Sustainable Building Archives - Page 3 of 8

In Building, Passivity May be the Best Action

July 24, 2009 by David Mark Brown

passivstandard Salt Lake City is going passive. Joe and Rebecca are teaming up with Brach Design and Fisher Custom Building to build Utah’s first certified passive house. That is the plan anyway. Brach Design is Utah’s only certified Passive House architect and this will be his first passive house if everything turns out right.

You may be thinking, “Who gives a diddly ding dang do.” But let me tell all you Flanders swearing neigh-sayers, this is pretty ding dang diddly cool. Let’s not forget that 76% of all electricity produced by U.S. power plants goes to the building sector. Passive House started up as PassivHaus in the UK, but that was too stinking European sounding for God-Bless-‘Em-Americans, so we changed it to Passive House Institute US, but it is the same thing. Passive House is a certification that literally beats the insulation off of rating systems like LEED. The graphic shows it pretty well (although LEED is not pictured because it is a bit like comparing apples to oranges). But the point is that Passive House is the stiffest energy efficiency standard the world has seen by far.

Pre-fab Fad Falls Down, Again.

July 4, 2009 by David Mark Brown

zero-house-01 I just can’t feel bad about it. Post modern luxury and hippie just shouldn’t go together, and that is what so many of the most recently reencarnated pre-fab housing gurus have been trying to do. It has been doomed to failure since the start. Now the economic “downturn” is finishing the job, and I am hopeful that it may be one more good result that comes from it.

I think Buildblog puts it best in their recent post, “Pre-fab houses don’t work.” They go on to list 10 reasons why pre-fabbers have gotten it wrong at a time when I believe that most things were in their advantage to get it right. Like so many other huge changes that are taking place across the U.S. in the way that we think and live, this time of economic malaise could have been an opportunity for radical visionaries to rebuild American housing. Instead we came up with a stupider and more convoluted way to build the same old, stupid and convoluted environs. God bless America.

Affordable Housing, Where Have you Gone?

June 27, 2009 by David Mark Brown

So the typical definition of affordable housing is less than 30% of your income. And yet, the 2007 Census revealed that over 40% of American home owners are spending at least one-third of their income on housing, and the percentage is rising. Low to moderately low income people are the fastest growing category within this stat as well.

Housing prices are falling. For people in lots of debt at the moment, this is bad. For people that own their home it is a slight bummer, but no big deal. For people that would like to be home owners this is actually good. The problem is that property prices are not falling in most areas. Most property has maintained a strong and constant value for a while. The exceptions are areas where their is little to no practical use for the land, and therefor unimportant for our discussion. So, even after the economy bottom’s out and starts to rebound (assuming that it will), there will be little help for people wanting to own a home in proximity to a place they can actually live.