What Makes Affordable Housing Green?

A five-story, beige apartment building with blue balcony railing and zig-zagging red and blue lines decorating its exterior, Zilker Studios, a 110-unit apartment building in Austin’s Zilker neighborhood, is more visually inviting than a lot of other supportive housing. The building has ample outdoor common spaces with lawn chairs and an indoor common area with a splashy floral-themed mural. The building houses people making between $23,190 and $38,650 a year and many of the tenants are seniors who have only recently exited homelessness.

Zilker is also built to a high standard of sustainability. The building’s foundation, walls, and heating and cooling systems are designed to minimize energy use and keep cool air or heat inside.

Builders across the country are making difficult decisions to address two interwoven crises: the climate crisis and the affordable housing crisis. But designers and developers must negotiate a somewhat convoluted policy landscape when it comes to sustainable building, where most cities and states don’t have their own green building standards and many rely on a patchwork of tax incentives tied to standards developed by nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Austin is one of few cities that does have sustainable building standards: Austin Energy, a community-owned utility company, implemented a ratings system with both voluntary and mandatory guidelines for properties. The organization first introduced guidelines for single family homes in 1991, then added guidelines for commercial buildings in 1995 and for multifamily apartments in 1998.

But even in Austin, it can be challenging to navigate the patchwork of federal, state, and city incentives to build sustainably and affordably. “It’s great that all these entities are using these standards as incentives,” says John Hagar, a principal at Forge Craft Architecture + Design, the firm that designed Zilker Studios. “But if you’re trying to put two or three of these things together, and each one requires a different standard, it can be very confusing for an owner.”

Energy standards

One of the most prominent energy standards is Energy Star, which was privately developed and is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. The standard mostly deals with appliances in the home, including heating and cooling, washers, dryers, and ovens. Electrical appliances need to demonstrate that they consume as little energy as possible in order to get the ENERGY STAR label. Existing buildings and new construction can apply for an Energy Star Home Upgrade that includes a smart thermostat, better sealed windows and attics, as well as more efficient heating and cooling.

Leo Barrera works at the Community Development Corporation of Brownsville (CDCB, which does business as “come dream. come build.”). CDCB builds affordable single-family homes in South Texas and relies on ENERGY STAR ratings. Barrera says that many of the residents they build homes for don’t immediately think of sustainability, but they reap the benefits. Homes with more insulation trap heat in winter and cool air in summer and keep utility bills low.

The official Energy Star certification for new construction costs an extra $450, Barrera says, but many homeowners install appliances with the same standards and forgo the additional test required for the certification, which would otherwise be tacked onto the sales price. The EPA also administers the WaterSense labeling for indoor plumbing and Indoor airPLUS labeling program to combat air pollution in the home.

Another standard, FORTIFIED, developed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, is a construction and roofing program that aims for durability and the ability to withstand extreme weather. It offers a list of contractors who adhere to the standards, and verification that the work done meets its standards.

Passive building is a design philosophy that aims to achieve energy efficiency in comfortable indoor living space, whether single- or multifamily. Passive house standards focus on energy use for heating and cooling and are not tied to any one institution, although the nonprofit Phius (formerly Passive House Institute of the U.S) offers certification.

Then there’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), a point-based rating started by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in the 1990s. The system, which governs standards for how buildings are designed and maintained, is voted on by the USGBC’s membership and updated regularly. Points are awarded for things like reusing materials or maximizing fresh air, and certification is offered in several categories, such as building design and construction, interior design and construction, homes, and neighborhood development. Hundreds of jurisdictions across the country provide incentives, often in the form of tax breaks, for buildings based on LEED certification, and its popularity led to lobbying groups for lumber and other trades pushing bills to disincentivize it. Past versions of LEED have been criticized for awarding points for features that did not reduce a building’s greenhouse gas emissions. A 2012 USA Today report found that only 14 percent of LEED-certified buildings generated renewable energy and that companies were tacking on amenities like bike racks to win LEED certification and get millions of dollars in tax breaks. USBG now recommends tax breaks for buildings that are based on the building’s actual energy use.

But Barrera says getting points in the LEED rating system, which prioritizes health as well as energy efficiency, can be expensive—it awards points for fresh air circulation, shade and reflective roofs, reduced rainwater runoff, and appliances that reduce water use, among other requirements. This all raises the cost of construction, making it a rarely used standard among affordable housing developers in South Texas. Barrera says LEED inspector jobs have dried up in recent years.

“There just wasn’t enough people doing LEED to make those inspector jobs feasible,” he says.

CDCB uses Enterprise’s Green Communities Certification. The set of criteria is unique for its emphasis on the local built environment and climate mitigation. For instance, one criterion suggests limiting new development in floodplains, as well as sensitive ecosystems like wetlands and areas with rare wildlife or soil used for agriculture. It suggests locating new development close to existing utilities and transportation infrastructure to reduce sprawl. And it awards points for building more absorbent surfaces to deter flooding. It also works alongside other standards, suggesting builders refer to ENERGY STAR for appliances.

“It factors in the surrounding community,” Barrera says.

Ray Demers, at Enterprise Community Partners, helped develop the Green Communities Criteria and certification process. He says that when the criteria were being developed, “there were no real good options for green building standards for housing; LEED was just getting started and was primarily focused on commercial.”

Demers says the criteria exist in relationship to local building regulations, and all the certification standards are useful. While he’s not sure which criterion is most widely used, he points out that LEED, Green Communities, and another standard called the National Green Building Standard appear most often in Qualified Allocation Plans, state guidelines governments use to award federal housing tax credits.

But he also stresses the need for more coordination between energy standards and in energy policy. “The importance of having comprehensive green building standards used by cities and states to orient their sustainability goals [is] really critical,” Demers says.

Density

With the exception of Green Communities Criteria, most of these standards don’t have much to say about the macro issues that influence a building’s sustainability—like size, distance, and neighborhood amenities—which are decided in planning and land use at the municipal or state level.

Experts say denser, multifamily housing is more energy efficient than single-family homes, if only because the units are smaller, minimizing the heating and cooling needs. And it’s better for this housing to be in a public transit-rich area with jobs and amenities nearby that minimize the need to travel long distances by car.

Designers typically have no control over a building’s height or density or the size of the rooms, decisions that are often made before they come on board.

“The policy levers for the amount of energy a building uses [are] separate from the kinds of policies like zoning and land use and transportation plans,” says Carlos Martín, director of the Remodeling Futures program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Demers says that while denser projects will have less embodied carbon, meaning the amount of carbon emissions resulting from the process of constructing and maintaining any given structure, most cities will determine a level of density that makes sense for them and developers have to work within those bounds.

“Cities and communities have a feeling to them, a sense of place,” Demers says. “The housing typologies that you’re deploying in those places, the level of density, the materials, the visual cues… those are all more driven by local conditions. I think that’s the beauty and the challenge in it.”

Retrofits

Most building codes and energy standards cover new construction, not alterations to existing buildings. But to make homes across the country sustainable and affordable, cities will have to establish standards for both new and existing housing.

Yet while the embodied carbon involved with demolishing and building anew is more than would be produced in fixing an older building, retrofits can be more challenging than building from scratch.

“It’s harder to retrofit an existing home, particularly ones that were built before energy codes existed, which started in about the 1980s,” Martín says. Older buildings will have more cracks and gaps in the building that need to be sealed up, for instance.

“The adage is, the greenest building is the one you already have. I think that’s true,” Demers says.“The embodied carbon of a project is already there. So not squandering that is really an important thing.”

Demers says that finding people who do sensitive, site-specific building rehabs is key. “They know how the construction methods were done at the time,” he says. “Rehabs are tricky because you often don’t know what is behind the walls, in the roof, or under the slab. Having partners—architects, energy raters, contractors—with local experience and knowledge of the history and housing stock of the area can mean all the difference.”

In Austin, many of the buildings are new—the city has seen a building boom in the last few years. For this reason, Forge Craft, a local architecture firm, hasn’t had an opportunity to do a retrofit project there yet, but is open to it. “Finding opportunities to save an entire building from being tossed in the landfill is huge,” Hagar says.

A big part of all this is making sure buildings last a long time. If a building deteriorates more quickly, it may have to be demolished and reconstructed from scratch, or large swaths of the structure may have to be replaced, all of which are carbon-intensive processes.

“Concrete floors…hold up better over time,” Hagar says as an example. He says the deterioration of interior spaces can create an unpleasant atmosphere for tenants who move into affordable housing. “That’s got a negative psychological impact on residents,” he says.

One size doesn’t fit all

Back in Austin, Zilker Studios is owned by a nonprofit supportive housing provider called Foundation Communities. The organization thought long-term about how the building would be constructed, how sustainable it could be, and how residents would interact with those design decisions.       

“They have an incentive to invest in sustainable building practices in a way that you don’t always see,” says John Hagar. He says that Foundation Communities considered energy use, water use and maintenance before building Zilker Studios.

Because Forge Craft has designed supportive housing with Foundation Communities before, their design decisions were also informed by how low-income people exiting homelessness have interacted with their housing in the past.