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.
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