A home can be considered green when energy efficiency, water and resource conservation, the use of sustainable or recycled products, and indoor air quality considerations are incorporated into the process of home building. The increased availability of education for builders, growing consumer awareness, and the exploding market for sustainable, environmentally-friendly, and recycled building products has accelerated green building's acceptance rate and move into the mainstream. Incentives also encourage growth.
In many areas of the United States, green building is legally mandated for commercial buildings, and those mandates are making their way into residential development, as well. There are a few places, such as Boston, Washington, D.C., and California, where laws have been passed. Mandates are a concern for several reasons. They take choices away from builders, leaving an "all or nothing" approach that leaves the rest of the country’s traditional builders with no time to ramp up or prepare for a new way of doing business. Further, they limit innovation. Green home building is a dynamic process that depends on innovators to test new theories, practices, and products to determine if they are worth trying again. Green building gets better with each passing year due to this continual innovation. Mandates can lock down the industry at the current point, and make future developments much harder to test and achieve. See the Green Building Legislative Toolkit (PDF) for more information on how to address mandates locally. This document is available only to NAHB members, requires login to the NAHB website.
In other areas of the country, information, resources, and experienced professionals in green building are hard to locate, leaving all involved wondering where to start. However, this is changing rapidly. The NAHB National Green Building Program helps to connect existing green building programs with a national network of resources, promoting the development of more local green building programs nationwide. In late 2007, there were about 60 local programs, and that number is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. The National Green Building Standard, based on the NAHB Model Green Home Building Guidelines is expected to be approved by the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI in May 2008. Learn more about the standards development process, and about the NAHB National Green Building Program.
Another important consideration against green building mandates is cost. Every time the price of a home goes up by $1,000, there are 240,000 potential households priced out of ownership. Affordability is a critical issue. While consumers and homeowners are very interested in building green, and do generally find green-built homes easier to maintain, more efficient, and healthier, the up-front cost can be limiting. This is an important reason why the NAHB Model Green Building Guidelines and the National Green Building Standard were designed as a flexible, regionally appropriate approaches. Not only does this allow time for local builders, building inspectors, planning and zoning officers, and other affected parties to prepare for green building in their area, it allows them to choose from a set of guidelines, a set of locally-appropriate strategies, to produce green homes.
It's up to you, the policy makers of our communities to decide how green building fits in your market. The National Green Building Program and this site will help by providing links and resources to fully understand the issues involved with green building, so you can make informed choices and recommendations for your communities.