As low-income households face the dual burden of weather extremes and high energy costs, energy efficiency is an increasingly important strategy for both climate mitigation and lower utility bills.

Passive House standards — which create a building envelope so tight that central heating and cooling systems may not be needed at all — promise to dramatically slash energy costs, and are starting to appear in “stretch codes” for buildings, including in Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington and New York.

And while some builders are balking at the initial up-front cost, other developers are embracing passive house metrics as a solution for affordable multifamily housing.

“We’re trying to make zero energy, high performing buildings that are healthy and low energy mainstream everywhere,” said Katrin Klingenberg, co-founder and executive director of Passive House Institute-U.S., or Phius. 

Klingenberg says the additional work needed to meet an aggressive efficiency standard, is, in the long run, not that expensive. Constructing a building to passive standards is initially only about 3%-5% more expensive than building a conventional single family home, or 0%-3% more for multifamily construction, according to Phius.

“This is not rocket science… We’re just beefing up the envelope. We’re doing all the good building science, we’re doing all the healthy stuff. We’re downsizing the [heating and cooling] system, and now we need someone to optimize that process,” Klingenberg said. 

Phius in practice and action

A Phius-certified building does not employ a conventional central heating and cooling system. Instead, it depends on an air-tight building envelope, highly efficient ventilation and strategically positioned, high-performance windows to exploit solar gain during both winter and summer and maximize indoor comfort. 

The tight envelope for Phius buildings regulates indoor air temperature, which can be a literal lifesaver when power outages occur during extreme heat waves or cold snaps, said Doug Farr, founder and principal of architecture firm Farr Associates.

Farr pointed to the example of the Academy for Global Citizenship in Chicago, which was built to Phius standards. 

“There was a really cold snap in January. Somehow the power went out [and the building] was without electricity for two or three days. And the internal temperature in the building dropped two degrees over three days.”

Farr said that example shows a clear benefit to high efficiency that justifies the cost.

“You talk about the ultimate resilience where you’re not going to die in a power outage either in the summer or the winter. You know, that’s pretty valuable.” 

There is also a business case to be made for implementing Phius and other sustainability metrics into residential construction, such as lowered bills that can appeal to market-rate buyers and renters, and reduced long-term maintenance costs for building owners. 

AJ Patton, founder and CEO of 548 Enterprise in Chicago, says in response to questions about how to convince developers to consider factors beyond the bottom line, simply, “they shouldn’t.”

Instead, he touts lower operating costs for energy-efficiency metrics rather than climate mitigation when he pitches his projects to his colleagues. 

“I can’t sell people on climate change anymore,” he said. “If you don’t believe by now, the good Lord will catch you when He catch you.

“But if I can sell you on lowering your operating expenses, if I can sell you on the marketability, on the fact that your tenants will have 30%, 40% lower individual expenses, that’s a marketing angle from a developer owner, that’s what I push on my contemporaries,” Patton said. “And then that’s when they say, ‘if you’re telling the truth, and if your construction costs are not more significant than mine, then I’m sold.’”

Phius principles can require specialized materials and building practices, Klingenberg said. But practitioners are working toward finding ways to manage costs by sourcing domestically available materials rather than relying on imports.

“The more experienced an architect [or developer] gets, they understand that they can replace these specialized components with more generic materials and you can get the same effect,” Klingenberg said.

Patton is presently incorporating Phius principles as the lead developer for 3831 W Chicago Avenue, a mixed use development located on Chicago’s West Side. The project, billed as the largest passive house design project in the city to date, will cover an entire city block, incorporating approximately 60 mixed-income residential units and 9,000 sq ft of commercial and community space.

Another project, Sendero Verde, located in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City, is the largest certified passive-house building in the United States with 709 units. Completed in April, Sendero Verde is designed to provide cool conditions in the summer and warmth during the winter — a vast improvement for the low-income and formerly unhoused individuals and families who live there.

Barriers and potential solutions

Even without large upfront building cost premiums and with the increased impact of economies of scale, improved technology and materials, many developers still feel constrained to cut costs, Farr said.

“There’s entire segments of the development spectrum in housing, even in multifamily housing in Chicago, where if you’re a developer of rental housing time and again …  they feel like they have no choice but to keep things as the construction as cheap as possible because their competitors all do. And then, some architecture firms only work with those ‘powerless’ developers and they get code-compliant buildings.”

But subsidies, such as federal low income housing credits, IRS tax breaks and resources from the Department of Energy also provide a means for developers to square the circle, especially for projects aimed toward very low-income residents. 

Nonetheless, making the numbers work often requires taking a long-term view of development, according to Brian Nowak, principal at Sweetgrass Design Studio in Minnesota. Nowak was the designer for Hillcrest Village, an affordable housing development in Northfield that does not utilize Phius building metrics, but does incorporate net-zero energy usage standards.

“It’s an investment over time, to build resilient, energy-efficient housing,” he told the Energy News Network in June 2023.

“That should be everyone’s goal. And if we don’t, for example, it affects our school system. It affects the employers at Northfield having people that are readily available to come in and fill the jobs that are needed.

“That’s a significant long-term benefit of a project like this. And that is not just your monthly rents on the building; it’s the cost of the utilities as well. When those utilities include your electricity and your heating and cooling that’s a really big deal.”

Developers like Patton are determined to incorporate sustainability metrics into affordable housing and commercial developments both because it’s good business and because it’s the right thing to do.

“I’m not going to solve every issue. I’m going to focus on clean air, clean water, and lowering people’s utility bills. That’s my focus. I’m not going to design the greatest architectural building. I’m not even interested in hiring those type of architects. 

“I had a lived experience of having my heat cut off in the middle of winter. I don’t want that to ever happen to anybody I know ever again,” Patton said. “So if I can lower somebody’s cost of living, that’s my sole focus. And there’s been a boatload of buy-in from that, because those are historically [not] things [present] in the communities I invest in.”

No longer a niche, Passive House standards becoming a solution for highly efficient affordable housing is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Massachusetts has awarded $53 million — and announced plans for additional funding — to allow affordable housing operators to execute energy efficiency retrofits that are expected to reduce carbon emissions, cut energy bills, and create healthier, more comfortable homes for residents. 

The state in late July announced the second round of awards in the Affordable Housing Decarbonization Grant Program, allocating $26.1 million to five organizations to improve insulation, tighten building envelopes, and switch to heat pump heating and cooling systems. These grants come seven months after an initial round of $27.4 million was awarded to seven affordable housing operators statewide. 

“This has been a really critical funding stream for moving forward critical energy projects at some of our family public housing sites,” said Joel Wool, deputy administrator for sustainability and capital transformation at the Boston Housing Authority, which received grants in both rounds.

Along with the most recent round of awards, the state also announced it would invest another $40 million into the program in anticipation of giving out another set of grants in the fall.

The program was designed to address two major policy goals: decarbonization and addressing the state’s affordable housing crisis. 

Massachusetts has set the ambitious goal of going carbon-neutral by 2050. Buildings — which contribute 35% of the state’s carbon emissions — are a particularly important sector to target for decarbonization. This means finding ways to retrofit the state’s existing housing stock, much of which is drafty, heated by fossil fuels, and decades — or even centuries — old. 

At the same time, Massachusetts is experiencing an acute housing crisis. State officials estimate at least 200,000 new homes are needed to accommodate demand by 2030. Finding an affordable home is even more challenging for lower-income residents faced with soaring rents and home prices — and often, high energy bills. 

“We have such a housing crisis in Massachusetts that we want to do anything we can to create more housing, but also to make the housing we have now a better place to live,” said state Energy Department Commissioner Elizabeth Mahony. “These are investments in our infrastructure.”

Nonprofit Worcester Common Ground received an $820,000 grant in the latest round that it will use to complete deep energy retrofits on four buildings that were last updated some 30 years ago. The money will allow the renovations to include air sealing, more energy-efficient windows, and extra insulation. The grant will also allow the buildings to go fully electric, including with air source heat pumps that will provide lower-cost, more comfortable heating and cooling.

“Even though it’s a higher upfront cost, the hope is that maybe it reduces expenses going forward,” said Timothy Gilbert, project manager for Worcester Common Ground. “It might sound a little cheesy but we really do care about the well-being of the folks who live in our houses.”

In most cases, the grant money is being combined with other funding to allow more complete — and even downright ambitious — upgrades. In Worcester, other funding sources will pay for rooftop solar panels that will make the newly energy-efficient buildings even more cost-effective and environmentally friendly. The Boston Housing Authority is using its latest $5.8 million award as part of a larger project that aims to completely decarbonize the Franklin Fields housing development in the Dorchester neighborhood by combining energy efficiency upgrades and Boston’s first networked geothermal system. 

In the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, the Madison Park Development Corporation is receiving $13.5 million from the Affordable Housing Decarbonization Grant Program to do work at its 331-unit Orchard Gardens development. But it is also seeking out other sources to meet the $20 million expected cost of the planned sustainability upgrades.

“It’s a big property and the heart of one of Boston’s oldest, most diverse, most underserved neighborhoods,” said Oren Richkin, senior project manager for the organization. “This grant money is pivotal for this project.”

Supporters of the program are expecting it to strengthen the state’s ability to respond to climate change in the future as well. Switching affordable housing units from fossil fuel heating to heat pump heating and cooling will allow residents to stay comfortable and safe in their own homes during increasingly hot summers, Wool said. 

The funding could also help nudge the ideas of deep energy retrofits and electrification more into the mainstream, Mahony said. 

“We are essentially socializing these programs — the more we do it, the more people will get used to the ideas,” she said. 

As the recipients of the first round of grants begin their projects, the state is starting to learn how to operate the program more effectively. The state has already, for example, started providing some technical assistance to organizations interested in applying for future rounds of funding. Continued conversations with building owners and nonprofits will be essential to creating an even stronger program moving forward, Mahony said.

“We’re setting ourselves up for success in the future,” she said.

Massachusetts awards $53 million to help affordable housing operators cut emissions and make homes healthier is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.