Industry consultant Adam Sgrenci proposes a fresh perspective on how to evolve the conversation, and ultimately, the industry.
Fifty years ago, scientists and forward-thinking designers presented the building community with a concept called sustainability. This concept has had a huge impact on affordable housing as we know it today. Yet, our world still suffers from a global housing crisis, a fragmented and wasteful construction industry, and a skilled labor shortage.
Fortunately, the thought leadership behind sustainability has evolved – some now call it regeneration. We can call it regenerative housing. Makes sense, right? We want to do more than just “sustain” our environment, our markets, and our society – we want to rebuild our environment, grow our markets, and empower society.
For building, and affordable housing specifically, this means we want to build homes that have a net-positive impact on the environment, economy and society. Today’s common practice is to build with a net-zero impact on the environment by minimizing waste and using efficient energy appliances. Likewise, with regard to the economy, the current approach is to minimize costs by offsetting labor inputs. For the overall impact on society, sustainability doesn’t offer much.
On the other hand, regenerative housing uses products that clean the environment, economics that raise the wages of local labor and active social inputs that inform the masses around critical lifestyle upgrades like security, disaster prevention and crisis management.
In this regenerative housing series, you will read about a formula that the affordable housing and greater building community can apply to their daily practice and begin to truly tackle the world’s greatest infrastructure challenges – overpopulated metro areas, sea-level cities, resource-thin communities, climate change, and the skilled labor shortage.
To be clear, regenerative housing is not merely a semantic play on sustainability. We recognize the major gains sustainability has contributed to our built environment over the last five decades.
History of Sustainable Building
That bears repeating. “Green” is 50 years old. A lot of things have changed since the early 1970s: Climatic events are more intense; builders haven’t adopted sustainable practices as quickly as we had hoped; and, now we have ConTech. We’ve got greater challenges, but also have better tools to solve them.
How Did We Get Here?
But before we get to the new tools, let’s take a brief look at where we’ve come from. Sustainability – we are all probably familiar with what this is, but did you know this one word gets more hits on Google than Ghandi, Star Wars or Steve Jobs?
That’s what systems design folk call a “signal.” The signal is that people want more from sustainability, or at the least, want to better understand what it is and how to achieve it.
Many attribute the birth of “green” to a pivotal book, The Limits To Growth, published in 1972. It is regarded as the first major call to action for environmental justice.
For those of us in the building world, we’ve become somewhat desensitized to hearing it over and over as “sustainable building.” To build sustainably is to build something that doesn’t “hurt” the environment by introducing specific approaches, systems or materials on a project. This could include:
- saving energy through a tightly wrapped and well-insulated building envelope,
- using high-efficiency appliances,
- using non-toxic materials like low VOC paint,
- minimizing job waste by pre-cutting materials off site, and
- using systems that consume the planet’s natural resources in a healthy way: rain water catchment or renewable energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal, etc.).