Incorporating sustainability into affordable housing projects brings logistical and financial challenges beyond those that come up on a conventional project. Affordable housing projects are confronted with creating environments that offer low energy costs, a connection to the community, natural daylighting, ventilation, and site amenities on very tight budgets. At times the building’s construction budget can seem irreconcilable to these goals.
This session will focus on the various sustainable design and financing approaches available to affordable housing projects in Colorado. We will present compliance paths to meeting the requirements of the recently adopted CHFA energy efficiency requirements: Enterprise Green Communities Criteria. We will highlight benefits of using the standard for this purpose, and also discuss some challenges that have arisen in recent projects. The session will also discuss the range of potential finance partners and opportunities, highlighted with examples from recent experiences of the presenters. The presenters include representatives from: a sustainability and building energy consulting firm, an architecture firm, a development firm, and from Enterprise Green Communities, each of whom have worked on multiple affordable housing projects. They will discuss, from each firm’s perspective, what has worked well and what has not in recent projects to help others successfully incorporate sustainability into future affordable housing projects. |
