Unreasonably BOULD: A Social Enterprise for Affordable Homes and Green Building Education

Shane Gring
Co-Founder + Director of Operations
BOULD

Imagine a world where potential is not governed by what we're told to be, the only fear is not giving enough, and business-as-usual, is a little more...unreasonable.

As a USGBC Emerging Professional, Colorado Chapter member, and young social entrepreneur, this is the world I’m working to create.

After a year serving Flatirons Habitat for Humanity (Boulder, Colorado) as an AmeriCorps VISTA, I approached a fork in the road. Do I confirm my acceptance to graduate school and pursue my Masters of Architecture? Or, do I pursue a slightly less conventional path: one filled with incredible potential, but also substantial uncertainty?

Two years later, after the completion of 17 LEED-registered affordable homes, the training of 115 now-qualified LEED Professional exam candidates, and fundraising of $20,000 for affordable housing builders, you will see that I chose the latter.

In 2010, at age 23, I co-founded a social enterprise, called BOULD, with the ambitious mission to eliminate substandard housing through green building education.

BOULD staff, Brian Brunsing in action at a LEED Platinum seeking Habitat for Humanity home in Boulder, Colorado

Here’s how it works. First, we train local affordable housing builders (AHBs), like Habitat for Humanity, to transform housing projects into structured, green building classrooms for career developing professionals and students. Our program, EverbuildPRO, provides leadership opportunities at all phases of a project: from design development to LEED documentation to on-site construction. Upon program completion, participants have the project experience they need to qualify for LEED accreditation, the world’s preeminent green building credential. Then, in return for the opportunity, professionals pay a tuition fee that is shared between BOULD and the AHB, making “green” affordable and accessible for all.

Congressional Members Introduce Building Efficiency Measure

Bryan Howard
Legislative Director
U.S. Green Building Council

Yesterday, Representative Charles Bass (NH) and Representative Jim Matheson (UT) introduced bipartisan legislation that deploy energy efficiency programs across many sectors of the built environment.

H.R. 4017, “The Smart Energy Act,” picks up on the bipartisan work of Senators Jeanne Shaheen (NH) and Rob Portman (OH), by enhancing financing options for building efficiency at the Department of Energy (DOE), as well as boosting energy conservation within the federal government by expanding the use of private financing tools to pay for energy-efficient building upgrades and consolidating federal energy data centers.

In a statement, Congressman Bass helped demonstrate the need for action to advance energy efficiency by saying:

"The federal government spends $7 billion annually to heat, cool, and operate its 445,000 buildings. Given our nation's fiscal constraints, a common-sense place to save taxpayer dollars is by improving the energy efficiency of the hundreds of thousands of federal buildings across the country."

In a letter to the sponsors, USGBC Vice President of National Policy Jason Hartke applauded the introduction of the bill, saying:

“Programs like these offer significant opportunities to leverage private financing to deliver real utility savings to school districts, municipal governments and expand investment opportunities for private commercial real-estate.”

While this bill is far from being sent to the President for his signature, the introduction of this bipartisan legislation is an important first step in the process of increasing our nation's energy efficiency.

Senate Efficiency Champions Advance Elements of Recent USGBC Report

Bryan Howard
Legislative Director
U.S. Green Building Council

As members of the House and Senate tax writing committees continue to negotiate over the extension payroll tax cut and other tax incentives, six senators of the Senate Finance Committee, spearheaded by Olympia Snowe (ME) and Jeff Bingaman (NM) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Acting Director Department of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Jeffrey Zients urging them to advance policies to improve energy efficiency and continue to support clean energy incentives.

                                             

Specifically, the letter calls on Treasury and OMB to improve the guidance on the 179D Energy Efficient Commercial Building Tax Deduction.  

“…as authors of the Energy Efficient Commercial Building Deduction (U.S.C 179D) we support the Administration’s Better Building Initiative to reduce energy consumption in the commercial building sector. Consistent with the President’s announcement on December 1, 2011, we encourage the Administration to issue guidance for partial deduction pathways for the building envelope as well as the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. In addition, we strongly support the effort to simplify the 179D tax deduction, especially for existing buildings, and look forward to working with you in this effort.

For the second time in two years, the U.S. Green Building Council has convened a diverse group of 15 businesses and organizations to help develop a series of green building policy recommendations that could be achieved via executive action. The report, Better Buildings through Executive Action, includes a recommendation on updating guidance on the use of Section 179D, the deduction for investment in energy efficient commercial buildings

“To encourage uptake of the partial deduction outside of lighting upgrades, IRS/DOE should issue guidance that avoids expensive performance modeling but rather instructs which particular pieces of high-efficiency heating, cooling, and building envelope materials and equipment should be installed that would meet existing savings targets already announced for those systems.”

We are happy these recommendations are being reviewed by policy makers throughout the federal government and hope that the Department of Treasury acts on this important recommendation since they have firsthand knowledge that green building sits at the nexus of saving people money, saving energy and creating jobs.

For more information on 179D, read our post  "Encouraging Energy Efficiency: A Tax Fix Everyone Can Get Behind"

Who’s Benefitting from Project Haiti?

Marisa Long 
External Relations Manager
U.S. Green Building Council

As part of the USGBC community, you’ve been introduced to Project Haiti over the past year. You’ve heard us talk about rebuilding this orphanage and children’s center in Port-au-Prince that was destroyed in the earthquake that devastated the region just over two years ago.

You know that Project Haiti is set to achieve LEED Platinum and the impact that will have – from creating jobs and teaching local Haitians how to “build back better” to providing a resilient model for rebuilding that all countries can learn from and replicate. As Roger Limoges, Project Haiti lead and vice president of organizational development at USGBC says, “If we can build LEED Platinum in Haiti, we can do it anywhere.” Project Haiti is a powerful symbol of what’s possible in the green building movement and its impact will be vast.

 Marisa Long with children at the Crèche at Lamardelle

But it’s of course more than that. What you haven’t heard us talk much about is Fondation Enfant Jesus (FEJ), the beneficiaries of Project Haiti. It wasn’t until last week, when I traveled to Haiti myself, met the amazing people from FEJ and spent time with the children and staff at their facilities, that I fully understood the impact this project will have on FEJ and the communities it unselfishly serves.

House Bill Puts Transportation Programs in Reverse

Bryan Howard
Legislative Director
U.S. Green Building Council

Next week, the House is expected to debate H.R. 7 “American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act.” The bill is the long awaited legislative product to reauthorize a number of federal highway, transit, rail, planning, trail and other programs. Unfortunately, H.R. 7 doesn’t look to be long term solution to our nation’s surface transportation problems.

H.R. 7 provides roughly $260 billion over five years for transportation needs including roads and bridges, bus and rail, and other programs. Regrettably, the proposal removes the small funds from transit in the motor fuel tax and redirects it into highway spending. This means that projects to support or expand bus, light rail and other transit efforts would no longer have a predictable funding source. Projects like these would be subject to yearly funding battles in the appropriations process that would pit programs against each other for funds. This is a sad development that would likely yield minimal investment in modes of transportation that help to ease congestion on our already crowded streets.

Congressman Earl Blumenauer with the USGBC staff and the board of directors at the Capitol Visitor Center in 2010

 
USGBC joined more than 75 national organizations — including the Transportation for America, the American Public Transportation Association, American Society of Civil Engineers, and the National Association of Counties— and a list of other individuals and state & local groups urging the House Ways and Means Committee to reject policies that would undermine investment in transit programs, but unfortunately this effort largely fell on deaf ears.

Transit advocate Congressman Earl Blumenauer (OR) summed up the bill with pinpoint accuracy. “Rather than taking a serious approach to strengthening our transportation system, this bill will make it more difficult for local communities to have the flexibility and support necessary to build and maintain transportation systems that serve all of their citizens, to offer transportation choices, and to encourage economic development.”

For more information on how to voice your concerns click here.

Obama Budget Charts Bold Course for Green Building Priorities

Bryan Howard
Legislative Director
U.S. Green Building Council

On Monday, President Obama released an ambitious $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2013 that seeks to pump billions of dollars into the economy through clean energy and infrastructure improvements, while seeking to eliminate existing incentives for oil and gas and ending tax cuts for those making more than $250,000.

As part of the Better Buildings Initiative, a 10-year initiative to make non-residential build¬ings 20 percent more energy efficient, the budget aims to re-design the cur¬rent tax deduction for commercial buildings 179D to a credit, and change the eligibility program to cover other taxable entities such as real estate investment trusts (REITS). This budget proposal mirrors a 2012 request made by the Obama Administration, which has yet to get traction on the hill. USGBC has been working with others in the real estate and environmental community to advance solutions to improve the existing 179D so it is encouraging that the Administration continues to show support for improving the deduction.

The budget also includes billions of dollars to modernize at least 35,000 schools across the country, including energy-efficiency upgrades and comprehensive, green retrofits. This proposal was included in the President’s American Jobs Act last year but has yet to be considered by Congress.

Project Haiti IV

Sally Gimbert
Structural Engineering Technician
HOK

This entry was cross-posted from MetropolisMag.com.

USGBC's close collaborators in Project Haiti, global architectural firm HOK, have published a series of blog entries on their efforts to design the first LEED Platinum orphanage and children's center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Their pro-bono design efforts have been met with great enthusiasm, but also unique challenges. Read more about the design process for Project Haiti on HOKlife.com.

Early in the Project Haiti process, our team decided to meet the design requirements of the ICC 2009 International Building Code—also encouraged by the Haitian government for new construction since the 2010 earthquake. We were already familiar with the code and so we believed it would provide the best opportunity to create excellent design. Selecting a code was also a means by which we could ensure the safety of occupants.

HOK has never worked in Haiti before. Our partner, the U.S. Green Building Council, is focused on adapting to a new global perspective in sustainable design. These two factors made for a project with unique challenges. And, we knew at the outset that we’d have difficulty following codes written for consumer-based, resource-rich nations.

Amidst the chaos in the earthquake’s aftermath, an underlying sense of self-enforced order supports the Haitian desire to own and operate at a Western standard. They, too, are looking to build fiscally sound, structurally stable, and economically progressive projects. The difficulty? Haiti has very little infrastructure to support these goals. As we work with the code here, three items continually demand our attention: constantly checking on the realistic cost of building to code, developing an educated workforce to achieve code-compliant design, and the acquisition of materials in a resource-poor country.

The residential streets of Port-au-Prince. (image courtesy of HOK).

It is easy to make assumptions about infrastructure in the U.S. An engineer working in St Louis, for instance, can have confidence that when she/he specifies a high-strength structural bolt, it will be available domestically, with little to no lead time, and at a reasonable price – all saving time and money while easily meeting the code. This is not the case in Haiti. Port-au-Prince only recently acquired such basic things as garbage trucks – a welcome site for residents living on streets lined with goat-eaten trash and building debris.