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Envision

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What does green affordable housing look like? How do I build it green? How does green benefit residents and the environment?

It's All About the Elements.

To start, get to know the key elements of any green building. Energy and water efficiency, good indoor air quality, waste reduction, and site design can help build community, care for the environment, and protect your bottom line in development and operations.

Decisions, decisions...

Next understand how the best opportunities to green your project come early in the design phase. Deciding to build green from the start will allow you to do much more with the same budget, in large part because doing so will get everyone on board and raise expectations about what you can accomplish jointly. Go the Decisions page.

Life (cycle) is beautiful!

Think about the economic and environmental costs and benefits of green building over the life of your affordable housing development. Look for safe, durable, and efficient materials, designs, and methods that minimize these life-cycle costs. Go to the Life-cycle page.

Measure Up

Look to green building guidelines and standards, benchmarking tools, and energy modeling software to see how your project vision measures up. Use these tools to guide your decision-making and help you verify and evaluate your team's green building efforts. Go to the Measure Up page.

Envisioning green development means taking your project to the next level. When you take advantage of all that green building has to offer, you will see how affordable housing can give residents manageable utility bills, durable, attractive, and healthy homes, and vibrant neighborhoods.

In this Section:

Elements of Green Building

Green building offers you and your team a comprehensive set of best practices to help you design and construct efficient, healthy homes that benefit the community, the environment, and...

Decisions, decisions

To build a truly green building--- one that pays off for residents, the environment, and your pocketbook--you must make a commitment to green before the first sketches are drawn. Look...

Life-Cycle Green

Building green sees beyond a project's short-term bottom line to a broader payoff, delivering returns for the economy and the environment. Life-cycle costing does the long-term math so that we...

Measure Up

As you consider your building's design, several tools can help you decide how to build green and then how to make sure that your project delivers on the promise of...