Green Building and Healthy Housing Concepts
These principles comprise sustainability, energy efficiency, recycling, and indoor air quality, and incorporate the "Healthy Housing" approach pioneered by HUD.
The Green Initiative will focus on properties within HUD's Section 8 portfolio, specifically properties in the Mark to Market (M2M) Program administered by the Office of Affordable Housing Preservation (OAHP).
What is Green Building?
The real estate industry, including the
housing industry (and more particularly the affordable housing industry), is undergoing
a fundamental shift toward Green Building principles.
Green Building is designed to result in a property that reduces its impact on the environment, costs less to operate, and improves the residents' quality of life.
Green building considerations start with site selection and include building placement and design, materials and techniques used in construction, and all the systems, appliances, and fixtures within the building. Wikipedia provides a good working definition for the OAHP Green Initiative:
- Green building is the practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings and their sites use and harvest energy, water, and materials, and reducing building impacts on human health and the environment, through better siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and removal - the complete building life cycle.
To
date, the focus of green initiatives has been on new construction
rather than on rehab, particularly moderate rehab that is
associated with M2M properties.
There are fewer opportunities to Go Green in rehab,
but the opportunities are significant, particularly
when viewed in the context of the M2M standard 20-year schedule of property repairs
and replacements.
Green Rehab Benefits
Green rehab practices should result in lower utility
costs that benefit HUD as well as residents and lower environmental impact. When rehab is performed
in a manner that meets both Green and Healthy Housing principles, residents will
benefit from
- lower utility costs
- improved indoor air quality
- lower risk of pest infestations
- lower levels of allergens
- reduced risk of mold-related illness
Why
apply Green principles in the M2M Program?
The M2M Program offers a unique
platform for establishing a Green Initiative in the HUD affordable housing portfolio
because it can be implemented within existing statutes, regulations, and authorities.
M2M provides opportunities to implement Green Building principles in a representative
sample of M2M restructurings involving properties that are already undergoing
rehabilitation.
As HUD's primary housing
preservation tool since its creation in 1997, OAHP has restructured more than
1,600 projects nationwide through the M2M program. These projects are privately
owned, HUD-subsidized (through Section 8), multifamily properties, with approx
100 units each, on average.
In addition to rehabilitating properties, M2M also resizes and restructures property debt to account for market rent levels, to pay for rehabilitation and 20 years' of estimated repairs and replacements, and to establish a financially viable project for the long term.
M2M provides an opportunity to test the impact of Green and Healthy Housing principles in the existing HUD-subsidized multifamily inventory by providing modest incentives to owners and purchasers to perform needed rehab and maintenance using Green alternatives, and to collect ongoing data to validate impacts on utility consumption and indoor air quality.
In developing the Green Initiative, OAHP has consulted with several industry experts, and their participation has been invaluable in the development of this outline. By launching the Green Initiative through M2M, HUD has the opportunity to continue to work with industry leaders to shape both the future of HUD's efforts and of the Greening of affordable housing in this country.
MORE INFO: http://www.hud.gov/offices/hsg/omhar/paes/greenini.cfm