LOW-INCOME-HOUSING BUILDERS SEE GREEN

From: Dr. Jai Maharaj (usenet_at_mantra.com)
Date: 12/10/04 

Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 20:33:50 GMT

LOW-INCOME-HOUSING BUILDERS SEE GREEN

Forwarded message from fidyl@yahoo.com

[ Subject: Low-Income-Housing Builders See Green
[ From: fidyl@yahoo.com
[ Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004

Low-Income-Housing Builders See Green

By Ashlea Ebeling, 12.08.04, 6:00 AM ET

http://www.forbes.com/business/2004/12/08/cz_ae_1208beltway.html

NEW YORK - The Dec. 16 groundbreaking for Denny Park, a 50-unit
affordable housing project in Seattle, will break new financing
ground too. The project is the first in a nationwide program to
combine special "green" building funding with federal low-income
housing tax credits. To qualify as environmentally correct, the
apartments take advantage of east-west exposures, are near amenities
and public transportation and were built with durable 50-year
exterior materials and low-maintenance landscaping.

More than 100,000 affordable housing units are built every year using
the federal credit. Traditionally, "affordable" has meant low-cost
and uninventive. But developers such as the not-for-profit Low Income
Housing Institute, the Denny Park developer, have been doing small,
one-off projects seeking a higher ground.

The tiny Denny Park project is part of something much bigger. It
kicks off the Columbia, Md.-based Enterprise Foundation's Green
Communities Initiative, which is offering $550 million in equity
investment, backed by low-income-housing tax credits, for developers
to build 8,500 units of green affordable housing nationwide over five
years. The tax credit investors involved in this effort include Bank
of America (nyse: BAC - news - people ), Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM - news
- people ), Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE - news - people ), J.P. Morgan
Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) and Washington Mutual (nyse: WM -
news - people ). The Denny Park project got $5.5 million.

Bart Harvey, chief executive of the Enterprise Foundation, thinks the
program's scale will be enough to make sustainable practices
mainstream in affordable housing. "We're setting out to show that, on
a large enough scale, building green doesn't cost anything extra," he
says. "This should be a standard way that affordable housing is
thought about and designed in this country. We're taking what's
gradually occurring and giving it a big push."

But isn't building green expensive? Not necessarily. With
technological advances and a growing demand for green building
materials, the extra cost to build green can be as little as a 1% to
2% premium over traditional costs. Yet that small investment,
advocates say, can yield a big payoff in lower energy costs and even
better health (and lower medical costs) for residents.

"For whatever premium there is in the first cost, there is a payback
when you look at the life cycle of the building," says Rod Wille,
senior vice president in charge of sustainable construction for
Turner Construction. Turner has more than 85 green building projects,
with a construction value of $7.56 billion, under its belt.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency started pushing hard for
green building practices in the early 1990s, and the commercial
building industry created the U.S. Green Building Council, which sets
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification standards
and rates projects on how green they are. First came standards for
new commercial construction; then for interiors (is your carpet made
of recycled materials?); and then renovations. Other rating outfits
have gotten into the green act too--Labs 21 for laboratories and,
more recently, the Green Guide for Health Care. The Green Communities
Initiative is applying its own set of green standards in the
affordable housing arena, partially based on LEED standards.

Already, California, Oregon, New Jersey and Washington State give
low-income-housing developers who incorporate green elements extra
points on their applications to win allotments of the federal tax
credit. Harvey says that by offering equity investment money at
favorable terms only to developers who meet these green standards,
the Enterprise Foundation hopes to encourage even more states to give
preference to green building. That in turn will encourage more
developers to go green, he says.

End of forwarded message from fidyl@yahoo.com

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