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!
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