Including Australian and internal examples of sustainable building, this book is packed with practical information to help every home renovator or builder. ---back cover.

Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing is a guide for housing developers, advocates, public agency staff, and the financial community that offers specific guidance on incorporating green building strategies into the design, construction, and operation of affordable housing developments. A completely revised and expanded second edition of the groundbreaking 1999 publication, this new book focuses on topics of specific relevance to affordable housing including: how green building adds value to affordable housing the integrated design process best practices in green design for affordable housing green operations and maintenance innovative funding and finance emerging programs, partnerships, and policies Edited by national green affordable housing expert Walker Wells and featuring a foreword by Matt Petersen, president and chief executive officer of Global Green USA, the book presents 12 case studies of model developments and projects, including rental, home ownership, special needs, senior, self-help, and co-housing from around the United States. Each case study describes the unique green features of the development, discusses how they were successfully incorporated, considers the project's financing and savings associated with the green measures, and outlines lessons learned. Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing is the first book of its kind to present information regarding green building that is specifically tailored to the affordable housing development community.

Disaster-proof, environmentally friendly housing solutions for a changing climate. How can we adequately provide housing when disaster strikes, whether that disaster is weather related, like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, happens in a matter of minutes from an earthquake or tsunami, through a slow process like rising sea levels, or is the result of civil disorder or poverty? There is an urgent need for safe, sustainable housing designs that are cheap to build, environmentally friendly, and hardy enough to withstand severe environmental conditions. Not only is there climate change to contend with, but there are millions of people, right now, who do not have safe or adequate housing. In Urgent Architecture Bridgette Meinhold showcases 40 successful emergency and long-term housing projects—from repurposed shipping containers to sandbag homes. She surveys successful structures as well as highlighting promising projects that are still being developed. Every one is quickly deployable, affordable, and sustainable. This book is an essential resource for those who are interested in green building, sustainable design, eco-friendly materials, affordable housing, material reuse, and humanitarian relief.

Latest in sustainable housing design trends from around the world.

Written by experts using case studies of latest practice, Sustainable Housing brings new perspectives on residential sustainability and is based upon the 'Housing and Sustainability' conference at the RIBA in 1998.

This guide for nonconventional home builders provides inspiration for using salvaged and reclaimed materials to build affordable, environmentally friendly dwellings and offers case studies of projects meeting this challenge, including Phoenix Commotion, Haberae and Builders of Hope. Original

US cities are faced with the joint challenge of our climate crisis and the lack of housing that is affordable and healthy. Our housing stock contributes significantly to the changing climate, with residential buildings accounting for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. US housing is not only unhealthy for the planet, it is putting the physical and financial health of residents at risk. Our housing system means that a renter working 40 hours a week and earning minimum wage cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment in any US county. In Gray to Green Communities, green affordable housing expert Dana Bourland argues that we need to move away from a gray housing model to a green model, which considers the health and well-being of residents, their communities, and the planet. She demonstrates that we do not have to choose between protecting our planet and providing housing affordable to all. Bourland draws from her experience leading the Green Communities Program at Enterprise Community Partners, a national community development intermediary. Her work resulted in the first standard for green affordable housing which was designed to deliver measurable health, economic, and environmental benefits. The book opens with the potential of green affordable housing, followed by the problems that it is helping to solve, challenges in the approach that need to be overcome, and recommendations for the future of green affordable housing. Gray to Green Communities brings together the stories of those who benefit from living in green affordable housing and examples of Green Communities’ developments from across the country. Bourland posits that over the next decade we can deliver on the human right to housing while reaching a level of carbon emissions reductions agreed upon by scientists and demanded by youth. Gray to Green Communities will empower and inspire anyone interested in the future of housing and our planet.

This open access book explores the environmental, social, and financial challenges of housing provision, and the urgent need for a sustainable housing transition. The authors explore how market failures have impacted the scaling up of sustainable housing and the various policy attempts to address this. Going beyond an environmental focus, the book explores a range of housing-related challenges including social justice and equity issues. Sustainability transitions theory is presented as a framework to help facilitate a sustainable housing transition and a range of contemporary case studies are explored on issues including high performing housing, small housing, shared housing, neighbourhood-scale housing, circular housing, and innovative financing for housing. It is an important new resource that challenges policy makers, planners, housing construction industry stakeholders, and researchers to rethink what housing is, how we design and construct it, and how we can better integrate impacts on households to wider policy development.

Economic Growth and Sustainable Housing: An Uneasy Relationship critically discusses the possibilities of decoupling environmental degradation from economic growth. The author refutes the belief in combining perpetual economic growth with long-term environmental sustainability based on the premise that economic growth can be fully decoupled from negative environmental impacts. This proposition is underpinned by intensive study in the housing sector from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Xue employs critical realism to inform the investigation and organize the argumentation throughout the book. The book is organised into four parts: the first discusses the relevance of critical realism to the research field of housing and urban sustainable development in terms of ontology and methodology. The second makes a transcendental refutation of the possibilities of decoupling economic growth from housing-related environmental impacts by describing transfactual conditions of full decoupling. The third part presents two case studies to show whether and to what extents decoupling between economic growth and housing-related environmental impacts have historically taken place. Inspired by critical realist ontology, generalization of abstract concept from the case studies are made to cast light on the implausibility of maintaining perpetual economic growth through decoupling. The final part explains why and how the belief in full decoupling and economic growth is generated and sustained despite its implausibility and non-necessity, which constitutes an explanatory critique of the growth and decoupling ideology and paves the way for the paradigm shift to socially sustainable de-growth. This book will be of interest to students of housing and urban studies, to students of environmental sustainability and also for those students and academics with a general interest in critical realism.