Construction Industry Trends
June 2004
Q&A with Doug Shroeder
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Doug Schroeder is an associate director with the Sustainable Buildings Industry Council (SBIC), a non-profit organization focused on advancing the design, affordability, energy performance, and environmental soundness of residential, institutional, and commercial buildings nationwide. SBIC offers workshops, seminars, books, and other tools to help builders better understand and incorporate the principles of sustainable building into their design and construction processes.
Q: Do green homes look like typical houses, or do they require homebuyers to reassess what they are buying?
I don’t think that what typical homebuyers would be looking for in general — to have a house that reminds them of their grandparents’ house or one that they can compare to their brother’s or sister’s house — from the aesthetic viewpoint that they have to compromise anything. I would say that the one major element that they’d have to accept is orientation. It’s one of the fundamental things in any good green, energy-efficient house — you need to orient it to the sun. An east-west orientation allows you to maximize the southern exposure if you’re in a climate where you need to use the sun to help heat the house. It also must be properly designed so that it’s shaded well in the summer. You could end up with a house that might be a little cockeyed in its orientation to the street because it’s designed to the sun and not to the street layout itself.
Q: What about developments that are built to be green from the start?
When you go into one of these developments that have been very well thought through from the beginning, the greenness of it all is transparent. The designs look so mainstream because the systems are designed to work properly and they do. The one thing that sells buyers is not the features, not the sexy glazing or the panels, but the benefits that they’re going to be getting.
Q: Why is green homebuilding a growing niche?
I can’t point to any recent study that’s saying that the purchase of green homes has risen by a certain percentage. But there are surveys of people who are buying homes and what they’re looking for. And the indicators in these studies show that they’re looking more and more for buildings that perform in this way, and they’re willing to pay more than they had indicated in the past and more than what the building industry professionals still assume they’ll pay. There’s a big gap between what a builder thinks today what a client would pay for green features and what the clients are saying that they would pay. But if the builder starts to hear that and starts to understand that, then the decision on his end to incorporate these elements into his product becomes easier to make.
Another big indicator to me that this is growing fast is the introduction of different products and programs that are supporting both consumer demand and supply offerings. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) years ago established a green subcommittee within its energy codes committee. That subcommittee over the last couple years has worked to the point that it is establishing a home building guidelines program. What it indicates is that the NAHB, the largest association of builders in the United States, is saying that this is a market area that it needs to be involved with so that it can give its members some type of tool that if they want to take advantage of it, they can.
There are other programs out there that are looking to certify the performance of this building type as a green home. Probably the biggest program that’s recognizable is the USGBC’s LEED program. Their new commercial construction program is the only program they have right now, but they have a number of other programs in development, and one is the LEED home program. So the fact that they’re marching forward with that product, and that the LEED new commercial product has had such a visible impact on the larger building market, is an indicator to me that the green home segment is growing quickly.
The third indicator is the number of local green home programs that have developed. And again, these are prescriptive programs that can put some type of grade on the building that’s been built, so that if a buyer is interested in this, he can go to the local Austin program or Seattle or Atlanta to see if the home meets certain criteria that have been developed.
Q: Is it more expensive to build green?
I think the consensus is that in general the first cost is going to be a little more. But it’s an evolving consideration, because as more and more manufacturers and distributors get involved in this growing industry niche, the prices are going to come down. The lifecycle cost of the building is going to be much less. That includes not just the operational costs for the occupants, but also the cost to us of this building in our environment. It’s better designed, better built, and it’s going to last longer. And when it does need to be replaced, its materials are preferred so the process of getting them into the waste stream theoretically is going to be much more beneficial than with other types of materials.