Government should incentivize high performance home builders
dan.bulwinkle.net
dan.bulwinkle.net
Picking a specific solution like passive solar or PV on the roof is likely to get outdated relatively quickly but cost is a useful metric.
At some level it would make sense for municipalities to actively identify inefficient buildings and offer the owners incentives to improve them. Fraught, but likely to improve things faster than waiting decades for stock to cycle.
It didn't seem to have that much of an effect. The government has now had to ban the renting out of units that are too badly insulated [1], with landlords complaining about this.
Of course, with there not being nearly enough units in some markets as is (Paris, for example), combined with rent-controls, I bet watching this unfold will be interesting.
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[0] The rating has existed for a while, though I think it only recently has become mandatory. In my neck of the woods (Paris), when I was looking to rent, it would be exceptional to not see the rating on the advertisements.
[1] The rent is not allowed to be raised on G-class units, and they'll be banned from renting altogether starting in 2025.
Not surprised. In most cities housing is a seller's market so people can't be too picky about stuff like energy efficiency of the unit if they want to have a roof over their head so landlords get away with not doing any maintenance for decades while still collecting rent.
>ban the renting out of units that are too badly insulated [1], with landlords complaining about this.
Great. Maybe the landlords should do less complaining and more renovating instead of keep being slumlords and keep making money without doing any work.
Something like "mpg" will depend a lot on your lifestyle, how many family members, etc. It's not realistic. But what you could do is create a generic "score" -- which I think is what you really want -- that takes into account things like insulation and double pained windows, and then you can buy houses with higher scores. This was the idea behind LEED certification for office complexes, so I think you want something like that for residential housing. The good news is that this exists!
https://www.usgbc.org/leed/rating-systems/residential
So what I think you really want is to mandate that every residential construction project obtain a LEED rating -- or equivalent -- which of course will add to the cost of residential housing. That's a trickier question.
But seriously, we don't need more housing subsidies. Whether or not more regulation is needed is a quantitative question. Newer homes already have better insulation tech, for older homes, it depends on whether the owners upgraded them. If they did, you can be sure they will advertise this info in order to get more when they sell it.
Regulating disclosure of this for rental housing by landlords might be a good idea, though.
Having big stickers with annual costs on them at point of sale is just as much about influencing manufacturers as consumers. Think about the steady improvement in refrigerator efficiency, it’s not that everyone compares these numbers it’s that more people do.
Someone being able to roughly find this out if they jump through some hoops isn’t particularly meaningful to the overall market. Someone building 1,000 homes however has to predict consumer behavior and looking obviously worst than the competition is never appealing.
New houses need to have an energy label A+++ or A++++ ( eg energy usage of at most 50 kWh/ m2/per year, which in practice means all new houses come with good isolation, a heat pump and solar panels. Restrictions are also coming in 2030 that forbid renting out a house with a poor energy label, and subsidies are provided to home owners for measures that improve the energy label of your house.
Cost however has a great way of ordering the scale because the biggest differences are also the most impactful differences.
My apartment tower has broke garbage disposal chutes on _every single floor_. That is, the building's waste disposal system is entirely broken. For 2 years now. Nobody can get it fixed because by my estimate under 20% of residents are owner-occupiers.
Real Estate agent says to contact building management, building management ignores you, real estate agent says there's nothing they can do about that. Perfect denial of responsibility.
Move elsewhere? It's all the same in other buildings.
The construction industry is very learn-resistant so standards would bring the price down with higher volumes as with seatbelts and airbags.
Where I live in New Zealand the regulations are actually protecting the construction industry building poorly performing houses with junk materials. People want to build passive but it's difficult because there are barriers to entry for companies wanting to sell components like European style windows.
- property which gets developed for sales gets developed as cheaply as possible, mostly because people are looking to buy the most square meters for their loan capability. We see a lot of barely legal housing and even last year most new builds were with gas heating as it's cheaper to build.
- there is no long term planning, nor is there long term offering .. I guess people are not aware that over the lifetime of their property they pay the price of one-two-three house price as extra heating costs. Just insane.
- some business property developers who will own the property and make money on rentals are definitely optimizing for ongoing costs and things look better.
I love the idea but I don't know how practical the efficiency ratings will be in real life. For example, the "patio" door on my apartment has a wheel that has never worked ever since I started living here early last year. This means there is a small gap which lets heat in (?) in the summer and heat out (?) during the winter. I have reached out to the management several times. They make promises every time but have yet to fix the issue. Why would they when I keep paying rent on time every month with auto pay? In my defense, what other option do I have? I don't have a lot of free time as most of my time is taken up by my own work and I can't afford to spend my free time fighting apartment management.
edited for clarity
The price would come down if mandated for all rental units, but it’s still going to be a semi-skilled laborer with specialty equipment (and now, a government mandate) for 2 hours minimum, plus all the office, administrative, and bureaucratic overhead associated. That’s not going to be much less than $500 in any case and if you have asbestos pipe insulation, lead painted windows, or other spreadable hazards, you may not be able to test. If you have a fireplace/pellet stove/other solid fuel appliances, you have to have all appliances and ashes cold, meaning some appointments are going to be busts. Other combustion appliances need a shutdown before and startup check after the test.
In just the US, this could be over 100K jobs dedicated to just this task, or 200K if needed for all owner-occupied housing every year (rather than just upon transfer). Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on your point of view, but I don’t see a likely benefit commensurate with burning that many people on just this task.
For a compareable result an analysis of the wall and roof structure (structure and surface area) and the corresponsing transmission factors has to be done.
Housing stock (even tract homes) is at/toward the custom end of the custom<->mass produced spectrum (especially used housing, which is the vast majority of units) and that’s before considering the ongoing effects of modifications and substantial repairs, which happen more often to houses than appliances over their useful life.
Rentals wouldn't need constant testing to make at least some difference in the market (like say one large apartment building is built with more insulation than another one nearby).
[0] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy-efficiency/energuide/energuid...
But it is - in my experience - essentially an exercise in futility (or if you prefer only some added burocracy).
In practice you are never in a condition when you can choose (both for buying or for renting) among several different but comparable houses with different A-G levels.
Everything "old" is G[1], anything new and "luxury" is A or B, all the rest is E, very few houses are C or D.
Whilst - possibly - for buying the energy class might somehow influence the price[2], AFAIK the prices for rent are unaffected.
BTW I woulld personally steer away from houses in classes A or B built more than 10 years ago, as those very likely don't have proper mechanical ventilation.
[1] there is a (terribly managed) government campaign in Italy with very important subsidies for restoration works that result in jumping two energy classes, which in practice means - since everything is G, to get to E
[2] set aside the subsidies, costs for a renovation leading to improving by two energy classes is likely (very roughly) to be 10% of the market price of an apartment and will lead to (still very roughly, and with current extremely high price of energy) to save in energy costs the same amount in 10-20 years.
At the same time you could offer grants or loans to upgrade existing structures. Which many jurisdictions do for energy efficient appliances, heat pumps, etc.
edit: also, very minor correction of a pet peeve of mine. Lumber is not a "low R-value item". It has a much higher R-value than other construction materials like concrete, masonry, and steel. Of course it should still be insulated.
Things have costs. Mandating additional costs and plugging your ears and pretending like market economics for those costs don't exist does not help anyone.
But why not let the market show what there is demand for? Is it so bad that we always have to call for coercitive intervention?
the opposite should happen to incentivize to build, too much single family zoning in USA, there should be only residential zoning /mixed use with the freedom to build whatever on owned lots. like having duplex and condos in SF and LA from existent inventory
We should probably disincentivize (or at least not incentivize) single family homes in many places, higher density is much better for most things.
I see two large sticking points with the idea: 1. it would obviously drive up the price of new housing. 2. I don't know how easy it would be to game an energy audit (which would have to locale specific).
Generally, it’s a bad idea to be using any construction product unless it’s been around at least a few generations without major issues.
In your opinion, does that apply to stuff like 3d printed concrete houses where the material is very old but the application technology is extremely new?
Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic homes are another - typical materials in atypical layouts.
Tons of weird issues, from leaks in difficult to access areas, to weird condensation problems with no solutions.
Every building has problems. New styles of buildings or new materials create new problems with no known solutions (or no solutions at all), a surprising percentage of the time.
1. bank has more confidence in credit worthiness and can offer better rate
2. customer is more knowledgeable
3. energy cost can be hedged on the futures market
My point being, if homeowners aren’t hedging energy costs now, why would they begin to?
Tho I don't see how you could ever "pay up front" for energy for that long of a period without someone doing a futures deal. As a person especially today the energy prices fluctuate wildly.
Edit: making a hedge for your energy for the lifetime of the building (or yourself) does not in any way negate the idea of the GP. TCO is still made explicit and the energy part can be compared with other buildings and smarter decisions about insulation will be made which should drive developers into building better.
That seems like a bad idea soo many fronts. Hell I do not even like the annualized utility plans the companies offer that average out utility costs over the year
No, I want to pay exactly what I use, as I use it. No more, no less
The median mortgage is $1100 per month. Say the average monthly energy bill is $200 on top of that, and interest is 5%. Instead of paying $200 to the utility company, I pay $200 + interest to the bank, and the bank just keeps the interest?
Another issue is that you'd be putting 2022 dollars in escrow to be paying energy bills in 2052. So if the escrow doesn't grow at at least the rate of inflation, home owners are losing real purchasing power.
Maybe a simpler and more tractable solution would to just require projected energy costs to be listed in any home ads.
I don't think my proposal could actually work as written above. Your suggestion is an excellent starting point for something that might actually work.
My rationale for figuring a out a mechanism to include the energy cost up front is that many people only own a home for a few years, so they are less motivated to spend money on energy savings that they will never realize. Currently, when people shop for a home in a certain price bracket, they won't price in the energy savings of a better built home. If energy pricing was mandated in every ad, it might help. If the total cost of the house plus energy and taxes for the next 30 years (just projecting from current rates) was the top line number posted in ads and you had to dig down for details, it might be adequate incentive to nudge the market toward energy savings.
The solar installers sell it as a rebate of approximately 33% of the purchase price - you get a check in the mail a few months later. But behind all that is a really complicated process that the homeowner doesn't understand, buried in a bunch of contractual fine print that nobody reads.
What happens when you sell the house? The closing needs to accurately prorate prepaid items that one side owes to the other. In the case of solar, the seller needs to pay the buyer for the portion of the "rebate" that hasn't been "used". In your scenario, the buyer needs to pay the seller for the energy that has been paid for but not used.
This is a big issue that can't be solved with an energy audit. Your house will now need to be permanently connected to the internet so a 3rd party can collect the energy data. They aren't going to do that for free! What we are seeing with solar is that the whole process is opaque enough that it supports a collection of companies who structure things so that you get just barely enough of a discount for it to be worth it, and pocketing the rest of the savings for themselves.
More efficient houses (insulation, solar panels, etc) will have much less projected energy use, so far less money needs to be put into escrow, which would make new efficient houses cheaper than new less efficient houses. Unfortunately, it does nothing about existing stock.
https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy-efficiency/homes/buying-energ...
but, at ;least where I am . it has not reallu caught on.
Base this on bedrooms, location, offset pre-installed solar and ASHP/GSHP and bingo, you have an incentive to design and build green.
I live in a very moderate climate and the amount of people speccing triple-pane windows, complex ventilation and tremendously expensive insulation is mind-boggling. You can literally live with a couple of windows open all year and be comfortable here. Fetishism abounds.
A modern, "fully-sealed" design sidesteps all of this. Insulated walls and a little solar —both bizarrely absent in most buildings, even new builds— would go a long way. I'm not saying that there's no an opportunity to overspec these things, but the status quo, the spec 90% of buildings are being made to, is barely any better than the buildings going up 30 years ago.
But to answer your lead, yes. Materials' fabrication costs should be factored into their 10y efficiency.
Surely there is tremendous room for new building materials, right? I’m not saying hempcrete (real thing) is the future, but can we find ways to use alternative building materials that don’t require a tree to grow in the ground for 20+ years?
Also, it seems to me that an interlocking LEGO style brick would make things go up so much faster and cheaper…or at least make DIY more possible. But there are dozens of companies who come and go with a few flashy demos and then disappear.
It feels like we can do better.
First reaction: the homes are solving the same issue (somewhere to keep people warm safe and dry), so the solutions will look similar.
Second thought: Almost none of the actual technology in a modern home is the same as a hundred years ago, from insulation to ventilation, even down to fundamental structure - balloon framing became platform framing, tongue and groove sheathing became plywood, wood shingles that would need to be scraped and painted every half dozen years became one of a dozen products that'll last a quarter century without maintenance easily. A stick framed house a hundred years ago would be lucky to have crumpled paper in the cavity as insulation. Communications cable, high R-value insulation, air exchange with heat recovery, water and waste plumbing, electrical, multi-layer building envelopes, water-tight foundations, ... the list could go on and on, but a house built today is vastly more efficient and useful than one built a hundred years ago. (If you're looking on the market, most hundred year homes will have had all or most of these features added over the decades, at much higher expense)
> it seems to me that an interlocking LEGO style brick would make things go up so much faster and cheaper…or at least make DIY more possible
If you told me I should make a house out of some sort of brick-style product, all I would see is a hundred joints where water could get in and cause issues. I'm not going to do it unless the product has been on the market and heavily used for decades.
Trees are an incredible renewable resource. Most homes today are built with trees from managed, sustainable forest and LVL's (laminated veneer lumber) from the same sources. The LVL's replace "big beams" for old growth. The "frame" of an average house now looks like this: http://www.joneswholesale.com/products/images/ROS-RFPI-Solid...
Anysort of concrete/hempcrete/whatever is actually going to be a terrible thing for the environment compared to... wood.
Between LVLs, Glulam beams, and CLT what you should be asking is why arn't more midsize buildings built of wood instead of environmentally disastrous concrete. See this for example: https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/worlds-most-advanc...
Here in Japan, it's because wooden structures over about 3 stories will collapse in an earthquake, so everything over that height is made of steel and concrete.
A joke I keep making is, it doesn't surprise me so many people I meet in the trades are anti-science / conspiracy theorist adjacent, if you spend all day doing manual, physically intensive tasks using methods and materials that are functionally identical to how they did it 50+ years ago, it's easy to think scientists are full of shit.
From what I see most progress and 'efficiency' happens on the manufacturing side. Materials get cheaper to produce, overall better (stronger, nicer finish, etc), but usually not easier to install or work with.
A bit of a tangent but in the past you could just throw more people at the trades, so it didn't need to be any more efficient, but here in Aus the mining industry and commercial construction has eaten up most of the skills, and where I am it can take 12 months to break ground on a residential project right now. We're doing a commercial job for a builder that literally has "Homes" in their company name, and is just doing commercial work now. In October I was trying to organize an residential electrician in a smaller town (<50,000 people), and no one in town could come within 8 weeks. One company told me their entire staff was 5000km away from town for a commercial job, probably wouldn't be back available until next year, the money was just too good.
Talking to a friend of mine who builds homes, he was looking at cinder blocks and called them quick blocks or something similar.
Anyway, I think they are basically that. Make a wall with staggered blocks, poke rebar down the holes, fill them with concrete and vibrate. You then have a very strong durable wall.
Don't know about r-value though.
At that point you would have essentially 8" of solid concrete, so an R value around 1.5
Adding 3" of rigid foam on the outside (then waterproofing and siding on top of it) would bump that R value up to around 15, with all the thermal mass on the inside (which can help if there's large day-night temperature variation)
The biggest issue that still arises in highly insulated homes is moisture buildup. Even with ample air circulation, modern building techniques at large have accepted having a home that "breathes" is more important to prevent dangerous / destructive mold from growing in enclosed airspaces / under siding etc.
Also, "high performance" homes in most of the country, especially the east coast are at least 1.8x to 2.5x as expensive as the average builder home. This is simply not accessible even to relatively financially equipped home buyers.
That said, my current apt is incredibly well insulated and in comparison to my parent's home it's wild how much more efficient my dwelling is. At times in the winter I barely use my heat pump for days at a time to keep my home comfortable.
Part of the conservatism of building is due to building codes. Building inspection is fundamentally about risk management and my building inspectors wanted to see familiar products with already specified installation procedures in the building code - or else a detail stamped by a eg structural engineer so there is somebody to sue if things go wrong. In some cases they would also take a manufactured product with manufacture provided installation instructions.
Any "high performance" building that is innovative will automatically require a lot of additional engineering overhead to pass building inspection and in general residential building departments wish you would just do things like everybody else...
Developers are prolific political donors. Developers and unionized public sector workers split the pie, and your average citizen has little to no say in local politics.
As one of them: Ha ha! I wish!
Public Sector Workers have zero power, either in their union or in the government
Never confuse being a Union Worker, and thinking the union gives a crap about you the worker
And some of them are member run, not organizationally run. I'm on a local board of mine.
Requiring 6K ft^2 of the latter is quite high for a government-imposed requirement (and therefore likely not common enough to be a major source of overall housing pressure).
Solution: We need more government regulation!
Go get all housing regulations repealed for all I care, it won’t fix the problem.
The correction proposed in this article of gov't requiring that new homes be energy efficient and directly paying for it I think strikes the right balance. I would even go further and put money up for every home to be updated and retrofitted.
Government regulation bad market good is too naive and is a meaningless statement in abstract. You have to look at each case and the real effects market distortions will have.
The problem is that government regulations almost always create perverse incentives.
Government pays for energy efficient upgrades? Sounds like a program ripe with fraud and some juicy kickbacks to suppliers with connections to the government.
Or upgrades to home that aren’t actually inhabitable (but who cares if the contractor still gets paid?).
Remove almost from there: always
As for buyer and seller. Buying is the action of purchasing a product of service. Trying to get a service cheaper under coercion is a bad thing. Trying to sell it more expensive... will not work in the presence of alternatives. If no alternatives exist and no regulation is artificially shrinking the market, how can u go set a price for the seller? that would be coercitive and clearly baf, after all if they r the only ones able to produce the service (in absence of absurd regulations) and people buy it it is bc they give it the same or more value of the purchase price
Third parties putting conditions (a triangular relationship where it should be binary, the third party does not pay cost just sets a rule because yes wothout paying any cost).
Given these premises, in order to satisfy your need you have two options: choose an alternative or produce it yourself. After all, if you want something in the first place it is bc there is value in it. How come you want someone go to pint guns at them? No way!
Regulations usually shrink the market and create artificial monopolies. Those people who force monopolies are interventors who also have incentives, and sometimes way more perverse than the producers, which create some wellness for the others.
So you create a system where the person produces something has to play under the rules of the ones who produce things for others and where the regulators (persons not producing goods or services) pay no cost for it! That is absurd under any sensible view!!!
That is why you cannot just say that the market is bad.
The only limit to the market should be negative externalities.
And even those create a market incentive from the seller to not do things that afe negative. The buyer could choose an alternative. But if they do not and noone claims damage, after all people maybe do not care as much for that as those third party interventionists continuously claim, right?
Otherwise you would hear them...
Concrete examples where those market failures cannot be corrected, ever, with market mechanisms? Bc I hear it again and again in abstract terms.
Environmentalism, in the form of so-called green laws, has done so much to keep prospective home buyers out of the market for much of their lives, could really care less about the efficiency of new homes that most of us can't afford to buy anyway.
'Burn baby burn' ... if 'build baby build' ain't your motto.
Edit to add: This would not really lower demand, it would just shift it. A major consequence would be a decrease in single-family homes for rent. If there wasn't a consequent increase in single-family buyers, then this would lead to mass unit housing owned by fewer landlords (less competition).
I personally favor regulatory innovations encouraging rent-to-own or other mechanisms that encourage home ownership, while making it relatively easy to move if a job demands it. Something like automatic mortgages that a buyer can 'default' on if they need to move, but said 'default' not hitting their credit rating much as it's effectively just turning over the house in good condition to the mortgage holder to resell to the next tenant. With the mortgage payments already paid being split in some way between the moving out tenant and the mortgage company. Alternatively, if you stay until your mortgage is paid off, you own it outright.
I am definitely not a real estate or credit expert, and I'm sure such a system would be difficult to implement, but it probably wouldn't be impossible to implement.