Affordable by design: building an eco-house on a tight budget is no longer an impossible dream - includes related article on Habitat's Environmental Initiative Partnership - Cover Story

E: The Environmental Magazine, July-August, 1997 by Alice Horrigan

The principle "small is beautiful" is often held aloft by environmentalists, but it's not always practiced by Earth-conscious architects, whose tony showcase eco-homes are sometimes sprawling mansions. "Unfortunately, green building is generally accessible only to large commercial projects or affluent homeowners," says Matt Petersen, executive director of Venice, California-based Global Green USA.

"We could solve an awful lot of the problems in this country if the average couple and their kids could move into a house they could afford," says George James, program manager for the Department of Energy (DOE) Building America Program, which promotes energy efficient, environmentally sound housing. But, he says, "Most architects are only interested in that one-of-a-kind castle for somebody, and that's not helping the overall situation."

A small but dedicated crop of architects and developers, however, is trying to rethink the concept of the eco-home to meet the needs of average folk who don't have a lot of green to throw around. And some designs are already on the market, bringing the dream of living closer to the Earth closer to reality for the average American.

The Cost of Green

Eco-housing, green development, sustainable design - environmentally-sound housing has as many names as it has definitions. In its broadest logic, an eco-home strives to cause low adverse impact on the environment, and to use materials that provide a healthy living environment, maximizing indoor air quality and providing plenty of natural light.

The Rocky Mountain Institute, in its Primer on Sustainable Building, flexibly describes this new kind of architecture as "taking less from the Earth and giving more to people." In practice, "green" housing varies widely. It can range from being energy efficient and using nontoxic interior finishes to being constructed of recycled materials and completely powered by the sun. The city of Austin, Texas initiated the first rating system for environmentally responsible buildings; most of the rest of the country has yet to standardize the concept.

If you're building on a budget, the standard eco-home is not for you. In Your Natural Home, authors Janet Marinelli and Paul Bierman-Lytle propose that a "moderate budget" of $80 to $125 per square foot will yield a home with extremely energy-efficient windows and such features as a ground-source heat pump, a solar hot water system and radiant floors.

Yet the median size of an American home, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), is 1,920 square feet. This puts the cost of a "moderate" eco-home in the $153,600 to $240,000 range, too pricey for most people. (The Mortgage Bankers Association calculates the average mortgage in the U.S. at $106,750.)

Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts-based architect Betsy Pettit designed a dozen eco-homes in Dallas for much less, working with a developer who wanted to "do the right thing"; they sold for $80,000 each, including the land. Such projects, although on the rise, are a rarity in subsidized low-income housing developments. They're almost non-existent in the mainstream housing market.

The median sales price of a new conventional home in 1995, including land, was $133,900 ($69 per square foot). This means more than half the nation's new home buyers fall into Marinelli's and Bierman-Lytle's "tight budget" category ($30 to $80 per square foot) for an eco-home. In that range, they advise, a home builder may be able to orient a house for solar gain, take measures to mitigate indoor air pollution and replace the traditional lawn with a low-maintenance native garden, but "won't be able to afford cutting-edge products and technologies."

The prevailing "green castle" motif reflects a shortage of impetus and ingenuity on the part of architects, developers and government programs. Compact eco-homes, for instance, are more sustainable in every way: They're a bargain to build, maintain and operate. Yet blueprints for such homes are as scarce as old-growth cedar.

New green technologies tend to be first tried on wealthy clients, points out the Vermont-based newsletter, Environmental Building News.

This trickle-down theory permeates green design and building. It effectively insulates architects and developers against sober scrutiny when they put the stamp of "sustainability" on their designs. While the new technologies are indeed expensive, other forces many of them cultural - are just as strong in keeping green homes out of reach.

As a group, for instance. American architects are only vaguely interested in affordable housing. In the latest survey by the American Institute of Architecture (AIA), only 500 of its 58,000 members (fewer than one percent) identified affordable housing as a primary interest. The AIA's National Committee on the Environment, dedicated to sustainable building practices, hasn't considered affordability with urgency. "We're thinking about it for next year as an angle," says Chris Gribbs, director for environment programs. "You can only cover so many issues at one time."