Affordable by Design
Building an Eco-House on a Tight Budget is No Longer an Impossible Dream
By Alice Horrigan
From E Magazine (enivrolink.org)
The principle "small is beautiful" is often held aloft by environmentalists, but it's not always practiced by Earth-conscious architects, whose showcase eco-homes are sometimes sprawling mansions.
A small but dedicated crop of architects and developers is rethinking the concept of the eco-home to meet the needs of average folk who don't have a lot of green to throw around.
The Cost of Green
The Rocky Mountain Institute, in its Primer on Sustainable Building, describes
this new kind of architecture as "taking less from the Earth and giving
more to people." In practice, "green" housing ranges from being
energy efficient and using nontoxic interior finishes to being constructed of
recycled materials and completely powered by the sun.
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 a "moderate budget" of $80 - $125 per square foot for 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, 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, or $69 per square foot.)
In the "tight budget" category ($30 to $80 per square foot) 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."
Tim Maloney of Kentucky-based One Design, Inc., designer of a $40,000 compact eco-home, says he was "dumbfounded" when the first prize at an AIA-sponsored environmental housing competition went to a "zillion-dollar house that used an earth-tone color key." Maloney believes that most houses in the U.S. are too big. There's a deep-rooted "bias against tiny," he says.
Affordable green housing is expensive to design, and not a big money-maker for architects. "It takes a lot of research to stay on top of the game" notes Austin-based architect Peter Pfeiffer, who is on the board of Casa Verde, a firm that builds low-income green housing in Austin. "Frankly, you've got to go with who's going to pay you to do it."
Erector Set with a Roof -- at $10,000
The cost of eco-construction can be significantly lowered by using cheaper materials,
including recycled-content, and making houses smaller. Austin-based architect
Pliny Fisk, co-director of the non-profit Center for Maximum Potential Building
Systems, is doing both. For less than what many people pay for two years' rent,
he has designed "a real, honest-to-goodness grow home"--a studio apartment-style
house that "grows" incrementally with the intended ease of an erector
set.
With a post-and-beam framework of recycled steel, the house uses various materials for walls, depending on regional availability. The first prototypes have walls of pressed straw paneling, widely available in Texas. In other ecological zones, different recycled-content, pressed-panel materials such as sawdust/cement composites and nontoxic, recycled styrofoam might be used. All elements of the house can be assembled with simple hand tools.
At 256 square feet, the "core" of the GreenForms house is Lilliputian, but rooms can be added as the homeowner saves money. It includes a solar hot-water heater and air collector for passive heating, a radiant barrier system in the roof for venting summer heat, and high re-radiating roof paints. For heating and cooling, a pipe snakes underneath a "very good looking" earthen floor of soil stabilized with cement. It connects to a ground-source heat pump system buried, together with the waste-water system, in the yard.
The house has one very unusual but startlingly logical feature: a completely mobile kitchen--including stove, sink, and cabinets. On hot summer days, the whole kitchen can go outside onto a breezeway. The estimated building cost, including the adaptable kitchen, dinette, loft, porch, bathroom, waste-water system and non-toxic interior finishes, is $8,000 to $10,000. Additional bedrooms are estimated at $4,000 each. The design offers freedom from a punishing mortgage, allowing for financing "in a very incremental way," says Fisk. By year's end, Fisk hopes to offer a basic plan series for approximately $45 and an optional starter kit for $2,000 to $3,000.
Just a Little Green
An equally insurgent design with a more traditional look is the ECCO House,
offered by Tim Maloney of Kentucky-based One Design, Inc. At 580 square feet,
it's billed as "the world's smallest luxury home," sporting an 18-foot
cathedral ceiling in the kitchen/living room and a whirlpool bath in the master
suite.
At about $69 per square foot (not including land) the ECCO House is far from dirt cheap. But the idea of the compact design is to squeeze the highest quality out of each square foot and to keep the mortgage, maintenance and energy bills down.
The appealing wee home offers a 34-foot line of sight from any spot, for instance, giving it a spacious feel. Ecological elements include solar preheated water, a built-in commode sink for recycling hand-wash water, ample natural light, color-balanced fluorescent artificial lighting, non-toxic paints and floor coverings, and recycled plastic and wood deck lumber, counter tops and mantel. Heating and cooling is a bargain (about $100 a year in the Virginia climate), with passive solar heating supplemented by a gas-log fireplace.
The DOE, which chose the ECCO House in its Exemplary Buildings Program, conducted a numerical simulation, walking the design through a typical weather-year in Richmond, Virginia and Pittsburgh. "We came up with 60 percent savings when compared to the Model Energy Code house," says Paul Tosselini, engineer at the DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. "Few houses meet the Model Energy Code."
According to Maloney, who spent 17 years developing the design with a group of "far-sighted" investors, the ECCO House fits on one-tenth of an acre, can be built on any type of foundation anywhere in the country, and is easy to mortgage. "One of the last things you learn in a career in alternative housing is that it better use utterly conventional trade tools or it ain't gonna happen," he says.
The estimated construction cost (in Virginia) of the ECCO House is $40,000, including appliances, floor covering, landscaping and contracted labor. Maloney sells three sets of blueprints for $395, including a standard expansion of 240 square feet that adds a dining room and an extra bedroom and bathroom.
The "Ecology House"
The "Ecology House" is a passive solar two bedroom starter" home
with cathedral ceilings and an open floor plan. It is suitable for northern
climates in such areas as New York and Denver. With about 1,400 square feet
of living space, it includes a solar-heated basement which is earth-bermed on
non-south-facing sides, and an optional 162-square-foot greenhouse. "In
a small footprint, every square inch is used," says Donald Watson, the
Trumbell, Connecticut-based architect.
Like Maloney's design, these plans suggest using structural stressed skin foam paneling for the walls, because it's easy to work with, uses minimal wood and achieves a reasonable level of insulation and air-tightness. The approximate building cost is $96,000. Heating and cooling costs are estimated at $100 per year. Watson sells the plans at cost, for $99.
Whether one starts with green or conventional blueprints, architect Peter Pfeiffer suggests reading up on "site specificness"--how to orient the house for best solar gain and prevailing winds. "The window orientation and wind are crucial," says Pfeiffer.
The Ecology House "probably has 24 ways to respond to climate," says Watson. "You cannot fine-tune a house unless you understand its local situation." Pfeiffer recommends hiring an architect for $200 to $300 to review the plans and the building site. The architect might help reduce building costs by, for example, pointing out that in a certain climate and building site, simple overhangs could replace exotic low-E windows called for in the plans. "People think they have to be building a quarter-million-dollar home to make it worth hiring an architect." says Pfeiffer. "Get some good consultation and maybe save a few thousand in construction."
Modular Eco-Homes for the Masses
The Hickory Consortium, a group of Boston developers, builders, architects and
manufacturers, is working with the DOE to design "Eco-Dynamic" housing.
Using a modular approach (factory-built pieces shipped for on-site assembly),
two recently completed energy-efficient and nontoxic homes were approximately
20 percent less expensive to build than comparable conventional ones.
Some low-cost green housing developments are sprouting up across the country. Austin probably leads, with its progressive Green Builder program, but projects also are gaining momentum in Boulder, Chicago, Florida and California.
In Dallas, architect Betsy Pettit and engineer Joe Lstiburek designed a 12-house development, "Esperanza del Sol," with 1,270-square-foot, three-bedroom homes that maximize winter solar gain and natural lighting, shading and ventilation. The $80,000 homes are heavily insulated and have controlled ventilators to ensure circulation of fresh air. In Chicago, Shaw Homes is experimenting with a resource-efficient inner city development with 1,670-square-foot homes for about $90,000.
Greening Habitat for Humanity
Habitat affiliates are learning the fundamentals of passive solar design, hazardous
paint disposal, and waste recycling from construction sites. They are also learning
to broaden the concept of affordable housing to include ongoing expenses for
utilities, availability of transportation and ability to grow food.
At least 20 Habitat affiliates are building low-cost houses using green concepts. The average cost of a Habitat home, in the area of 1,000 square feet, is $38,000--including land, permitting costs, skilled subcontractors and materials at market value, but excluding labor, which for Habitat is all volunteer.
Habitat's target clients, however, are limited to people at 20 percent of the median income level. Because Habitat has a unique specialty in low-cost housing with 1,400 affiliates in 50 states (3,800 houses built in 1996), the organization's work may eventually "trickle up" to other low-cost housing developments and to individuals of any income level looking to build an affordable green home.
According to Frank Purvis, director of Environment for Habitat International, "Anyone is welcome to contact a Habitat affiliate and ask for house plans."
Habitat for Humanity: Americus, GA; (912) 924-6935
Earthly Goods
Many eco-homes made of alternative construction materials are cheaper--although
controversy rages over exactly which materials are best in both quality and
cost-effectiveness.
David Easton, the principal designer at Rammed Earth Works in Napa, California, has created a relatively low-end, 1,241 square-foot home of "rammed" earth--massive walls of compacted soil--for $80,000 ($64 per square foot). The two-bedroom home includes active and passive solar systems, radiant "terra-tile" flooring (of earth and cement) and alcoves and bookcases carved from 24-inch-thick walls. In Napa, California, heating and cooling costs are estimated at $150 per year.
In The Straw Bale House, authors Steen et.al. suggest that a "moderate" budget for a straw home, completely contractor built, is $50 to $80 per square foot, and the total "life cycle" cost (over 30 years, including construction, finance and energy) saves thousands over conventional designs. Climate, local building permit requirements and regional availability of baled straw all affect the price.
Contacts:
Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems: Austin, TX. (512) 928-4786
Center for Resourceful Building Technology: Missoula, MT (406) 549-7678