Three Reasons Greening Every U.S. Home is a Game-Changer

The ache for a home,” Maya Angelou once said, “lives in all of us.” At the most primal level we all understand how the home is the essential place of comfort and the ultimate haven. But it’s also more than that. It’s a platform. It’s the launching point for a healthy and fulfilling life.

Yet for decades, housing in the United States was too commonly built as little more than basic shelters, developed on the cheap, with little regard to their long-term sustainability, the health consequences for residents or their connections to opportunity – to transit, jobs and schools. This was especially true of affordable housing for low-income families, for whom a quality home – a true platform for opportunity – is profoundly needed.

Fortunately, this is changing.

This month we launched the 2015 Enterprise Green Communities Criteria, the latest update in our framework for building healthier and more sustainable affordable homes for the future. Think of the Criteria as a guide for building that critical platform for families. Not only will residents reap the rewards of the Criteria, but as a society we all stand to gain.

Since Enterprise first launched the Criteria in 2004, we’ve learned more and more about the range of benefits that come with greening homes. We view these benefits as a triple bottom line: health, economic and environmental; and they extend to tenants, owners and taxpayers alike. Here’s how.

1. Better Health and Fewer Trips to the Doctor
   The notion that your home impacts your health isn’t new. Even Florence Nightingale, in the 19th century, understood that the “connection between the health and dwelling of the population is the most important one that exists.” Yet we continue to learn more every day about the extent to which quality housing serves as a “vaccine.” Obesity, cardiovascular health, mental and emotional stress – all of these things have been shown to improve with quality housing.
   
   To give you an idea of the costs incurred by society from these epidemics, consider asthma, which disproportionately effects low-income families. Treating asthma alone costs the U.S. $56 billion every year (an average of $3,300 per person), and up to 40% of children’s asthma episodes are linked to home conditions. Compounding this, visits to the doctor take children out of school and parents out of work. The Enterprise Green Communities Criteria’s focus on resident health swiftly remedies this.
   
   
2. Lower Long-Term Costs for Owners and Residents
   The largest resistance to greening buildings typically takes the form of an economic argument – that there is a “green premium” which makes greening prohibitively expensive. This argument no longer holds water. Developers continue to find that Enterprise Green Communities Criteria-certified buildings are actually more cost-effective over the life cycle of a development.
   
   This is to say nothing of the long term utility cost savings for tenants. Today, we face a housing insecurity crisis, in which 19 million families – one in every six households – pay over half their income on housing costs, leaving little money left over for other basic essentials. For a low-income family living paycheck to paycheck, savings on utility costs means more money spent on groceries that month, or transportation to get to work.
   
   
3. Reduced Energy and Water Consumption
   The western United States, you may have heard, is experiencing a drought of historic proportions, an occurrence that’s predicted to increase in frequency into the future. Additionally, while our water supply is down, our residential energy prices are going up. Energy and water efficiency now represents a national imperative.
   
   Criteria-certified homes are significantly more energy efficient than conventional buildings, with each individual home reducing overall energy use by roughly 2,000 kilowatt-hours each year and greenhouse gas emissions by 1.4 metric tons every year. With homes certified in 2014 alone, savings are equivalent to removing 2,300 passenger vehicles from the road, or adding over 9,000 acres of U.S. forest land.

The 2015 Criteria now reflects another imperative: resiliency. Recent storms, such as Sandy, have exposed our vulnerability to natural disasters and have revealed how costly – economically and otherwise – our under-preparedness can be. Our Criteria not only guides developers on how to create stronger and more resilient buildings against disasters, but it also equips communities to respond more effectively in their wake.

Currently, the Enterprise Green Communities Criteria is required for affordable housing development in 21 states and is used in many more. The Criteria should be extended to every last state and every last affordable home. 

It’s time we make green homes the standard and not the exception. Their health, environmental and economic benefits will provide families with a true platform to opportunity – which begins at home.