Building Healthy Communities

Yesterday I got the chance to visit a family who has lived for about a year in a house they helped build with the Atlanta affiliate of Habitat for Humanity.  I always enjoy these opportunities to see the work of the organizations we support, so I was looking forward to the chance to talk to the parents and spend a little time with their 3 children (I’m a sucker for kids).  I didn’t expect, however, to be touched to the extent I was by their story.

Yasir and his doctors after his transplant.

The family we visited had struggled to afford a healthy, safe home to raise their two girls and infant son until they were selected by Habitat to move into a new home.  Their elation didn’t last long as the day after getting the call from Habitat, they learned that their 6 week old son, Yasir, needed a heart transplant.  His mother was hesitant to have Yasir become the first infant in Georgia to be placed on a “Berlin heart,” a temporary device to help his heart pump, until they explained that without it he would probably die before he could get a transplant.  In December of last year, Yasir got the heart transplant and after many months in the hospital, came home to a wonderful new home.

Yasir’s mother told me what a blessing their home had been as they dealt with the last year.  They are paying far less each month than they paid in rent.  Because the home is built to the green Earthcraft Home standard, their utilities bills are low and the home provides healthy air for Yasir’s weakened immune system.  Knowing all of that would have made anyone feel good about helping families like Yasir’s have a stable, safe place to live for years to come.

Watching Yasir play with his two big sisters in the front yard of their home while knowing what their family had been through during the last year, reinforced the importance of having a “home base.”  Coming home from the hospital each night, his parents didn’t have to worry about whether they were going to be able to make their rent payment or whether they would have to move again and transfer their daughters to another new school.  They didn’t have to worry about where they would bring Yasir when he finally got out of the hospital.  These thoughts just made me remember once more that it’s not about what we do, but the most important thing is who we are doing it for.

I spent the day today in a Home Depot store with an orange apron on, helping customers, sweeping the garden department and bringing carts in from the parking lot.  First,  I’ve got to say, that I am dirty and tired and my feet hurt.  Working retail is a tough job, and summer in Georgia makes it even tougher.  For any retail company,  the associates who work the sales floor every day are obviously the most important people in the company, and that is particularly true at the Home Depot where we have the best, most passionate associates bar none (sorry if I sound biased).  That of, course, is the point of having a paper pusher like me spend time pushing a broom and remembering how fortunate I am to return to my air conditioned office with a comfortable chair.

Given that the Foundation’s goal is to help people understand the long-term economic benefits of using more efficient, higher performing and durable products in their homes, today was also my chance to evangelize to consumers directly.  I planned to seize this opportunity to teach people that if they spend an extra buck today, they’ll save it many times over in reduced operating and maintenance costs.  What a great message! What an easy sell, right?

Well, it’s not really that simple or that easy - and I completely understand why.  Even with the most stereotypical example: the CFL lightbulb, the quintessential “green” product, the spiral bulb.  A CFL costs about $1.20 compared to a regular incandescent bulb, which costs about half of that.  (I feel the need to interject here that it is very unusual for a “green” product to cost twice what a traditional product costs.  In fact, we’ve found you can “green” an entire new home for well under $5,000 of added cost. ) According to the EPA’s Energy Star program, each CFL will save a homeowner about $30 over its lifetime and pay for itself in about 6 months because it uses 75 percent less energy.  On top of that, it lasts about 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb.  So spending that extra $0.60  today to save $30 overall should be a really simple, straight forward decision, right?

Well, sure, except when you go to reach for the bulb off the shelf.  It’s actually really hard to remember that long-term benefit when you have to pay for the lightbulb today because it’s… well, it’s long-term.  Especially, when you really came into the store to get just what you need to fix the leaky faucet or replace the lock or whatever else has to be done today.  If the necessities are already stretching you paycheck too far, or even if they aren’t, it’s hard to pay that incremental upfront cost now for the promise of a return in the future.  So I talked to some customers today about light bulbs and air filters and windows and how getting the right product will be a real win over its life time.  Not everyone listened.  But I did get a couple of people to buy into green.

The trend in vogue in corporate philanthropy the last few years has been about “aligning with the business” – and all the more so now, give the current economy. So, we don’t pat ourselves on the back too much about focusing The Home Depot Foundation’s efforts on housing, albeit with a twist to work toward housing that is affordable and healthy to live in over the long-term. The trouble with talking about housing, though, is that it doesn’t strike peoples’ emotions – it doesn’t tug at their heart strings like some other charitable areas do.  A house, after all, is just a building. But if a home is a place of memories and comfort, a place that provides the stability from which a family can build a successful life, why don’t we tingle at the thought of giving others that gift?

Of course, there’s the oft-cited NIMBY issues, but today’s affordable housing, frequently in mixed-income neighborhoods, isn’t remotely like the “projects” that were built in prior decades. And let’s face it, a lot of us believe if you can’t afford a decent place to live, you’ve probably done something wrong or failed to do something right somewhere along the line. Additionally, the lack of decent housing doesn’t lend itself to a quick fix, and we’re impatient - we want immediate impact. Building at scale is difficult and expensive. These efforts take time – to acquire land, assemble financing and actually build a neighborhood of homes or apartments can take years, while economic development and community revitalization can literally take decades.  At bottom, though, “affordable housing” sounds so technical, so financial, so unemotional.

Mostly, though, I think we have trouble connecting with the importance of stable, affordable housing, because we can’t really imagine what it would be like not to have the same, safe place of our own to return to day after day. We take the enjoyment of living in our own homes, as well as the economic, financial and emotional stability that comes with that, for granted. We don’t really realize what great gifts homes can offer – the gift of stability from living in the same community from which employment and educational prospects can develop; the gift of health and safety from living in a home where the air and water are clean and there are parks and places to play nearby; the gift of financial security from knowing you’ll be able to pay the rent and the power bill, not only this month, but next month too; and the gift of belonging from which dignity and pride can grow. I don’t know about you, but when you look at it like that, it’s something everyone should feel very fortunate to achieve, and it’s enough to give me goosebumps.

It’s an exciting day today as The Home Depot Foundation and Habitat for Humanity International announce the national expansion of our $30-million, 5-year partnership, Partners in Sustainable Building. You can read the press release, but through the program, we are bringing grants and resources to help Habitat affiliates build at least 5,000 homes that meet Energy Star guidelines or another nationally recognized green building standard. With the first round of annual grants, more than 120 Habitat affiliates in 45 states will build almost 1,500 sustainable homes.

This is a significant program for the Foundation, among our very largest, and several people have asked why we are launching the program now, in this economy and with this housing market. I have to admit the question caught me off guard at first, because this seems like the most logical time to launch – and the time that this kind of program is needed most.

Through this partnership, we are focused on bringing the practical benefits of green building to families of modest incomes. While this may sound like just another “green” announcement, we are actually concentrating on the practical, pocketbook benefits of good building. The fact that some of these things are good for the environment is an added bonus, but not our first concern. We are much more interested in seeing energy bills being reduced by up to 50%; water bills going down by a third; and maintenance costs remaining low because durable materials are being used in the first instance – and all of it making economic sense from day 1.

So in answer to the question “Why now?” the answer has to be “How could we not!” The current economic and housing issues we are facing just confirm our belief that if we have helped a family move into a home that they can’t afford to live in over the long term, we really haven’t helped at all.

The Foundation staff convened a group of experts in green building, sustainability and community development for two days last week to review applications and help select the recipients of our annual Awards of Excellence in Affordable Housing Built Responsibly.   (We selected the finalists, are conducting site visits, and the winners will be announced in November at Greenbuild - sorry no previews!)  This recognition program was created five years ago to answer the question “Can non-profit organizations build houses that are green while they are affordable?”  We knew that the answer was “yes,” and we wanted to showcase examples of organizations not only doing it, but doing it exceptionally well.  We believed this would inspire others to strive to complete similar projects.

I was struck during the discussion how the world has changed during these five years - and how much it hasn’t.  In 2004, we were scrutinizing data about the type of lightbulbs and windows selected, the efficiency of the faucets and whether low-VOC paint was used, even though it was more expensive and difficult to find.  Last week, we were comparing projects that have achieved platinum LEED certification (if you aren’t familiar, take that as shorthand for a very green, very efficient building), considering how accessible transportation is to the residents, and debating whether the density of the buildings had too great of an impact on the natural surroundings.  This was essentially because today only CFLs are used; typical low-flow fixtures reduce water consumption by 30%; and no-VOC paint costs the same as the smelly stuff.

And while I was struck by how our discussion of the projects had evolved to take certain basic sustainable building items as givens and moved on to consider broader community issues as well, I also realized how competitive the 2004 winners would have been in the discussion to select 2009’s recipients.  (See case studies of all of our awards of excellence recipients.)   In fact, this was a reminder of how far ahead mission-based organizations have been when thinking about the practical, pocketbook and health issues of green homes.   Early on, they saw the importance of bringing the benefits of green building to the families they helped and who are now paying less for their utilities every month, having fewer asthma attacks and enjoying the other economic and social benefits stable housing brings.

This also made me think about who was catching up with whom. While the Foundation was only thinking about the four walls of the building and from the lot line in, the nonprofit builders were certainly thinking more broadly about the community-wide issues. They were considering whether their residents would be able to travel easily to jobs, stores and services, whether they were providing assets for the community at large, such as green areas and community centers, and whether they were hiring and training people from the neighborhood. So while I think back over the organizations we have recognized, I want to add an additional note of thanks for the education they have provided us along the way.