Feature Story

April 26, 2007

Affordable Housing Goes Green at Last

The Next American City:

While green building techniques are becoming mainstream for government and commercial developers, as well as a growing number of well-to-do homeowners, residents of affordable housing have not yet shared in the benefits.

Because it often costs developers more to build affordable housing than they can recoup in rental or sales income, the developers work with razor-thin margins.

They tend to be wary of anything that increases the upfront costs of design and construction, even if, as is the case with many green building techniques, the long-term savings would eventually outweigh the price of premium building materials.

Because affordable housing developers also rely heavily on public and private subsidies, they juggle many restrictions - from per-unit cost caps to design limitations - which make it more difficult to incorporate innovative green techniques.

When a project involves multiple funding sources and players, each with its own set of design and cost requirements, green innovations may get nixed early on.

But now, two large community development organizations - the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and Enterprise Community Partners (Enterprise), formerly the Enterprise Foundation - are on board with the greening of affordable housing, and the early projects are exciting.