Get Your Free Expo Pass – Courtesy Of Jason Lorcher!
G08 – Friday, November 22 | 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM | Bring Sustainability Home: Affordable Housing Leads the Way
What if an affordable housing development could be the most sustainable building in the city? What if the affordable housing industry could become the catalyst for change throughout an entire region? This session will present seven different projects in seven different contexts, with an in-depth focus on four. Each project has achieved first-in-kind innovations which subsequently set off a domino effect of sustainable transformation in the area. These project successes touch various aspects of regenerative building and community design including water, energy, materials, and social justice. They range from the first permitted greywater reuse system in Los Angeles to a project with an EUI reduction of 75% despite its subarctic climate, to a project partnering with industry in a revolutionary way to overcome hurdles with Red-List Free (healthy materials with ingredient disclosure) and Forest Stewardship Council certified materials. _x000D_ This panel of affordable housing experts (two architects, one developer representative, one non-profit executive) will discuss not only how each project was able to achieve their ambitious project goals, but also how they leveraged the successes to inspire others in their region – affordable housing projects and market rate alike. For example, one project is the catalyst project setting a high-performance bar for a new transit-oriented development and statewide affordable housing projects. Another project has inspired residential, commercial and institutional projects around the city to harvest the Alaskan sun to reduce their high-energy bills. Still another project convened a tribe-wide collaboration to design the future of indigenous housing in their community. These projects demonstrate that the affordable housing industry can achieve truly revolutionary accomplishments in sustainability and be the catalyst for larger change within standard budgetary constraints – proving that deep-green affordable housing is not an oxymoron.