Are your clients ready for a sustainable custom home?

Source: CUSTOM HOME Magazine
Publication date: 2005-07-01

By Bruce D. Snider

Energy prices rise dramatically. Experts debate whether world oil production will peak by the end of the decade or if it has topped out already. Competition for natural resources of all kinds shifts into over-drive as China unleashes the productive—and soon, perhaps, consumptive—capacities of its 1.3 billion people. While global climate change looms ever more menacingly on the horizon, we Americans pour more than 6 tons of greenhouse gases per person into the atmosphere every year, some 18 percent of it from energy used by our homes.

Are we ready to talk sustainable building yet?

This issue of CUSTOM HOME features four houses aimed at sustainability, so we put the question to the four builders responsible for those projects. Are custom home clients waking up to the importance of sustainable building? Are custom builders ready to step up with the technology and building practices?

Austin, Texas, custom builder Carl Rieck says he has been ready for a long time. “I've always been a borderline tree-hugger, so it's been easy to do.” His location helps, too. “Energy efficiency has always been big in Austin,” says Rieck, who credits the city's educated population and ground-breaking Green Builder program. Rieck's clients are accustomed to talking about energy consumption and payback periods for efficiency upgrades. “Those things are becoming mainstream in Austin.” But Rieck has long been concerned with conservation of durable materials, too. “We were always big on recycling on the jobs,” he says, to the point of separating out copper wire and steel. “I just got tired of the mentality of throwing everything in the Dumpster.” In addition to recycling job waste and donating used doors and windows to a church-supported resale center, Rieck makes every effort to reuse materials on remodeling jobs. But he finds clients less receptive to saving old materials—say, cleaning up and reusing masonry stone—if throwing them away and starting new costs even slightly less. Compared with selling clients on energy efficiency, Rieck says, “Reclamation is a little bit tougher, because they see the cost increase but they don't get the payback.”

How many of Rieck's clients will hire him to build as green as he can? “It's pretty sad. I'd say 20 percent at most.” Asked when his clients will fully embrace his approach, Rieck says, “I still think it's going to be a few years. I'm hoping that younger kids will be more geared that way, but I don't see it.” Still, in recent years he has seen progress. “It's gotten better and better over the last five years. Ten years ago it was like hitting your head against a brick wall.”

Chicago-area builder Rick McCanse is part of that progress himself. Having founded his company six years ago, he dove into green building only in the past two years. He did so as a long-term positioning effort, though, rather than to take advantage of current demand. “We would like to be the green builder in our market,” he says. But as of now, “It's quite a small market, because there's a substantial price penalty.” McCanse would like to see green materials like low-VOC paints and certified lumber made more available in his area. The biggest obstacle he sees, however, is Americans' short-term attitude toward their homes. “Most people buy houses for five years rather than for the long run,” he says, a span shorter than the payback period for many energy upgrades. But McCanse, too, sees change coming. “I think the rising fuel price is going to spur some interest in [energy efficiency].” And he notes Mayor Richard Daley's stated goal of making Chicago the “greenest city in America.” While the future of sustainable building has not yet arrived in the heartland, McCanse says, “It's coming, and I think Chicago will be one of the centers of that. I don't think that we're even close yet, but we're moving in the right direction.” In the meantime, “It's whatever the customer wants, but I try to nudge them that way.”

How much nudging, and how much time, will it take for custom home buyers to fully embrace the goal of sustainability? “I think we're one generation away from it,” says David Easton, who has devoted his career to building houses out of stabilized earth. The generation that came of age after the oil crisis of the 1970s will be slow to grasp the concept of finite resources, Easton believes. He pins his hopes on the children of the baby boomers “who experienced the first oil crisis, who lost the fantasy of the '50s that energy would always be cheap.” And energy is only part of the equation. “Durability has to play a role. I think we have to go to the European model, where a house has to function relatively maintenance-free for generations.” But even with the will and the technological means, changing the way we build will require difficult political changes as well. “As long as we subsidize oil and wood products,” he says, “alternatives are not going to be able to compete.”

Before John Abrams discusses sustainability, he likes to offer his interpretation of the term: “If we keep on doing what we're doing, we can keep on doing what we're doing.” And by that standard, the Martha's Vineyard, Mass., builder says, “We're light years away. We're going to have to make carbon-neutral houses, neighborhoods, cities and towns, and so on. We're a long ways from that.” But Abrams has been rolling this stone uphill for a long time, and he is finally seeing the terrain begin to level out. “There was a little blip [of interest in green building] in the 1970s. Since then, it's ebbed and flowed. But now there's a feeling that we must do this as well as we can, and we must learn to do it better.” A significant proportion of his clients have long been inclined toward green building. “But now the [architecture and building] professions are pushing hard too. The efforts that I see to do good green buildings—in terms of materials, energy use, and energy production—are improving dramatically year after year.” In any case, Abrams has never waited for client demand to lead his company toward building green. “Some of them are not interested at all,” he says, “but they are happy to have it because it's part of what we do. It's just part of a whole spectrum of what makes a good house. Whether the clients are interested or not, it's just what we do.”

As a design/build firm, Abrams' company exercises greater control over the direction of its projects than most custom builders. But each of his three colleagues above has also seized the initiative to one degree or another. Having grasped the environmental consequences of their work, they are seeking a more sustainable John Abrams, South Mountain Co., West Tisbury, Mass. way of building. All agree that we are not there yet, and that getting there will not be easy. “It's truly daunting,” says Abrams, who nevertheless remains optimistic. “We're pretty resilient as a species. There's a lot of good that can come of all of this.”

Are your clients ready for a sustainable custom home? Tell the editors of CUSTOM HOME what's on your mind. Send your comments and questions to Bruce Snider at bsnider@hanleywood.com. or click here to talk on the CUSTOM HOME online forum.