Green building adds to affordability

Developers of low-income housing find energy efficiency helps save even more

By Dan Schauer

Pamplin Media Group, Mar 13, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

JIM CLARK / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

At Station Place Tower, residents such as Barney Loop have to enter a lottery to get one of the 17 personal garden plots on the rooftop terrace, part of a roof system that supplies the buildings’ toilets and fire sprinklers with rainwater. Hummingbird feeders catch the rain, too.

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Count developers of affordable housing among Portland’s green building leaders.

Portland-area nonprofit organizations have earned national recognition for projects that demonstrate the benefits of sustainability across an economic, environmental and social spectrum.

When it comes to providing green homes for low- and moderate-income families, nonprofit housing development corporations “are on the forefront of innovation, quality design and affordability” says Kelly Caffarelli, executive director of the Home Depot Foundation.

The home improvement retailer’s foundation honored nonprofits at work in Portland, Tigard and Clackamas at the Enterprise Network Conference last October.

The winning community development corporations’ accomplishments show it’s no longer a question of whether green building is too expensive, but whether it’s too costly to ignore it.

“If you think about how to optimize green building for the most benefit, it’s by building green in an affordable manner for people of low income,” says Nancy Yuill, executive director of Clackamas Community Land Trust, which won first prize in homeownership for its SE Phillips Creek development. “These are the people who need it the most and who benefit the most.”

To low-income, savings count

So does it make good business sense to pay for green-built affordable housing? Going green adds between 5 percent and 10 percent to the initial bottom line, according to Kevin Kraus, construction manager at Reach Community Development Inc.

“If you’re in it for the long run like we are, it’s worth paying for energy-efficient and sustainable components up front that reduce ongoing operations, maintenance, utility and repair costs,” Kraus says.

A specific innovation that nonprofits have adapted out of financial necessity in order to build green at a responsible cost is an integrated design process. Simply put, the contractors, architect and developer start working together earlier to identify cost savings and resolve complicated regulatory, code and permit issues.

“It’s more productive to bring the contractor and design team together early on,” says Dan VanBrabant, partner at Oregon Construction Co. and builder of six new row houses at Southeast Powell Boulevard and 33rd Avenue for first-time homeowners.

“On both sides (nonprofit and for-profit) you have people who want to build green and people who could care less,” VanBrabant says. Nonprofit builders provide a “proactive environment to work in, and the quality and the cost reflect that.”

One of the green-building paybacks for Reach comes when it acts as property manager of the projects it creates.

“Building green makes sense because it lowers the ongoing energy costs for renters and owners with less disposable income,” says Dee Walsh, Reach’s executive director.

Roof tops it off

Reach’s Station Place Tower at Northwest Ninth Avenue and Lovejoy Street, which won the national runner-up prize in rental housing from the Home Depot Foundation, helps bring a measure of income diversity to the Pearl District for renters 55 and older.

Downsizing to fit into his one-bedroom unit and finding good, reasonably priced places to eat in his new neighborhood has occupied Michael Blakeslee, who moved into Station Place Tower in February.

Blakeslee made an appeal for gardening tips at a recent meeting of residents interested in tending the raised-bed gardens on the tower’s rooftop terrace.

“There’s a lot of knowledge among gardeners. You’ll be taken care of,” says Barney Loop, 71, to Blakeslee.

He’ll have to win a plot first. A lottery was held to determine how to share the 17 planting spaces among 30 interested residents.

The rooftop terrace is a component of the building’s most noteworthy green innovation. The roof harvests rainwater for a 17,000-gallon tank built into the ground floor that supplies the tower’s dual-flush toilets and fire sprinklers, saving water from the city’s mains while capturing and slowing runoff to the municipal sanitary sewer system and the Willamette River.