The C Street Co-op packs a punch: Affordable Housing at 60% AMI? Check. Affordable homeownership? Check. Permanently affordable homeownership? Check. Net Zero Energy? Neighborhood walkability? And all this with about 10% of the subsidy required by typical affordable housing apartment buildings? Check, check, and check. Recently completed in Springfield, Oregon, the C Street Co-op has…
This is a story about a family’s determination to effect a cleaner future by building a certified passive house – a giant collection of the very big and very small choices that many owners, architects, and builders made this year, this week, today. From the owners’ perspective, the arrival of their daughter brought them greater…
My Green Roof 16 years later and I am still hanging in there with it I was on a team that proposed a green roof at the Department of Interior headquarters. I read about green roofs and their benefits in slowing down stormwater, extending the life of roofs, and more. I saw the green…
Concrete is the worlds second most used material behind water and this material alone accounts for almost 8% of the entire world's GHG emissions. This is even before considering the impacts the raw materials such as sand have to ecosystems and even crime (!) in certain parts of the world. There are ample reasons to…
Above all else, this is the story of how to do what you can, where you can, when you can. Being a good environmental neighbor to our human and non-human neighbors isn't about being perfect, but it is about making it better than you found it as much as you reasonably can. Polluted runoff is…