There may never be a better time to get into green building than right now, particularly as a way to hedge your business against the slowing housing market.
"There is no slow down for my company," says Matt Belcher of Belcher Homes in St. Louis. "Last year we did 15 green homes, and this next year we'll do 25. I don't build anything but green homes."
Belcher says that a confluence of green products, how-to-build-green information, and customers easily sold on the concept have greatly reduced the obstacles builders used to face in getting started. By using the resources now readily available from national and local home builders associations and other organizations (see table), any builder can establish an individual plan to go green and execute it.
Emily English, director of the National Association of Home Builders' Green Building Program, says the NAHB's free Green Building Guidelines publication lays it all out in phased steps.
Step-By-Step Break Down
"There is a learning curve to switching to green practices," says Emily. "So we have different thresholds of building green, starting with bronze, then silver and gold. The first part of the Guidelines is a checklist for what level of green you are building to. The second part of the Guidelines is how to do it, and a source of resources."
The process of going green is broken into seven guiding principles (Resource Efficiency, Lot Design, Preparation, and Development, etc.) with each specific element in a principle section given a numerical value. By adopting elements from each of the seven sections into your building program, you move into green building step by step.
"It's easier to go green this year than it was last year," says Belcher, who will chair the NAHB Green Building Conference March 25-27, 2007, in St. Louis. "There's so much more information out there. Our local HBA of Greater St. Louis and Eastern Missouri just adopted the NAHB's Guidelines. We tweak them for our area, but there isn't much tweaking needed.
"On the product side, all the manufacturers of building components saw the writing on the wall, Belcher adds. "Green products are about all they're pushing."
