leaning on green
Green building will continue growing in popularity in the tighter economy if we balance old-school comfort and forward-looking sustainability.
Green, repurposed building materials naturally complement traditional Southwestern design. At this Santa Fe home, vigas salvaged from a nearby church harmonize with earth-toned American Clay plaster walls.
As I write this column in late 2008, we are in the midst of the most difficult conditions I have seen in 35 years of design work in New Mexico. To characterize as merely “lean” the deepest correction the housing market has seen since the Great Depression is perhaps an understatement—but I am after all an optimist, and I’m intent on finding the silver lining behind the current mess. Meanwhile “green” continues to be the dominant trend in home building, and one I think is vital to the future.
It’s no coincidence that I’ve paired the two: I think that once the excesses of recent years are pared down, we’ll arrive at a fresh view of the world in which “lean” simply makes the most sense and is, in fact, a fitting complement to “green.” Let me explain.
Beginning around Y2K and continuing right through early 2007, we saw an amazing rise in construction costs—doubling during the hottest five years. Sure, it was partially a result of a hot global economy competing for energy and materials—but we can now look back and see how the housing bubble bid up prices on homes and contributed to an inflationary building cycle. Specifically, rising real estate values supported rising construction costs, while easy mortgages kept greasing the wheels. Heck, the cost of building a house didn’t matter a whole lot when you knew you could flip it for a profit in no time flat.
But as early as late summer 2006, building costs began making it more difficult to get the 60 or 80 percent financing that home builders were seeking. I don’t have to tell you that today the situation is far tighter. Real estate sales have tanked, home prices have dropped, and appraisals have pulled back even more. But building costs have merely tempered their rate of rise, leveling off in only a few areas.
Meanwhile, credit is harder to find than a creek in the sagebrush. With these elements so out of whack, I expect that it’s going to take a while before building costs and home prices are back in balance and we have a healthy market again. Of necessity, it will be a smarter, less wasteful, and leaner industry than that of the recent past.
This returns us to “green” because the efficient and intelligent use of energy and materials is, by nature, lean. It implies, among other things, building small. It also implies building really well so a house will stand for centuries rather than a few decades. At a planetary level, this is a shift that we absolutely must make in a world of growing demand and limited resources, not to mention a threatened environment. At an economic level, it’s a shift we also have to make because for most of us it’s simply too costly to be wasteful or careless of energy and resources. Lean and green is the future.
In the Southwest we do enjoy one advantage: the costs of native materials such as adobe and vigas, which are ideal for both green building and our traditional architecture, have not risen nearly as much as mainstream manufactured materials. And I do think that New Mexico will recover as fast or faster as the rest of the country, if for no other reason than that baby boomers are lined up to move here as soon as they can. By that time, a home that is lean and green—sensibly designed, energy efficient, and environmentally sound—is going to look pretty good.
Right now there’s less incentive to build from scratch when the multiple listing services are awash with unsold homes at bargain prices. People with deep pockets and boomers who’ve long been sitting on great building sites may be eager to build, but many of us will feel compelled to stick with what’s available and consider remodeling. I’d like to think that the top remodeling priority would be to upgrade energy efficiency—and indeed, I am getting increased requests for just that.
Yet a worrisome aspect of the green-building craze is that it came at the frothy end of the housing boom, more as a trendy option than as a matter of real necessity. Can green building survive in a new leaner market, or is it going to be cast aside as nice but nonessential? If Americans have to choose between old-school comfort and cutting-edge sustainability, which will it be?
You would think that in lean times, going lean and green is a no-brainer. But the truth is that many of us are stuck squarely in a dichotomy between dream house and green house. We want it big, we want it cushy, and we’d still prefer to drill for oil rather than use less of the stuff. That puts intense pressure on green builders to simultaneously deliver comfort and energy efficiency, and at low prices to boot.
Meanwhile, the notion lingers that green building costs more than conventional construction. To overcome that misperception, green builders have to deliver excellent performance, and they have to demonstrate a compelling dollars-and-cents payback from energy-efficient systems. Green absolutely must stay lean and competitive if it’s going to fulfill its promise.
So we green enthusiasts have our work cut out for us. Other parts of the world, Europe included, have always been lean, and they see energy saving as a necessity. We aren’t quite there yet, but we’re inching closer. The silver lining in the current impasse is that we have an opportunity to proactively lean down and green up rather than wait for market forces to compel us to change. The leaning of America and the greening of America must go hand in hand.
Vishu Magee designs homes around Santa Fe and Taos. He is the author of Archetype Design: House as a Vehicle for Spirit. Contact him at archetype-design.com.