Low Rent High Tech
(Page 3 of 4)
November / December 2007
By Hannah Lobel, Utne Reader
Creating housing that avoids common illness triggers, uses less energy, and saves on utility and maintenance costs—all while using ecofriendly materials and strategies—is a win-win for affordable housing proponents, and it can be for the rest of us too. Before that can happen, though, we need to overcome more than a few misperceptions. Foremost is fear of the “green premium.”
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There’s no getting around the fact that, at least for now, building green typically costs more. Green building materials still have a way to go before they’re lining the shelves at home-improvement shops. And the technical know-how among builders, developers, and architects is still on the lower end of the learning curve.
But, advocates say, there’s good reason to believe that modest up-front costs will pay back in dividends over the course of a building’s life. Take, for example, Viking Terrace’s biggest-ticket item, a geothermal heating and cooling system. The $480,000 price tag almost got the system nixed from the blueprints. Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit focused on affordable housing, stepped in to help with funding through its Green Communities program, an initiative that’s allocating $555 million to build some 8,500 green affordable housing units by 2009. The geothermal system is now expected to pay for itself in just a decade through energy savings.
Though industry-wide data are limited and still coming in, players in the affordable housing field cite a green premium that hovers around 2 percent per unit (or around $2,000 to $3,000). In a 2005 study, New Ecology researchers calculated an average 2.4 percent increase in development costs to cover the green features in affordable housing developments. But when researchers modeled the 30-year life cycle of the projects, taking into account factors like future equipment replacement expenses and operating costs like maintenance, repair, and utilities, they projected an average expected savings of $15,000 per unit for 14 of the 16 developments sampled.
Those are impressive numbers for any building venture, let alone an affordable housing project, which Green Communities’ senior director Dana Bourland calls the most difficult type of housing to build. Funding is scarce. The clientele is, by definition, underserved in the marketplace. And multiple interested parties, from municipalities to granting institutions, keep developers jumping through myriad regulatory hoops.