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An Ounce of Prevention…

Monday, August 30th, 2010

It’s that time of year when we start watching the Weather Channel more frequently, and I start getting emergency weather updates on my Blackberry.  It’s hurricane season. We are thinking about this all the more as we observe the fifth anniversary of the horrible time called Hurricane Katrina.

Working with Home Depot for over a decade, I understand how a big storm impacts people, families and communities.  We are exceptionally proud of the things we do as a company and as a foundation in the wake of a storm when a community needs help.  This is also what gets the most media attention.  I hope, though, that we can start paying more attention to things that can happen before a hurricane, tornado, flood or fire damages a community or an entire region.  I know, it’s not nearly as exciting; the pictures aren’t nearly as good.  But what if we could actually avoid those “after” pictures.

I was exceptionally pleased last week to see that HUD has awarded $312 million to 13 states to reduce the damages from future disasters.  These funds will be used:

  • to buyout homeowners in high-risk areas and relocate them to safer places;
  • to complete improvements to homes to reduce damage by doing things like reinforcing windows and doors and raising the elevation;
  • to improve and enforce building codes; and
  • to develop thoughtful land use plans that reduce development in high-risk areas.

You may say that that’s a lot of money right now and ask it we can really afford it.  That’s a salient concern, but the answer is clearly that we can’t afford not to make these investments.  Every dollar spent on damage mitigation will result in a $4 reduction in the amount we would spend for disaster recovery.

You may also be asking why I’m writing - or even thinking - about this.  I know I typically focus on topics related to affordable housing and  “green” building.  But what could be more sustainable than to invest in building homes so they don’t get blown away by a strong wind or to build them in places where a flood won’t carry them away?  What could help a family with few housing choices more?  We know these storms are going to occur - whether every 10 years, every 30 years or every 100 years.  Isn’t it just common sense that we would think about how to reduce the damage caused by something that will inevitably happen?

I hope I’ve convinced you to think about what you can do before we start tracking the next satellite images of a storm (I know, there’s a storm tracking right now!).  While it’s on the top of your mind,  I’m  encourage you to do a couple of things.  First, think about donating to the American Red Cross before a specific emergency arises.  Every year we give to the Red Cross’s Annual Disaster Giving Program so they can do the things they need to do to be on the ground helping people immediately after a disaster.  They also have great resources to educate you and your family on how to be prepared.  Other fantastic resources are available at the site of our long-standing partner, the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, where they have everything from DIY home inspections, to a contractors’ certification program, to videos with step by step instructions on how to improve your home with disaster safety in mind.  Remember “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Healthy, Affordable Housing, Sustainable Communities | Leave a Comment »

Making Cities Healthier - for People and the Economy

Friday, July 30th, 2010

I’ve just come from a two-day discussion among a group of a dozen experts from a cross section of fields related to sustainability - energy, transportation, water and economic development, to name a few.  We brought them together to select the recipients of The Home Depot Foundation Awards of Excellence for Sustainable Community Development.  That’s a lot of words strung together, but we were looking for cities - large and small - that are 1) thinking about sustainability in the broadest sense and what it means for their community,  2) creating a plan that sets out the ways they are committing to make their cities healthier over the long term from an economic development, public health, social equity and environmental stewardship standpoint and that defines the objective standards they will use to measure progress and 3) completing projects that help move them toward their goals.  After reviewing the applications, I can confidently say that cities across the country are undertaking some truly amazing sustainability efforts right now, despite the dire budget forecasts they are facing.  (I can’t tell you who we thought was doing the best work yet, but you can check out the videos of last year’s award recipients.)

I think what the conversation underscored for me is what Kermit said so many years ago, “It’s not easy being green.” It takes an enormous dedication of resources, time and expertise to bring the benefits of sustainability to our cities.  In fact, it requires that leaders, staff and citizens re-think everything they are doing from paving roads and building police stations to buying paper and installing streetlights.  Hard questions need to be asked about the true health of a community and the actual opportunities that are available to its residents.  This requires looking at, among other things,  the rates of energy and water use, accessibility of transportation options, affordability of quality housing, levels of pollution in the air and water, success of local businesses and prevalence of obesity and related diseases.  And not only do they need to investigate all of this, they also have to figure out what needs improvement and set goals, prioritize the list and come up with money to pay for it.  They then must measure what they’ve done and report back.  Whew!

After reading that last paragraph, you may be thinking that this is too much to ask of any local government.  It’s too hard; the economy is too bad; for now, they should just focus on getting through the next week, month, year.

But that’s my point, right?  It’s not just “for now.”  The choices that are being made today are determining what our tomorrows are going to look like across this broad spectrum of issues.  We are creating roads, light rail lines, buildings and parks that are going to be with us for decades.  To a large extent, through the decisions made today, we are determining what taxes our children will pay, what kinds of homes they will live in, what kind of jobs they will have and whether they will enjoy healthy lives.  After all, much of what we live with today is because of what our fathers (and mothers) did: encouraging sprawl, eliminating green space, buying energy gobbling cars and homes and dumping pollution into our rivers.

So hopefully, you can see that although it’s hard, this is important work that must be done.  I hope, though, that you can also be convinced to take it one step further to realize that this is a once-in-a-lifetime, exciting opportunity.  We have the chance to really make a difference and to improve the way cities operate and govern.  We can make cities run more efficiently, more productively and more sustainably.  We can transform them!

Cities, after all, have a lot of infrastructure and history and policies, but they are made up of, and created for, people.  By making cities run better, we are getting to the core of what we do as a foundation: we help people to achieve their dreams of success for their families and to live better lives.  sci_logo

To learn more about how you can take action to make your city more sustainable, visit www.SustainableCitiesInstitute.org.

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Sustainable Cities, Sustainable Communities | Leave a Comment »

Help Pick SCI’s Pilot Cities

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

In May during the Congress of New Urbanism meeting in Atlanta, we were very excited to launch a new program for The Home Depot Foundation, the Sustainable Cities Institute (to read more about this program, see my prior post).  The primary purpose of SCI is to provide vetted best practices and useful resources as well as a hub for communication to city officials and staff to help them think about what they are doing now that will impact the long-term health of their community.  The issues covered run the gamut from housing and transportation, to water and waste management to land use, energy and economic development.  The goal is to help cities to take a long-term, integrated and systematic approach to developing and achieving  healthy communities by simultaneously addressing economic, environmental, and social issues.

We understand, though, that we can’t just be talking about these things, we also need to be doing them.  So a critical piece of SCI is the Pilot Cities Program, which is a way for SCI and our partner organizations to demonstrate how cities can move through the process of defining what sustainability means for their residents and communities and use that shared understanding to implement real change on the ground.  We will do this by investing $1 million in two cities over two years and by bringing appropriate experts in different aspects of sustainability to provide hands on assistance.  One of the most exciting parts of this program will be that the two winning cities will be posting their progress - good and not so good - on SCI within the City Program pages.  We believe that this essential if we are going to achieve our overall goal of helping all cities move their sustainability programs forward.

We invited an array of cities: large and small; hot and cold; those that had thought about sustainable development for many years and some who are coming to it more recently, and asked them to tell us how they are thinking about sustainability and what their plans are for moving forward through the expansion or implementation of a city-wide initiative.  We also asked them how they would use those plans with regard to a specific project that would create or rehab homes or an entire neighborhood for people of modest incomes.

When we extended that invitation to about 40 cities, we weren’t sure what responses we would get - we knew we were expecting them to do a lot and we were asking them to tell us a lot.  We were truly and honestly amazed at the quality of the work going on across the country - and not just in the large cities like Boston and Atlanta, where you would expect it, but in Burlington and Savannah as well.  Because of this, it was difficult to narrow the list to 4 finalists, but we’ve done it.   I know that after visits to these cities, it will be even harder to select the 2 pilot cities.  Here is information on the finalist cities and the nonprofit partners they are working with. We are scheduling trips to see what’s happening in each of them, but if you have a reason why you think we should pick one over the others, please let us know!

Ann Arbor, MI (pop. 114,000) and the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute of the University of Michigan:  In 2007, Ann Arbor adopted 11 Environmental Action Plan Principles and 10 Environmental Action Plan Goals.  They are now working to integrate these into their Master Plan and Capital Improvements Plan.  Their proposed project would focus on making rental housing in Ann Arbor and its sister city of Ypsilanti more energy efficient by providing incentives to landlords owning a total of 500 units.

Charleston, SC (pop. 124,000) and The Sustainability Institute: Charleston adopted a sustainability plan in February of this year, which focuses on six specific areas: better buildings, cleaner energy, sustainable communities, improved transportation, zero waste and green education.  Charleston SAVES is a city-wide initiative to provide energy efficiency services to any building owner who doesn’t qualify for the federal weatherization program.  They have proposed that SCI help implement the Green Collar Workforce Program, which would professionally train workers to conduct energy audits and to complete retrofits while makign energy efficiency upgrades to about 200 homes owned by low-t- moderate income families.

Fayetteville , AR (pop. 67,000) and the National Center for Appropriate Technology: While Fayetteville doesn’t have a sustainability plan, they have done great work in adopting Fayetteville Forward 2009, which sets policy across a broad range of issues, including transportation and light rail, green economy, local food, land use and green infrastructure.  The city has over 100 miles of stream, so water protection is a high priority.  Accordingly, they are proposing that we would work with them to create a manual for low impact design for drainage and that the guidelines developed in the manual would be used in the development of a new subdivision of about 50 green, affordable homes.

Salt Lake City, UT (pop 182,000) and NeighborWorks Salt Lake: The city adopted its sustainability plan in 2008 along with publishing the Blueprint Jordan River, which outlines an initiative to preserve 300 acres of habitat along the river, create transportation connections to the river and revitalize the housing along the river by making green improvement grants to homeowners.  The goal is for several local governments to coordinate efforts to increase housing values, preserve the river and promote healthy neighborhoods and sustainability within an urban setting.

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Sustainable Cities | Leave a Comment »

Embarrassed to be Human?

Friday, June 4th, 2010

I was talking to someone whom I greatly respect about some of the pressing issues facing us all right now, and he said that some of our current affairs made him embarrassed to be a member of the human race.  I hadn’t heard that phrase before, and it struck me as humorous at first, but if you take it literally, he’s completely right.

Pause and create your mental list of the realities that exist today that make you cringe inside.  My list includes the facts that:

I could go on, but that’s enough.  And this is in no way meant to be depressing - I hope that this is a very loud wake up call.  This list is embarrassing, not disheartening or overwhelming.  According to Webster’s dictionary, embarrass means to cause self-conscious distress.  We should be distressed, and we should each be looking inward to think about what we are doing about it because these are circumstances that we should not accept.  We should not allow these situations to continue to exist - and make no mistake, through our action or delay, we are allowing these facts to be.  We have the ability to change them; we just haven’t chosen to do that so far.

I believe strongly that there is no reason that almost 15% of Americans aren’t sure that they’ll be able to pay their mortgage or rent this month, that they’ll be able to feed their kids dinner tonight or that they’ll be able to fill a prescription the next time they get sick.  It is inexcusable that any child should try to go to sleep or to school with a stomach grumbling for food.  Why on earth don’t we recycle paper or think about what chemicals we are putting into our homes?  Perhaps part of the problem is that we aren’t being honest with each other - or with ourselves - about what we can do to change what’s going on around us.

This is my list and my commitment is to put my time, energy and resources into scratching them off, so instead of having a list of embarrassments, I have a list of things that make me proud to be a member of the human race.  I hope you’ll add your thoughts and tell me how we can work together to change what we see when we look at each other.

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Healthy, Affordable Housing, Philanthropy | Leave a Comment »

Catalyzing Sustainable Actions

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Those of us who think about how to make our cities better places to live had a great week in Atlanta as we hosted the Congress for the New Urbanism’s Congress 18, which focused on the interconnectedness of our health and the places where we live.  We don’t think or talk about it much, but how we live depends in large measure on where we live.  CNU focuses on planning and developing communities for people, not just cars, and for all kinds of people doing different things.

mayberry_post_office_rfdEssentially, it’s a throwback to Mayberry R.F.D., a small town where the doctor lived next to the barber (or sheriff) and you could walk downtown to shop or get an ice cream cone.  There was a park to throw a ball or have a picnic (baseball and apple pie).  Now we talk about sustainability and new urbanism, mixed-use developments and TODs (transit oriented development).  We don’t say you can walk to town, we say that it’s pedestrian-friendly or walkable  - you get the gist.

We call it “new” because we are coming full circle after we sped and sprawled to the suburbs only to learn that the grass wasn’t necessarily greener five - or 25  - miles outside of town.  It began to take a lot of time and resources (both emotional and financial) to drive into work everyday, which left less time and money for relaxing, enjoying friends and families and exercise.  And instead of walking to the places we wanted to go, we had to drive to the strip mall, so we were always sitting behind a steering wheel or a desk rather than getting some exercise and fresh air.  Our waistbands seemed to hdf_atl_0596spread along with the roads.  Unless your own yard was big enough to play a game of football or baseball, you and your kids probably weren’t going to play because there’s not a park in your neighborhood, so you stay inside and play a video game version.  Come to think about it, with all those cars on the new road, the air wasn’t so fresh anyway.  As the farms and forests started to be developed and paved, the rain water had fewer places to run and floods started drowning places that weren’t in the flood plain.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that we want to create communities like we used to have.  With larger cities, we are thinking in terms of neighborhoods.  As energy costs continue to increase and clean water becomes more precious, conserving resources and cutting utility bills also become more important.  We understand that where we put the places we need to go, such as offices, homes, schools and hospitals, and whether we have choices about how we get there, whether by cars, trains, subways, bikes or walking, have an enormous impact on our lives.  These questions of land use, transportation, resource allocation and economic development are enormous issues, and they are issues that our cities control.  More and more cities are bringing sustainability, which in many situations means getting more while using less, into their planning processes, their operations and their ordinances and zoning.

sci_logoBut it’s not easy to think comprehensively about all of the aspects of a community that make it a place that you want to live and that is affordable.  We’ve talked to many city officials, professional planners and developers and neighborhood residents who say that it’s hard to find credible, practical, action-oriented materials to help them accomplish their goals for today without sacrificing the resources and budgets of the future.  That’s why The Home Depot Foundation is excited and proud to announce the creation of the Sustainable Cities Institute, which we have developed in partnership with Southface.  At the Institute’s website, we are providing vetted tools and information to jump start efforts to make cities’ operations and policies more sustainable.  People in so many places across the U.S. and Canada are making enormous strides in bringing the economic, health and environmental benefits of sustainability to their residents.  By sharing their efforts and successes, we intend to catalyze similar activity in other places across the country.  In the fall, we will announce two cities that will have been selected as pilot cities.  Over two years, we will invest $1 million in these locations to bring their sustainability plans to life through specific developments.  The progress, challenges and learnings from those cities will be chronicled on the SCI website.

Just as we know that anything worth doing takes time, we understand that creating places and lives that are sustainable takes years and the effort of many people.  While we have been able to launch SCI because of the dedicated work of dozens of people, we know that it will evolve over time.  We hope that you’ll contribute your thoughts and experience as a member of SCI and join us in this journey to make SCI a tool that can help shape our communities of the future.

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Sustainable Communities | 1 Comment »

What do Admins’ Day and Earth Day have in Common?

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

I found a certain amount of irony this week when we celebrated both Administrative Professionals’ Day and Earth Day on consecutive days.  I know what you are thinking - that I’m going to say that I think both of these are “Hallmark holidays” created by greeting card companies to encourage sales.  If that’s what you thought, you really are a cynic.  That’s not it, but I do think that these days are just reminding us of what we should be doing year-round.  In fact, I think it’s a little sad that we need a day to remember how important the people who help us through our work days are and the amazingly complicated planet we live on it.  Maybe because they are so familiar, we just take them for granted.

For those of you who are interested, here’s a little history.  Although when you search “administrative professionals day” on the internet, the first result is for a florist, it was in fact created to encourage more people to consider becoming secretaries.  In 1952, a publicist for the International Association of Administrative Professionals came up with the idea of “secretaries day” to draw attention to the enormous potential offered by an adminstrative career.  Today, the IAAP stresses that it is the sole sponsor of the day, which it believes serves to highlight the “increasing value and contributions of administrative professionals in today’s workplace.”

Earth Day, on the other hand, was the idea of a politician, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.  According to his telling, Nelson first thought of bringing environmental conservation to the political fore in 1962 and he soon asked then-President Kennedy to conduct a national conservation tour.  Kennedy led the tour through 11 states in 5 days, but it did little to catalyze public or political concern for the environment.  Nelson had to wait 8 years until the spring of 1970 to celebrate the first Earth Day, which was an overwhelming success with 20 million people participating in local activities focused on the environment.  Who can imagine how many school children, corporate workers and families are participating in today’s fortieth anniversary activities around the globe?

So you see, there’s a huge appetite among us to pause to think about what we enjoy every day, whether it’s the blessings of a beautiful spring day after a long cold winter or the fact that you got your project done and out by the deadline because of the help of an administrative assistant.  It’s just that we forget sometimes in the bustle of the day to give thanks for the good things we have.  This week, while I’m recognizing the contributions of the assistants in our office and the many wonders of nature, I also want to thank the IAAP and Senator Nelson for reminding us to appreciate what we’ve got - while we’ve still got them.

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility | Leave a Comment »

When Being Too Nice is a Sin

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

I read a thought-provoking piece in the New York Times today about Ursula Burns, the new CEO of Xerox.  It’s a little bit of a puff piece about the first African American woman to run a major American company.  It tells about her early life in a poor New York neighborhood and the influence of her tough, single mother.

The article also talks about the culture in Xerox - and that’s what really struck me.  According to Burns, one of the issues that the company needs to overcome is being too nice.  That’s right.   She doesn’t talk about the cut- throat culture of this corporate icon; no criticisms of the dog-eat-dog world.  Instead, she talks about what she calls “terminal niceness” and how she wants the employees to “take more initiative, become more fearless and be more frank and impatient with one another to ratchet up performance.”

This article might have caught my eye because Ms. Burns sounds like a kindred spirit.  I have been accused of being direct and impatient.  I have no doubt that those are “nice” ways to say … something else.

Be that as it may, I do feel a sense of urgency to help families address issues related to affordable housing and stable communities.  I believe that it is essential that each of us is challenging ourselves, our employees, our partners, our grant recipients and our leaders to take some risks, rethink our strategies and ensure that we are working as efficiently as we can to address the real issues we face.

We recently completed half-day review meetings with each of the Foundation’s national partners to discuss what we have accomplished together, where we want to go and how we can work more strategically to get there.  Essentially we were asking “How can we be smarter about what we are doing?”  The dollar amounts we were discussing are probably not going to go up anytime soon, which is all the more reason we need to be sure we are investing wisely and deriving the best possible returns in our communities.

In 2010, my refrain has become looking out for lost opportunities.  I have absolutely no doubt that the work of The Home Depot Foundation benefits thousands of families and communities every year.  None.  But what more could we do?  Are we challenging ourselves and others to be our best?  To achieve the most we can?

During this fortnight of the Olympics, I can’t help but think of how Apolo Ohno thinks about what he is putting into his training.  He said every night he asks himself if he truly did everything he could that day to make himself the best he can be.  He said that on most days it’s hard to honestly say yes to that question, which I’m sure is why he’s one of the best athletes in the world.

Each night, he’s asking himself if he missed an opportunity to improve, to do better.  Perhaps we should ask each other that same question and avoid being too nice to answer honestly.

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Healthy, Affordable Housing, Philanthropy | Leave a Comment »

Celebrating Sustainable Affordable Housing

Friday, November 13th, 2009

This has been an exciting week for all of us at The Home Depot Foundation. Many of us have attended USGBC’s Greenbuild conference as well as the National League of Cities annual conference. At both conferences, we’ve been inspired by the amazing examples of businesses, cities and organizations who are making real progress in building and fostering sustainable communities across the country.

Along with many of the attendees at each of these conferences, the Foundation focuses our work on creating healthy, affordable housing as the cornerstone of creating communities that aren’t just surviving, but are thriving. We all face the same kind of challenges as we try to accomplish this goal:

  • How to created housing that’s healthy and efficient, while also affordable to live in, not just to move into
  • How to ensure there are safe and green outside places for families to walk, play and learn and
  • How to ensure that people have access to good jobs, good schools and the stores and services they need

There’s no question that balancing the economics with the environment – to be sustainable while being affordable – can be difficult. But it can be done with thoughtful design, appropriate product selection and responsible building.

This morning, The Home Depot Foundation is especially proud to be recognizing some impressive examples of affordable housing developments that show that finding that balance not only can be done, but that it can be done extraordinarily well. At this morning’s closing plenary session at Greenbuild in Phoenix, we are announcing the winners of our annual Awards of Excellence for Affordable Housing. Through this awards program, we celebrate the innovative and creative work of the nonprofit sector in building affordable housing to “green” standards. We have presented these awards for five years now, and we continue to be blown away by the quality of the nominated projects. We know you will be as impressed and inspired by our winners as we are.

The awards are given in two different categories: homeownership and rental housing. The award recipients were selected based on a number of criteria, including the physical design and building performance, as well as how well they met the needs of the local community while maintaining affordability for the residents.

The first place winner in the Home Ownership category is Habitat for Humanity, St. Louis, MO. The project they completed in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood in Midtown St. Louis is amazing. They built 27 single family homes that are 49 percent more energy efficient than homes built to code. In addition, the homes meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Platinum standards and earned the EPA’s Indoor Air Package (IAP) certification. The economics of the project were equally amazing – HFHSL was able to build to green standards without adding any incremental costs to the development by utilizing available rebates and incentives. View the case study and the video.

The first place winner in the Rental category is National Community Renaissance (National CORE), La Quinta, CA. This landmark project turned a distressed mobile home park into a beautiful and affordable 80-unit green housing development, called Vista Dunes, which meets LEED Platinum standards. Meeting this stringent certification standard added no incremental costs to the project. As a result of energy-efficient building, residents typically have 67% lower utility bills than homes built to standard code in the area. View the case study and the video.

The runner up in the Rental category is the Office of Rural Farm-Worker Housing in Yakima, WA.. The 26 rental townhomes they built at Pear Tree Place are certified by Enterprise’s Green Communities program. As a result of the quality construction, residents, who typically earn less than $40,000 annually usually save 35 percent on their energy bills and 31 percent on their water bills, yet greening the project added less than 1% to the total development costs. View the case study and the video.

I hope that you will take a few minutes to read the case studies and view the videos about each of these winners. What they’ve been able to do not only demonstrates the practicality of building green, but they are also making a substantial difference in the lives of hundreds of low to moderate income families by ensuring they have access to quality, healthy housing that is affordable to live in over the long-term.

Congrats to both Greenbuild and NLC for organizing great, informative conferences this week. And thanks for letting The Home Depot Foundation be part of both!

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Healthy, Affordable Housing | Comments Off

Energy Savings for All

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

This was a big week for the idea of residential green building.  Enterprise Community Partners announced the launch of their next generation of the Green Communities Program.  Not only did Enterpise make a $4 billion commitment to create, preserve or retrofit 75,000 green homes and community buildings over the next 5 years, but perhaps more importantly, they issued a national call to action to make all affordable housing green by 2020.  As the founding funder of Green Communities, we were proud to support the next generation of the program with a grant of $1.5 million.

Earlier in the week, Vice President Biden through the Middle Class Task Force announced the Recovery through Retrofit initiative, which aims to create green jobs and allow middle class families to avail themselves of the cost savings of energy efficiency measures.  The goals outlined in the Recovery Through Retrofit Report are nothing short of extraordinary:  set a standard for energy-efficiency of existing homes, establish easy financing options for homeowners and train and certify contractors to ensure they are qualified to do the work properly.  This would mean that homes would have something akin to a sticker - like appliances and cars currently do - to help consumers understand how much energy they will use.  If they want to get their energy costs down, there would be ways to pay for it and to make sure that the people they hire aren’t going to do substandard work, and that they really will get a better performing home.  Through existing technology,  by 2020 we could reduce home energy use by 40% and save $21 billion annually.

Neither of these events got a huge amount of attention, which is a shame.  They were similar in several other ways, as well: each targeted audacious goals, estimated big dollar amounts, and  set 2020 as the deadline.

I hope that in retrospect we will see that it wasn’t coincidence that these initiatives were announced during the same week.   I hope that we’ll look back and see that this week was a turning point when we collectively realized that “green” building is neither exotic, complicated nor a luxury.  In fact, I hope that we are coming around to the idea that we shouldn’t even be talking about “green” building, we should be talking about “good” building.  Why would we build or rehab a building and not put in enough insulation, seal the duct work and caulk the windows to make sure the go-forward energy bills are 20-50% lower?   Why shouldn’t we as consumers insist that the people we hire to work on our most valuable asset are qualified to do the work right?  I hope that we’ll look back and see how stupid we all were to have been building any other way.

In fact, when you think about it like that, it doesn’t seem that this week marked any grand realizations as much as it seems that we are starting to use some common sense.

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Healthy, Affordable Housing | Leave a Comment »

Housing, Service and the Environment: The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

I often speak to groups at conferences, and the topic varies, of course,  depending on the interest of the group - affordable housing, green building, urban forestry, volunteerism.  Lately, as I’ve prepared for these presentations the same theme always seems appropriate:  If you had considered it two years ago - or 20 years ago for that matter - would you have ever dreamed we would find ourselves in a time when the issues of 1) housing and community development, 2) volunteer service and 3) sustainability would be garnering significant attention in the nation’s conversation?  I can honestly say that I would not have bet one thin dime that this possibility would be our reality.

While it’s astounding that we are talking about these three issues at all, it’s even more surprising that we are seriously discussing how interconnected they are.  Solutions to the enormous problems we are currently grappling with will come more easily by combining the resources that are available under each of these umbrellas.  Here’s what I mean:  We have a housing crisis because we weren’t buying homes that we could afford to live in over the long term.  If we think beyond the initial expenses of getting into a house to consider how much it actually costs to live there (heating and cooling it, running the appliances, getting to work, keeping up the place, etc.), issues related to environmental sustainability immediately arise, such as energy and water conservation; public transportation and commute alternatives; using less and recycling more; and trees and gardening.  And if volunteer service is an essential component of the plan to survive and recover from the current economic crisis, we should bring the benefits of thinking green to our projects.  In fact, the President’s United We Serve initiative just announced that it’s going green.

As we see Washington putting the policy discussions into action with legislation like the Kennedy Serve America Act, the Recovery Act, with its focus on energy efficiency, and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, I can’t help but hope that the results live up to the possibilities for solving the problems facing our cities and the families living in them.  Each of us has the opportunity to use these new resources to do more, but if we intertwine our efforts in housing, volunteerism and the environment, we can grow the positive effects in our communities exponentially, both immediately and into the future.  Let’s hope we don’t waste this moment we’ve all been waiting for.

By Kelly Caffarelli
Posted in Environmental Responsibility, Healthy, Affordable Housing, Sustainable Communities | Leave a Comment »