Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, Revised Edition

By Walker Wells, Kimberly Vermeer and Jonathan F. P. Rose

The lack of affordable housing and the climate crisis are two of the most pressing challenges facing cities today. Green affordable housing addresses both by providing housing stability, safety, and financial predictability while constructing and operating the buildings to reduce environmental and climate impacts.

Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing is the most comprehensive resource on how green building principles can be incorporated into affordable housing design, construction, and operation. In this fully revised edition, Walker Wells and Kimberly Vermeer capture the rapid evolution of green building practices and make a compelling case for integrating green building in affordable housing. The Blueprint offers guidance on innovative practices, green building certifications for affordable housing, and the latest financing strategies. The completely new case studies share detailed insights on how the many elements of a green building are incorporated into different housing types and locations. Case studies include a geographical range, from high-desert homeownership, to southeast supportive housing, and net-zero family apartments on the coasts. The new edition includes basic planning tools such as checklists to guide the planning process, and questions to encourage reflection about how the content applies in practice.
 
While Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing is especially useful to housing development project managers, the information and insights will be valuable to all participants in the affordable housing industry: developers, designers and engineers, funders, public agency staff, property and asset managers, housing advocates, and resident advocates.
 
Every affordable housing project can achieve the fundamentals of good green building design and practice. By sharing the authors’ years of expertise in guiding hundreds of organizations, Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, Revised Edition gives project teams what they need to push for excellence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jul 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642830392

Book preview

Front Cover of Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing

About Island Press

Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

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Half Title of Blueprint for Greening Affordable HousingBook Title of Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing

Copyright © 2020 Walker Wells and Kimberly Vermeer

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street NW, Suite 650, Washington, DC 20036

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952104

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Keywords: Building envelope, carbon reduction, charrette, climate change, community solar, energy efficiency, Energy Star, Enterprise Green Communities, green property management, healthy housing, indoor environmental quality and health, integrated design process, LEED certification, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), NeighborWorks, Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP), resilience, social cohesion, sustainability, water conservation

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Foreword by Jonathan F. P. Rose

Chapter 1: The Case for Greening Affordable Housing

Chapter 2: The Integrated Design Process

Chapter 3: Best Practices in Green Design

Chapter 4: Green Operations

Chapter 5: Costs and Financing

Chapter 6: Looking Forward: Four Trends Redefining Green Affordable Housing

Case Studies

1. Auburn Court, 3 Brookline Place, Cambridge, Massachusetts

2. Avery Hill Solar, Laconia, New Hampshire

3. The Villages at Cabrillo, Long Beach, California

4. El Camino Crossing, Santa Fe, New Mexico

5. The Lace Mill, Kingston, New York

6. Mutual Housing at Spring Lake, Woodland, California

7. Orchards at Orenco I, Hillsboro, Oregon

8. Phoenix House, Atlanta, Georgia

9. Habitat for Humanity at Plaza Roosevelt, Grand Rapids, Michigan

10. The Rose, Minneapolis, Minnesota

11. North Santa Fe Apartments, Vista, California

12. Second Street Studios, San Jose, California

13. Sendero Verde, East Harlem, New York

14. Senior Residences at Decatur East, Decatur, Georgia

Appendix A: Glossary

Appendix B: Checklists

Index

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the many people who helped us research and write this book. Your insights into the state of the field, suggestions of specific projects to consider for case studies and emerging best practices to highlight, reviews of chapters, and general enthusiasm for the project are invaluable and much appreciated. We especially thank Rob Dapice and Grace Lessner, New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority; Ray Demers and Krista Egger, Enterprise Community Partners; Madisen Gittlin; Jeff Lesk, New Partners Community Solar; Harold Nassau, NeighborWorks America; Hillary Noll, Mithun; Katie Swenson; Sami Taylor, Raimi + Associates; and Joann Ware, Schemata Workshop, Inc. Much thanks to intern Molly Caplan and to Grace Lyons for their work on the cases and compiling the final manuscript. Special thanks to Steven Burdick for his graphic design work for the new figures and maps. And we recognize and acknowledge Global Green for its role in facilitating the first edition of the Blueprint.

Thanks to all the people and organizations that helped us develop the case studies, including Rebecca Schofield and Nira Gurung, Homeowners Rehab Inc.; Kara LaSalle and Sal Steven-Hubbard, Lakes Region Community Development; Brian D’Andrea, Century Villages at Cabrillo; Brian Ulaszewski, City Fabrick; Laura Altomare, Homewise; Guy Kempe, RUPCO; Steven Root, Bryan Dove, and Holly Wunder Stiles, Mutual Housing California; Brian Bieler, Ben Sturz, Chris Maxey, and Erika Mahoney Yen, REACH Community Development; Darlene Schultz, 3Keys, Inc.; Jon Toppen, Tapestry Development Group; Abe Kruger, SK Collaborative; Brandyn Deckinga and Kristin Rahn-Tiemeyer, Habitat for Humanity Kent County; Leslie Roering, Aeon; Mary Jane Jagodzinski and Sylvia Martinez, Community HousingWorks; Marty Keller, First Community Housing; Sabrina Barker and Jenny Wu, Jonathan Rose Companies; Jessica Yoon, L+M Development Partners; Christina Davis and Robert Barfield, Columbia Residential; and Michael Kloefkorn, VMWP.

Great gratitude is extended to our friends and family for listening to us talk about the project, understanding the late nights and early mornings, and providing emotional support.

Lastly, thanks to Island Press and our wonderful and supportive editor, Heather Boyer.

Preface

We are excited to see the Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing take on a second life. It is a great honor to contribute our shared knowledge and bring new vitality to one of the few books that bridges environmental and community development concerns. This collaboration built on our individual experiences and motivations, as we each describe below, and grew from our mutual trust and commitment to the process, with a richer, better outcome as the result. We hope you find this new version of the Blueprint valuable inspiration to take on some challenges of your own in creating many more examples of green affordable housing.

Walker Wells (Venice, CA) and Kimberly Vermeer (Boston, MA)

Walker Wells

As we confront the many serious challenges facing urban areas—adapting to climate change, providing shelter for the homeless and refugees, and ensuring equitable access to opportunity—the fundamentals of green affordable housing hold true: collaborate, seek design strategies that provide multiple benefits, stay mindful of the needs of the residents, seek opportunities along the entire arc of a project from land acquisition to building operation, and leverage real-world success through policy.

Initially, green and affordable housing seemed to come from two different worlds. Could they go together? Could green building become standard practice in affordable housing? These are the questions that a group of dedicated housing and green building practitioners began to explore nearly two decades ago.

It turns out that green building and affordable housing are a natural fit. Green building isn’t just an elite practice for luxury homes; instead, the integrated design process allows everyone to access green building benefits. Once we proved it was possible to design and build housing that saved energy and water, reduced waste, improved quality of life, and contributed to the surrounding neighborhood, doing anything else seemed irresponsible—to tenants, society, and the planet.

The original Blueprint arose from a desire to share the potential of merging a green perspective with the passion and optimism of community development. Case studies were popping up around the country of family housing, co-housing, tribal housing, public housing, housing for the formerly homeless, senior housing, and sweat equity projects—all using the green building process to integrate smart design strategies with innovative systems and healthy, environmentally responsible materials. We documented best practices, summarized the lessons learned from early charrettes, and searched for case studies that told valuable stories of innovation, inspiration, and perseverance so that green affordable housing would become the expectation rather than the exception.

The extent of the change in practice is clear. In 2007 the only rating system available for affordable housing was Enterprise Green Communities. Today multiple rating systems are being used to guide and certify projects, as seen in the new batch of case studies. In 2007 there were just a handful of pioneer developers testing green. Now most developers have completed some version of a green building project. In 2007 just a handful of states included energy or green building criteria in the Qualified Allocation Plans used to allocate low-income housing tax credits. Today nearly all states include some green building criteria, and the top states continue to stretch their goals, both in the green criteria and in the degree of verification and monitoring.

In the decade since the Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing was published, I’ve worked on multiple housing-focused LEED for Neighborhood Development projects and helped more than 30 affordable housing developments earn LEED for Homes or Enterprise Green Communities certification. Each is a microcosm of urban sustainability that demonstrates how a spirit of collaboration and commitment to integrated design can transform practice. Leading developers are exploring new challenges: net-zero buildings, resilience hubs, incorporating biophilia, catalyzing neighborhood revitalization, mitigating displacement, and combining housing development with open space.

This evolution in practice is heartening, because the need is great. An indicator of the success of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. Every night tens of thousands of people have inadequate housing—housing that is too expensive, unhealthy, unsafe, or too far from work, school, a grocery store, or public transit. Clearly, we need to do better. Green affordable housing treats low-income or formerly homeless people with dignity and compassion and helps to slow or even stop the systems and cycles that can trap people in poverty.

Our planet’s ecosystems and atmosphere are also suffering. Years of extractive industries that abdicate responsibility for the byproducts, emissions, and waste streams of their processes have put many of the fundamental systems that run the planet at risk. Climate change is a major concern, along with losses in biodiversity, plastic toxification, and loss of freshwater reserves. These issues affect our health and the vitality of our communities and the ecosystems we rely on.

In the face of these concerns, it can be hard to stay optimistic. But I am, and my level of optimism rises each time I see another green development fill up with joyous new residents. These projects are so much more than buildings. For the residents, they are a home that is affordable, stable, and safe. And they are a microcosm of urban sustainability, offering a glimpse into what our future cities can become: places that are safe, beautiful, and healthy and that foster an ongoing restorative dialogue between people and the environment. Green affordable housing is a tangible way to mitigate environmental damage and move toward a restorative model of development.

Today, the discourse on green affordable housing is turning toward resilience. Affordable housing is often the foundation of economic stability, physical and mental health, and social cohesion. The buildings themselves can be resilience hubs, familiar community gathering places that feature enough stored renewable energy to support several days of refrigeration for medicine, cell phone charging, lighting, and heating and cooling. Each green development contributes to making our communities more inclusive, more equitable, more compassionate, and more connected to the larger ecosystem.

This book wouldn’t exist without Kim Vermeer. More than two years ago she called to let me know the book was getting a bit out of date and it was time for a second edition. I was busy with the pressures of work and teaching. My first thoughts were how and when would I possibly be able to write an update to the Blueprint. I then realized that Kim was suggesting we write it together, making the task seem within the realm of reason and a lot more fun. Our combined effort brought a valuable East Coast–West Coast perspective to the project, adding to the collective knowledge we each brought to the project from working with community development corporations and for-profit developers. Thanks, Kim, for your insights, organization, thoroughness, and perseverance, and for being an excellent collaborator.

This edition of the Blueprint doesn’t need to prove that green affordable housing is viable. Instead, the goal is to show how a green perspective can be infused into the full spectrum of affordable housing development activities, in order to inspire experienced practitioners and demystify the process for those new to the industry.

I hope this book can serve as an inspiration and guide for those who have been in the game for many years and for those who are just starting out. We share our combined knowledge with the hope that you will take and apply our lessons learned and find new ways to fully integrate a green perspective into the fundamental human act of providing shelter, comfort, and care for all members of society.

Kimberly Vermeer

Young professionals come to affordable housing development from many different educational programs and initial career paths and get thrown into a complex process with multiple goals and many constraints. Green building, sustainability, and climate resilience might be among the priorities for a development project. But without previous exposure to these concepts, project managers may not have a strong grasp of what these priorities mean, how they work in practice, or how to get their teams to deliver those results. My own path to a green building and sustainability career was not direct. It took me from undergraduate architecture design studies and two years of Peace Corps volunteer service in the Kingdom of Tonga doing architecture design and construction administration to graduate school in housing policy and urban planning. That was followed by a decade in housing finance, before a year of traveling motivated me to do work with a more environmental focus. This was at a time when the green building movement was gaining traction, but there were no jobs doing the kind of work I had in mind, so I decided to start my own consulting practice and create the kind of work I wanted to do. Because affordable housing was my field, I focused on green building for affordable housing.

I concentrated on affordable housing in part because the benefits of green housing—lower operating costs, healthier homes—seemed so obvious to me that I assumed that market rate housing would adopt green practices rapidly, but that the pressure on first costs would make adoption of green practices more challenging in affordable housing. I decided I would stay in the affordable housing field to work to bring the benefits of green building to the people who call affordable housing home. Looking back, what has happened is almost the opposite of what I thought: Green building practices have been widely adopted in affordable housing, thanks in large part to the leadership role of Enterprise Community Partners and the Green Communities Criteria and the recognition of the value by funders and policymakers. Meanwhile, adoption of green practices in the broader housing market has grown but is still not standard practice.

My early work involved a lot of basic education with my clients as we began to incorporate green building practices into their projects: What is green, why we should care, how we will pay for it, and who will benefit. In the 2000s I developed and taught the first green building and healthy housing courses for the Neighbor-Works® Training Institute and introduced hundreds of practitioners to the why, what, and how of green affordable housing. When the first edition of the Blueprint was published, I incorporated it into the introductory course. Students worked with the case studies during the class to identify the real-world applications of concepts and strategies we had discussed—energy efficiency, water conservation, healthy housing, land use, and materials. I sent them home with the book, knowing that the chapter content was there to remind them of what they had learned in class and to be a resource to deepen their understanding when they returned to their work.

In the ensuing years the Blueprint continued to be one of the few resources that explains and applies green building principles to affordable housing, but over time both the green building movement and the affordable housing industry have gone through many changes. I got to know Walker Wells, lead author of the first edition, through our mutual work with community development corporations and affordable housing developers. As we talked about projects and what project managers need to be successful in developing green affordable housing, we kept coming back to the Blueprint. But we realized that to be relevant to a new generation of rising leaders it was time to create a new edition of the book, with fresh content to capture the evolution in both green building and affordable housing and new case studies to show the range of housing types and the varied approaches to pursuing sustainable development and green building today. As we continued to talk about how a new edition could come to be, doing it as a joint project and writing it together became the solution. It has been a pleasure to work with Walker to develop and write the new edition, to evaluate what is fundamental to keep and what is important to add. With Walker on the West Coast and me on the East, we’ve been able to bring perspective on how principles are applied differently in practice depending on local climate and conditions and to introduce each other and now you, our readers, to new projects and organizations doing great work. I’m inspired by Walker’s commitment to increasing social equity by greening affordable housing. And his thoughtful approach to how we took on this project and calm encouragement as we progressed have been essential for seeing it through to completion. Thanks, Walker, for agreeing to do this and for letting me join you in creating a new edition of the Blueprint.

And it has been inspiring to get to know the case study projects, learn about the organizations that built them, and speak with the people who are doing such amazing work to bring the benefits of green building to their communities and residents. In his comments, Walker brought up the challenges we face. I am encouraged by the passion and commitment of the people who are doing the hard work every day of creating green affordable housing. Keep it up!

Foreword

Jonathan F. P. Rose

We live in a time of great prosperity. However, this prosperity is very poorly distributed and is produced in ways that are ecologically degenerative. If we are to create a truly fair and just society, then our work must be to overcome this unequal distribution of wealth and ecological degeneration.

Safe, green, well-located, affordable housing addresses both of these issues, in ways that enhance the health and well-being of residents, neighborhoods, and the ecologies in which they sit. It is a pathway to socially and environmentally restorative justice.

The principles, practices, and case studies described in this book reflect the evolving work of thousands of practitioners who have grown the field of green affordable housing over the last decade. And it is good work.

The movement to make affordable housing greener began in the early 1990s, outside the mainstream of affordable housing development. Because of limited financial resources, early practitioners working to green affordable housing had to learn to develop green buildings for the same cost as nongreen buildings. This proved to be a valuable constraint, giving rise to financially feasible innovation in the field. Over time, as the long-term financial benefits of green affordable housing were proven, cities, states, and utilities developed programs to help affordable housing be greener, especially in ways that conserved energy. These resources expanded the scope and complexity of strategies to green affordable housing.

The big shift came about in 2004, with the launch of the Enterprise Green Community program. Green Communities grew out of affordable housing innovation at Enterprise Community Partners, developed with input from the Natural Resources Defense Council, EarthCraft homes, the U.S. Green Building Council, and others. The resulting Green Communities Program was multifaceted and included design guidelines, grants for technical assistance, low-cost loans, and dedicated low-income housing tax credit investments to help fund green projects. Perhaps the most transformational element of the program was an advocacy campaign to require or incentivize affordable housing subsidy programs and funders to reward green building designs.

Most affordable housing funders require increasing levels of green designs to successfully compete for scarce funding. As a result, more than 75% of all new affordable housing is built to a green standard. Many funding programs also prioritize transit-oriented development, except in rural areas. We believe this is the highest percentage of green buildings of any sector—higher than new retail centers, market-rate apartment buildings, offices, schools, hospitals, and houses of worship. And thus the lessons in this book may increase your chances of securing project funding. In the long term, they provide one of the pathways to building a more just and sustainable society.

When the first version of this book was published in 2007, some of the projects in it represented the initial generation of the Enterprise Green Community program, which was the only certification program available for affordable housing at that time. Twelve years later, as reflected in the current book’s fourteen case studies, the range of practice has significantly diversified, with a number of national and regional options available to pursue green strategies and certification.

And, the need for affordable housing has never been greater.

In 2019, more than 20 million American families spent more than 50 percent of their income on