I’m in Phoenix at Greenbuild, the US Green Building Council’s annual mass gathering of enviro building professionals. USGBC started out just focusing on commercial buildings - skyscrapers and fancy office buildings, but yesterday we were here talking about affordable housing. We had about 130 representatives of nonprofit organizations, architecture firms, city housing officials and greenbuilding experts, each of whom wanted to learn more about how to create homes that are more affordable and healthier for families of modest means. In particular, we talked about rehabbing existing homes, senior housing and transit-oriented developments, which is a fancy way of saying homes near train and subway stations and bus stops.
The speakers and panels were great and imparted a huge amount of information about existing projects, best practices and lessons learned. In the afternoon, though, the real action began when we broke up into small working groups to discuss 9 projects from throughout the country that are still in the pre-development or design phase. The key here was that the construction manager was able to talk to experts and peers about how to make their projects more efficient and healthier while still staying within their budget. Because these are projects that are going to be built and that are still in a phase where changes can be made, all the participants were very engaged and excited about the conversation. It wasn’t just a theoretical exercise.
At the end of the day, each group did a short report out. Without exception, every project manager saw that they could build a project that would meet a national green building standard (in several cases, LEED Platinum) and stay withing their budget - WOW! That’s a real accomplishment with 9 projects that ranged from a large Hope VI redevelopment of public housing to the renovation of a high school to be an apartment building to a Habitat house! Even better, in just a few hours, we had project managers come to see that green wasn’t scary, overly complicated or expensive. One even proclaimed to the crowd that he had been cynical about green building, but that he had been converted!
We’ll keep tabs on what happens as these projects come out of the ground and families actually move into them, and report back to you. The 30,000 attendees of the Greenbuild conference are streaming into Phoenix, with meetings starting today. On Friday, we’ll be presenting the Foundation’s Awards of Excellence for Affordable Housing Built Responsibly - check back for the winners and case studies - to an audience of almost 10,000. But, in terms of real progress and truly making a difference, I think Greenbuild has already been a success.
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This is great, you guys do really good work!