Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, Revised Edition

Walker Wells,Kimberly Vermeer

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642830392
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

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.

1

The Case for Greening Affordable Housing

The persistent need for affordable housing and the urgency of responding to climate change call for a renewed commitment to green affordable housing. As the climate imperative grows stronger, the need to strengthen, deepen, and broaden the connections between affordable housing and sustainability is critical to increase climate resilience through mitigation—building in a way that reduces the use of energy, water, and materials that result in greenhouse gas emissions—and adaptation—preparing for the impacts that the changing climate will bring to local ecosystems, weather patterns, and communities—in socially just ways.

A primary goal of the Blueprint is to give project managers and practitioners the knowledge and strategies that can empower them to lead their teams to implement successful green projects. But that work is neither static, rote, nor done in isolation. Green affordable housing increasingly addresses human health needs, social cohesion, and social equity, moving green strategies and implementation “beyond the building” to address connections to neighbors, services, nature, and healthy transportation options. These trends are addressed in greater detail in the final chapter of this book.

Green building for affordable housing arises from a convergence of thought and action in the sustainability and affordable housing communities over many decades. Adopted in 1948, Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that housing is integral to “a standard of living adequate for health and well-being.” The seminal Brundtland Commission’s 1987 report “Our Common Future” defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Today these concepts of human rights and sustainability have come together in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, where Goal 11, “Sustainable Cities and Communities,” calls for making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.¹

In the United States the development of green building certification programs specifically for and inclusive of affordable housing has accelerated the adoption of green building practices in affordable housing. As a result, the 1949 Housing Act’s promise of providing “safe, decent, affordable housing” has expanded to include health as well as safety, community quality and connection as well as shelter, and affordable utilities and transportation as well as housing costs.

By some accounts as much as 75 percent of new affordable housing is now built to green standards,² and most leading funding programs for affordable housing require some degree of green building. Certification programs that were only emerging or did not exist in the early 2000s now claim hundreds of thousands of certified affordable housing units. In many respects the affordable housing industry has been a leader in adopting and deploying green practices. Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit and affordable housing industry partner, was an early leader in establishing green building standards specifically for affordable housing. In 2004 it launched the Green Communities program and in 2006 issued the first edition of the Green Communities Criteria. By 2019, 127,000 units of housing had been built or rehabilitated to Green Communities standards.³ When the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) established the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Homes and then for Multifamily Midrise rating systems, first piloted in 2006 and 2010, respectively, many affordable housing projects were among the first to pursue certification. In 2014, USGBC reported that 43 percent of the units certified through LEED for Homes were affordable housing.⁴

The affordable housing industry can be proud of this success, but we cannot rest on our laurels. Through this new edition of the Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, we hope to inspire and empower a new generation of rising leaders to fully integrate green building in affordable housing.

What Is Affordable Housing?

For the purpose of this book we are defining affordable housing as housing with long-term restrictions on the amount that can be charged, based on the income of the residents. This type of housing is typically built and operated using various federal, state, and local incentives and may receive operating or rent subsidies to maintain affordability. In most U.S. affordable housing programs today, rent or housing cost is considered affordable if it is no more than 30 percent of household income.⁵

Affordable housing is essential for millions of American households. For families and individuals struggling with socioeconomic, health, and other challenges that make paying for housing in the private market difficult, affordable housing offers stability, safety, and financial predictability. Nevertheless, it is widely acknowledged that the need for affordable housing in the United States greatly exceeds the available affordable housing stock. Many households suffer from high housing and utility costs and poor housing conditions. According to “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2018,” “Nearly one-third of all US households paid more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing in 2016.”⁶ The report notes that for renters, the share of cost-burdened households is 47 percent, and that of these, as many as 11 million households pay more than 50 percent of their incomes for housing.

Affordable housing comes in many forms, including homeownership, but rental housing is by far the most prevalent and includes housing for families, seniors, and special populations. In the United States, public housing was the first large-scale effort to create an affordable housing program. More than a million units were built between the 1930s and 1960s, constructed and operated by local public housing authorities through support from the federal government. In the 1970s, housing programs shifted to providing financial incentives to private developers to build and maintain affordable housing through programs administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) such as Section 221d3, Section 236, and Section 8. In 1986 Congress passed the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, shifting the incentive mechanism from annual federal appropriations through HUD to tax incentives administered by the Treasury Department. Over the past several decades, the LIHTC program has become the primary vehicle for new affordable housing development, generating about 80,000 units per year. The affordable housing industry is a significant contributor to the total amount of new housing developed in the United States, where in 2017 total new housing starts included 849,000 single-family units and 354,000 multifamily units. State and local programs leverage the LIHTC tax credit equity with direct capital subsidies. Other local programs may provide ongoing rent subsidies for very low-income renters. In 2019 the United States had about 5 million units of federally subsidized housing, about half of which are physical units, and the remainder are rental subsidy housing vouchers.⁷ In addition, about 2.5 million units have been built, rehabilitated, or acquired through the LIHTC program since its inception.⁸

Over the past 50 to 60 years a large, diverse industry has developed to address affordable housing needs. Affordable housing development involves many participants, including developers, designers and engineers, funders and investors, property managers, and residents.

What Is Green Building?

The foundation for the current green building movement was laid in the solar and ecological homes of the 1960s, the energy efficiency response to the oil crisis in the 1970s, and the emerging awareness of sick building syndrome in the 1980s. Early thought leaders Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe published Sustainable Communities in 1986, and they along with other leaders, including Harrison Fraker, Pliny Fisk, Gail Vittori, and Gail Lindsey, established a new frame for integrated, systems-based design to address energy, environment, and health that led to the development of green building programs and certification in the 1990s and early 2000s. From the outset, the intent of green building has been to recognize that a building is more than a combination of materials but rather is a complex system that must be considered in the context of its location, purpose, and users. Green building is not just an object or static structure but rather an activity or a process. A green building process seeks to integrate energy efficiency and renewable energy, reduce the use of resources to minimize negative impacts on local, regional, and global ecosystems, and improve human health. These three objectives exist in a dynamic relationship with continual interactions between them, as the diagram in Figure 1-1 shows.

The green building process seeks solutions that optimize each of these objectives by first understanding each of them and then taking advantage of synergies between them for a given development project. For example, low–volatile organic compound (VOC) products reduce the environmental impact of finish materials and contribute to healthier indoor spaces. Let’s take each of these three elements in turn.

Address Energy and Climate

Reducing energy use and shifting to clean energy, to lower costs and achieve greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, are the primary focuses of green buildings. Energy use in the United States is broken out by sector, as shown in Figure 1-2.

As Figure 1-2 shows, the residential sector is not the biggest energy user. However, it is one of the most accessible sectors for effecting major reductions in energy use and conversion to clean energy. This is the case for both new construction and renovation of the existing housing stock, which is why energy use reduction is such a high priority in green buildings. The Paris Agreement on climate, reached in December 2015 at COP21, and numerous state and local policies are targeting large and rapid transitions in the energy sector that include ambitious energy efficiency, existing building electrification, and net-zero codes, all to achieve deep GHG emission reductions over the next 30 years. Although it will take sustained action in all sectors to achieve these targets, the residential sector can lead the way.

Figure 1-1. The green building process seeks to understand and optimize the dynamic relationship between energy and climate, health and well-being, and resources and environment.

Figure 1-2. The U.S. Energy Information Administration breakout of energy use by sector of the economy for 2018, as reported in the 2019 Annual Energy Outlook.

Energy use and GHG reductions extend beyond the building to include the energy impacts of transportation and materials. In response, green building certification programs give credit for buildings located in walkable neighborhoods near high-quality transit because of the reduction in transportation-related energy. Materials with lower-energy inputs for extraction and manufacture, such as reused or recycled materials or material substitutions such as fly ash for cement, have lower global warming potential (GWP) and are preferable to energy-intensive materials and products.

Reduce Resource Use and Environmental Impact

Green buildings also aim to reduce environmental impacts related to resource use. Reducing water use—especially potable water—is a priority, so green buildings include measures to lower water use indoors and outdoors such as low-flow plumbing fixtures and low–water use landscaping with efficient irrigation. Managing and reducing resource extraction for building materials and products is another major concern. The reuse of existing buildings and materials and specification of products with high recycled content contribute to and accelerate a virtuous cycle of use and reuse, or cradle-to-cradle practices. It is also important to consider where we build. By concentrating development in already-developed areas, building at a density that supports transit and local retail, and mixing the types of uses to make it easier to live, work, and play without making car trips, green development encourages better use of land, reduces vehicle and GHG emissions, and helps to sustain natural areas, farmland, and recreation space.

Improve Human Health and Well-Being

Concurrent with the growing urgency to address energy and environmental impacts, awareness of th...