Green Building
Austin in the Vanguard of
New Building Trend

by Stephen Beers
Photography by Barton Wilder Custom Images
Also read "What Makes a Home Green?"

A quiet revolution is beginning right here in Austin-a change that is happening somewhere close to you, perhaps under your very own roof. It is the growing trend toward green building.

Austin Energy sponsors the award-winning Green Building Program, which gets a great deal of credit for nurturing the trend. The city program in turn helped spark a lively grass-roots movement of building professionals and homeowners, who gather in monthly meetings of the Sustainable Building Coalition.

Why go green? The reasons are many-to save energy, materials, water, money, and the environment. According to the City of Austin's Green Building Program manual, Green by Design, "Half of all energy and materials we produce and almost a quarter of the water we use in the (United States)" are used in buildings.

Green homes run the gamut from luxurious mansions to humble houses built by Habitat for Humanity, a Christian ministry that builds basic shelter for the poor. Advocates say these are beautiful buildings that make for comfortable living. They claim the homes save money while saving the planet. These environmentally friendly designs feature well-insulated and weatherized buildings equipped with efficient lighting, appliances, and heating and cooling systems. Passive solar designs and solar hot water heaters are incorporated in many dwellings. Saving water is also a priority with xeriscape lawns, low-flow toilets and showerheads, and high-efficiency dishwashers and washing machines. Many homeowners in the country around Austin capture rainwater from the rooftop for their household water needs.

Residents of green housing reportedly enjoy better personal health due to less toxic indoor environments. A better-sealed home means fewer problems with allergies and a quieter, more comfortable dwelling.

Many builders tout the benefits of a better built home using durable, low maintenance materials like fiber-cement siding, roofing tiles, stucco and stone. Other people prefer the aesthetics of "new" materials like compressed earth or straw bale.

Local builder Warren Spain of Escarpment Construction says, "I'm very green conscious, but I do it because of performance characteristics-energy, maintenance, durability, how good it holds up. When I first started doing construction doing tract home type stuff, seeing how those were just basically disposable homes, that motivated me to do something better." Some in the construction industry don't even call it green building, preferring terms like "high performance" building.

Conservation drives innovation

How did the city of Austin come to believe that it needed a Green Building Program? In the early nineteen-eighties, the city was agonizing over energy choices. There was widespread disappointment in the costly and controversial South Texas Nuclear Project. Austinites rejected a proposed lignite coal plant. As an alternative Austin's City Council embraced the idea of reducing demand. The City announced the goal of a "conservation power plant" to displace the need for some five hundred and fifty megawatts of new electric capacity.

The Austin Energy Star Program began in 1985 as a marketing aid for builders who constructed more efficient homes. According to Mary McLeod, residential program coordinator for the Green Building Program, "More than six thousand homes were rated under this program."

Green building began as a further extension of this star rating idea. The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a homegrown Austin nonprofit active since 1975, played a key role in its genesis. Gail Vittori and Pliny Fisk, cofounders of the Center, approached the city with the idea of an expanded rating system that would encompass more dimensions than just energy. The new Green Building Program would also include water, waste, materials, air quality, and other natural resource-related issues. Two foundation grants in 1991 and 1992 helped develop the new program.

The Green Building Program is a completely voluntary education and marketing effort-a resource to builders and homeowners alike. After a slow start, there has been rapid growth in builder participation in later years. Mary McLeod says "between 1993, when the rating tool was introduced, and 1998, seven hundred and thirteen homes in the service area were rated. Our rating numbers started to skyrocket, and during 1999 and 2000 more production builders joined our program. Between 1998 and 2002, we rated more than twenty-four hundred homes, which brings our lifetime total to more than thirty-one hundred ratings." (See accompanying article, "What Makes a Home Green?")

Architect Peter Pfeiffer says, "We became the model for the national Energy Star program. That initiative saved us all that money and all that air pollution, and kept our utility rates very reasonable. Incidentally, our city utility (helps) fund our fire department and other city services." For almost a decade Pfeiffer chaired the city's Resource Management Commission, which oversaw development of the Green Builder program. Pfeiffer regards the program as a "great stepping stone between best building practices and the building code, which is minimal. Our Austin program is a model for a ton of green building programs across the country."

In 1999, environmental author Paul Robbins calculated that the program saves nineteen percent a year in peak electric demand. In Austin the peak occurs on hot summer days when there is the greatest use of air conditioning. For this reason, both Robbins and Pfeiffer believe that the program has delayed the need to add expensive new power plant capacity.

However, Robbins says that when one considers the whole year's consumption, not just the peak, the program only saves about four percent on overall energy consumption. So, by his reckoning, the city "while doing a good job of deferring some new power plant investments" could still do much more to save on fuel and emissions.

A new industry takes flight

Green Building Program staffers make presentations to interested groups and provide marketing support and technical seminars for their membership of environmentally-minded builders. The popular Green by Design workshops for homeowners are held several times a year. Free personal consultations are provided to both homeowners and builders. A directory of Green Building professionals is maintained and made available on-line. (See accompanying article, "Resources.")

According to Mary McLeod, "At any given moment about seventy-five builders are active. Among these are large production builders like David Weekley Homes, Hammonds Homes, and Newmark Homes." In recognition of its service to builders, Austin Energy got an award from the National Association of Home Builders in 2002.

The program teaches that successful energy-efficient design begins with a careful examination of the building site. With proper passive solar design, the building is positioned to minimize heat gain in the summer. A well-sealed and weatherized home is also vital for efficient energy performance. "We're dealing with a hot, humid, and pollen-infested air infiltration, so we need to…(have) a tight house," Pfeiffer says. "Our motto is to build it tight and ventilate it right."

Once the outside shell is finished, the green builder's attention to detail continues. Warren Spain says, "We use bamboo flooring, stained and scored concrete flooring. We use tankless hot-water heaters from Japan that (operate) on demand. We use (EPA) Energy Star appliances." The tankless hot-water heater he refers to heats water instantly, rather than warming up a mass of water and maintaining it all day for just the few minutes you need it.

Building methods old and new

While green building professionals stress that they mostly seek to make better use of conventional building elements, there is an enduring popular grass-roots interest in more exotic "new" materials like earth or straw. Frank Meyer of Thangmaker Construction built the first load-bearing straw bale home in this region in 1993. This technique is actually quite old. It was a common building method in the Great Plains states in the eighteen-hundreds and early nineteen-hundreds. Many of those structures are actually still in use.

The bales are stacked, usually in a house-raising party. Perhaps the main point in favor of straw bale, to many people, is this community building aspect. Stakes are driven through the stacked bales to hold them in place and then stucco is plastered on both exterior and interior walls, usually the excuse for another party. Straw is the dead, dry plant material left over after a crop plant (wheat oats, barley, rye and rice) has been harvested. A Green Builder fact sheet says stucco covered straw bales offer a thick wall system which is "durable, healthy and fire- and pest-resistant." The thick walls offer a very high insulation value, better than R-32. (The "R" or resistance value of an insulating material measures its ability to impede heat flow, with increasing values indicating more resistance. Typical fiberglass insulation might only have a rating of R-13.)

Annie Borden and her husband Rick Sternberg built a straw-bale home on land beside the Pedernales River. Annie Borden says, "We started building our dream house made of straw bales in 1998. I designed the house. Our friend Wolf Sittler, a fabulous furniture maker, put together a crew with two other guys to frame it. A month later, we had a weekend wall-raising workshop and got most of the bales stacked…Then we had a series of stucco parties and later plastering parties to finish the walls. We figure about a hundred volunteers helped us with our house!"

The couple moved into the home in February 2000. They recycled long leaf pine boards from an 1873 school house for the ceilings, and used some of the mesquite cleared from the site for doors and cabinets. The Sternberg-Borden house also uses rainwater collection and the couple grows vegetable gardens on their home site.

Use of earth building materials, likewise, is not exactly a "new" idea. Frank Meyer points out that more than a third of the world's people live in mud or earth homes.

There are several earthen construction systems, but one interesting technique has been developed locally. Warren Spain uses a machine developed by an engineer friend of his father's that compresses soil into an adobe-style block.

He says massive block construction is "quite common in the Southwest-Arizona and New Mexico. It's a fantastic way to build, it's high-mass construction, very thick walls. Depending on how you orient the blocks they are either ten or fourteen inches thick. That's a great way to build if you have your own land and have soil on-site. A wide range of soil will work to make the blocks, (although it requires) perhaps twenty percent clay content. That's also a fun way to build. It's kind of free form. You can do a lot of neat features economically like arches, barrel vaults or whatnot. They're actually authentic, they're not fake like you have to make with frame construction." The insulating value is very high, equivalent to R-55.

Green building saves money

The catalog of benefits associated with building green seems impressive, but does it pay off with more green in your pocket?

Paul Robbins says, "Four or Five Star homes can cost a little bit more (to build), but you can get that back in quality of materials, energy and water savings."

Peter Pfeiffer says that electric utilities like Austin's can save a watt of electricity cheaper than they can produce one. He says, "You'll get between three and five times return on your investment for saving energy than (with) energy production strategies."

Gail Vittori, who is secretary of the board of directors for the US Green Building Council, cites a study done in 2003 by the State of California, which examined the performance of thirty-three large commercial "green" office projects from around the country. She says, "They found out, for example, from between half a percent to two percent added first costs, but you get thirty-eight percent improved energy performance."

Spain says "We're really pretty competitive with conventional construction. Some things you will definitely pay a premium for…A metal roof, yeah it's more expensive, but you're going to get a discount on your insurance premium-it's going to save energy because it's reflective and it's low mass, it doesn't stay hot all night long after the sun goes down; it cools off. A standing-seam (metal roof) is basically a lifetime roof."

Casa Verde Builders (CVB) has proved green can be affordable to low- and moderate-income families. CVB is a project of American Youth Works (AYW) to build energy-efficient, affordable housing in East Austin. Since 1993, CVB built more than forty-five homes at an average sale price of less than seventy-two thousand dollars. Most of the construction work is supplied by high school students enrolled at AYW who are considered "at risk" for dropping out. The homes utilize metal framing and roofs, along with structural insulated panels as load-bearing walls. Other features include both scored and stained concrete floors and carpet with recycled content as well as xeriscape lawns.

Architect Gayle Borst of Stewardship Inc. has designed many of CVB's homes. She says, "Casa Verde started from the beginning with the goal of affordable, sustainable housing. They've succeeded, with almost every home nowadays being (rated) Four or Five Star. There are level Five green-built homes available at any price range now in Austin."

The future's here

Gail Vittori says it's getting easier for builders and consumers to economically locate greener building products. She says, "There's been a surge of interest by mainstream builders and developers…The premium for healthier products is getting a lot less. There's now an industry to serve this market, which sees…it's not just a little thing that's going to be a flash in the night and then disappear."

Robbins, in his 2000 edition of the Austin Environmental Directory, issued a report card on Austin's energy track record. He noted, "Despite the City's vanguard efforts in the Green Building Program, it still does not have anything close to a majority of new buildings participating...The program has only had a very modest impact…The green builder program is doing a good job, but a low marketing budget, the voluntary nature of the program, and the fact that they have a minimal number of people hamper the mission." Today, he continues to think the program needs a larger budget, along with cash rebates to highly rated green homes.

For green building to continue to grow, sources of private capital will also have to become more accessible. Paul McCutcheon, green lending specialist and owner of Green Mountain Mortgage Company, says he's often been frustrated by the aversion of conventional institutions to finance green projects. He says while there has been some progress recently, "What we're trying to do now is create a green bank, a completely separate source of money for the green community. That's going to be the final frontier."

Still, the mainstreaming of green building is upon us, so it would seem. Peter Pfeiffer was named a 2004 Fellow of the American Institute of Architects for his efforts in the "mainstreaming of green building in North America." His practice is currently doing twenty million dollars worth of buildings a year that are exclusively green. As he says, "Green building is profitable and it works."

Stephen Beers is a freelance journalist who lives in a drafty duplex that is too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. He looks forward to recycling his voluminous files on energy and water conservation. You may e-mail Stephen at sbeers@goodlifemag.com.