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Greening Your Road Map
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| Panelists discuss achieving green goals l-r: Mary Ann Shanley, Mercy Housing Lakefront; Carlton Brown, Full Spectrum of NT LLC; Betty Tamm, Umpqua CDC; Dana Borland, Enterprise Community Partners |
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Symposium Speakers Stress Urgency of Green Housing
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| Tom Deyo, NeighborWorks Senior Advisor for Gulf Rebuilding and Green Strategies and Keynote Speaker Gail Vittori, co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems and Board Chair for the US Green Building Council |
Given environmental concerns and shrinking fossil fuel energy supplies, the clock is ticking for developers to move forward with their green housing projects, said Gail Vittori, co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems and board chair of the US Green Building Council (USGBC). She was a keynote speaker at a green symposium, held in Phoenix, May 6, as part of a NeighborWorks national training institute.
“People are seeing green as a lifeboat in our times,” she said in a keynote address to conferees. USGBC offers the environmentally friendly LEED for Homes rating, and Vittori said that more than a third of LEED rated homes are “affordable.” Green solutions must have enduring value, she said, advocating for a holistic approach to green development. For example, green housing should include safe walkways to school and building materials that are good for the lungs, given what she called an epidemic of child asthma, caused by toxic materials in homes.
The NeighborWorks symposium focused on helping organizations plan for “greening” their housing development plans and offered a newly released Green Roadmap as a tool for the housing development process. The Green Roadmap defines how to assure green outcomes for each phase of the development process.
Sponsored by Bank of America and The Home Depot Foundation, the symposium attracted some of the most innovating thinkers in green affordable housing. In addition to Vittori from the USBGC, speakers included luncheon keynote speaker, William Shutkin, chair in sustainable development at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Dana Borland, vice president of Green Initiatives at Enterprise Community Partners; Kevin Morrow, National Association of Home Builders’ program manager for Green Building Standards; and Walker Wells, director of the Green Urbanism Program for Global Green USA.
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| Luncheon Keynote Speaker William Shutkin, chair in sustainable development at the University of Colorado, Boulder |
Panelists and breakout session facilitators included three NeighborWorks organization representatives: Betty Tamm, executive director, Umpqua CDC, Oregon; Tony To, executive director, HomeSight, Seattle; Mary Jane Jagodzinski, project manager with Community HousingWorks; and many other green housing practitioners.
William Shutkin, author of The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, said that housing developers and conservationists are beginning to speak the same language, which bodes well for cooperative green efforts in local communities.
Other green learning events held during the Phoenix training institute, included a dozen courses promoting environmentally friendly and healthier communities and clinics on “Identifying Financial Resources for Your Green Roadmap,” and “Healthy Housing and Energy Management Strategies for Multifamily Rental Properties.”