Yesterday I met Lou Waddell, a very talented LEED certified AIA architect waddellarchitecture.com at Starbuck’s for coffee and we ended up talking about sustainable and Green type housing.
The idea of building LEEDS certified Single Family Homes is attractive to me because you are working with existing inventory and not tearing the whole house down and rebuilding it, which defeats the sustainable environmentally friendly aspect of Green housing.
My idea was to put a review process on some of the San Francisco’s larger employers and come out with a mortgage profile of a younger employee that is about to start a family that yields the purchase price of a house for them would be. Then select an existing property, perhaps a bank foreclosure or distressed property along BART extensions that could be remodeled and LEEDS certified. My thoughts are generally centered on 2-bedroom 1 bath homes with a small yard for a garden. I’m wondering if there would even be some community money available, or special loan programs, since these homes would in a sense be anchoring these employees of the area’s larger employers into the community. Perhaps it’s time to bring into the picture the idea of “Barn Raising” events to help neighbors as communities have done in the past?
Once we had the price and the design we would then look for investors to fund each remodel and then market them not only to the general public but through the firms that shaped the vision in the first place.
Basically what we ended up with after our discussion on our Starbuck’s paper napkin (made out of recycled paper) was a picture of an environmentally friendly, affordable house for people in decent jobs in the larger corporations in the city. We also had a series of maybe’s for future discussion.
Maybe the entire transaction would itself have to be paperless using electronic signatures and a secure transaction website to be in sync with the ethical considerations of the design.
Maybe the energy design for the home would put power back into the grid.
Maybe the backyard has a greenhouse to grow vegetables, a compost pile that is easy to maintain.
Maybe the garage has hookups for electrically recharging an automobile from storage batteries attached to a windmill.
Maybe the financing comes from investment funds whose ethics are also in line with sustainability.
Maybe one bedroom is designed to that during the day it can be transformed quickly into an office for the worker that does not have to go to the office every day.
Maybe there is an income unit attached that allowed the owner to purchase the property using their self-directed IRA and fund a portion of their retirement portfolio off of renting their income unit out.
Perhaps the private investment model could itself be turned into a regenerating fund that finances future Green housing.
The ultimate goal both Lou and I seemed to agree would be to form a team that designs a LEEDS certified affordable housing stream connecting workers to their place of employment using presently available public transportation….of course everyone in the group would have to ride bicycles to the meetings.
We ended our discussion when Lou mentioned he had to leave to get ready for his daughter’s 2nd birthday, showing me that somethings are always more important than saving the world from itself.
Posted By: 
Bill Wygant
