“You need a building that actually works, not a building that just checks a lot of boxes.”
One failure of the real estate industry is clinging to LEED certification as the standard for eco-friendly buildings.
LEED was all the rage for a while and remains the most popular way for owners to showcase how “green” their buildings are. But with carbon emissions now dwarfing other environmental concerns, what matters most is how efficient buildings are at heating and cooling.
Operating costs are also crucial, especially for affordable housing.
LEED does not ignore these metrics, but some of the ways developers rack up LEED points to achieve certification have little to do with them.
Scott Short knew this 15 years ago when he set out to build the state’s first passive house multifamily building: a 24-unit affordable project with day care at 803 Knickerbocker Avenue for the Brooklyn-based nonprofit now named RiseBoro. (The honor ultimately went to another RiseBoro project that he started later but finished sooner.)
“We were trying to do something new, to break the mold,” said Short. “One of the things that attracted me to the passive house standard was, unlike LEED or these ‘green building’ [designations] where you get certified based on plans, with passive house it’s really all about the performance of the building.”
At the end of construction, a blower door test determines how leaky the building is.
“If the building doesn’t perform as you project it to, you’re not going to get the certification,” said Short, who was RiseBoro’s housing director and later became CEO. “You need a building that actually works, not a building that just checks a lot of boxes during the design phase.”
In the early 2010s, no passive house apartment buildings existed in New York, and city officials who controlled affordable housing subsidies were skeptical.
“We had to go in for funding four times,” Scott recalled, “and chip away at the bureaucratic hurdles.”
Contractors were also skittish about passive house construction and inflated their bids by 20 percent, Short estimated. “It was the novelty premium,” he said.
That premium has largely disappeared as more contractors have become comfortable with the methods, equipment and materials needed to make a building virtually airtight, with carefully controlled ventilation.
In New York City, most affordable projects are now built this way, although they don’t often seek passive house status because the certification process is expensive. Perhaps the biggest is the 277-unit 425 Grand Concourse in the Bronx, finished in 2022 by Monadnock Construction and Dattner Architects. (Outside of affordable housing, a 352-unit CornellTech NYC residential building completed in 2017 is among the city’s passive house pioneers.)
I checked with Short’s successor as CEO, Kieran Harrington, to see how 803 Knickerbocker is doing a dozen years after opening. “There have been meaningful savings,” he said.
The six-story, 35,000-square-foot building uses about 20 percent as much energy as an average building of that size in the city. Its annual cost for gas, electricity and water is 62 cents per square foot, about half of the Housing Development Corporation’s $1.12 benchmark.
But the benefits of the super-insulated building go well beyond cost savings, according to its architect, Chris Benedict.
“Not only do we have a very good air barrier on the exterior of the building to meet passive house [standards], we also create an air barrier between each apartment so that air, bugs, smoke, sound, none of these things can pass from one apartment to the other,” she said in a YouTube video.
Buildings guru Henry Gifford was a consultant on 803 Knickerbocker. His role, in part, was to ease the anxiety of its contractors. As the construction team met near the end of the project, a plumber worried about being blamed if the 400,000 BTU boiler proved too small to heat a 24-unit building.
Gifford didn’t miss a beat. “The boiler is not going to provide the heat,” he said. “It’s going to provide the heat and the hot water.”
“Nobody doubted I was taking full responsibility,” Gifford recalled, “and everyone calmed down.”
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