much new development from being eligible to meet the criteria being established by LEED-ND, NAHB believes new development affords many opportunities for implementing green development principles.

Even though the notion of returning to ‘Main Street America’ seems to have captured the popular imagination, there is no sign that the production of large, detached, single-family homes will actually be coming to a halt anytime soon. (Barbara Faga’s article  on Planetizen, “Two Things People Hate: Density and Sprawl,” spurred a lively debate on this topic a few weeks ago.)

So, if urban sprawl is on a roll that cannot yet be stopped, can a neighborhood rating system that prioritizes density accomplish significant change? Many industry professionals believe that the LEED programs in place so far have managed to make a broad impact upon construction practices precisely because they have not set the bar impossibly high. Now the NAHB and the International Code Council are working on their own consensus-based National Green Building Standard, and this standard will be applicable to a wide range of developments, including conventional, suburban ones. (To view progress on the draft Standard, visit the NAHB Research Center site.) If consumers find the National Green Building Standard to be more adaptable than LEED, then perhaps LEED will have met its match in the American marketplace.

Photo Credit: NAHB
 

According to the USGBC website, the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system (currently in its pilot phase) “integrates the principles of smart growth, urbanism and green building into the first national system for neighborhood design.” Because of the emphasis on utilizing existing infrastructure, the rating system can be interpreted as encouraging developers to build up, not out. As Terry Miller, a consultant and manager at Portland’s Green Building Services, said in his article “Redefining Neighborhoods” for Sustainable Land Development Today, “it offers a framework of predominantly performance-based criteria by which to create and recognize the quality of new communities.”

The first LEED-ND certified project in the country, earning a Silver rating, was a single building: The Eliot Tower in Portland, Oregon. This 18 story, mixed-use building incorporates retail on its ground floor, and has 228 residential units above. A plaza on the north side of the building provides outdoor space for residents as well as the public. The Eliot Tower is one of 60 projects selected to be in the USGBC’s focus group, according to Miller’s article. Feedback from the focus group will be used to form the final version of LEED-ND. Andrea Thompson, a project coordinator for Green Building Services, told Becky Brun in an interview for Sustainable Industries, “I think this is a project that has raised a lot of questions because it is a single building,” and added that USGBC might include a minimum building requirement in the next version of LEED-ND.

Science fiction writers have not been the only people to envision vertical megastructures as the cities of the future. Renderings of Paolo Soleri’s conceptual Hyper Building are posted at MEGAblog. (Soleri, who spent time at both of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin locations, developed the concept of Arcology, a melding of architecture and ecology.) Architects in Europe have also begun to actively pursue the development of vertical cities. (See World Architecture News‘ report on De Rotterdam in The Netherlands.) Indications are, the time has come to determine whether the concept of the vertical city is valid for this stage in history, or whether it is best left in the realm of fantasy.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

For more articles on urbanism see:

http://greenbuildingelements.com/2008/02/21/green-communities-part-1-new-urbanism/

http://greenbuildingelements.com/2007/02/28/vancouver-adaptive-reuse/

http://greenbuildingelements.com/2007/12/25/married-with-children-in-the-city/