Architect Chris Benedict is on a rooftop in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, New York, explaining to a camera how energy recovery ventilators provide fresh air without losing heat. It’s windy, it has been raining, and everything is soaking wet, but she forges on with her message: decarbonizing our drafty, aging building stock is one of the most critical problems we face. And she’s working with an innovative retrofit model that meets the challenge.
Depending on how you play with the statistics, buildings contribute between a quarter and half of the global greenhouse gas emissions threatening the survival of our species. And most of those emissions come from the world’s biggest cities. In New York City, heating, cooling, cooking, water heating and clothes drying in buildings create about 70% of atmospheric carbon and methane.
We’re beginning to do better with the electrification of vehicles and the ramping up of renewable energy. Adoption of these has already passed the tipping point. Greening these sectors together with solving our buildings predicament would put us on a path to ending about 75% of global emissions.
Unprecedented heat, fires, floods and storms are forcing politicians to declare a climate emergency, and more are turning to the building sector for solutions. U.S. President Joe Biden’s pivotal Inflation Reduction Act is pouring billions into tax incentives for building retrofits. Officials all over North America are announcing bans on natural gas hookups in new buildings. In place of gas-burning furnaces, politicians are talking up electric heat pumps.
In the midst of it all, Benedict and her team are in the spotlight, having partnered with New York State, the city and RiseBoro Community Partnership over many years to refine climate solutions, most recently installing heat pumps and other green technology in nine multi-family buildings in Brooklyn. “Suddenly, I’ve been getting a lot more calls about affordable retrofits, creating lower-carbon, healthy spaces,” Benedict says. “This RiseBoro group alone has another 100 buildings. We’re starting on some more projects of theirs right after these nine, plus a 13-storey seniors’ tower.”
Like Benedict, architects, engineers and builders everywhere are now being asked to decarbonize larger buildings than ever before, with well-proven green technology that much of the public assumes is new. Green building professionals have survived decades-long struggles against industry acceptance, regulatory frameworks, tight budgets, supply chains and, above all, fear of change.
Now that public support for the energy transition is growing, can we take emissions from all buildings to near zero? Can we ramp it up fast, and scale it up large? Absolutely yes, say these experts. Corporate Knights reached out to the teams working on more than half a dozen of the most exciting green architectural achievements in North America to learn more about how they’re doing just that.
There may not be enough of them, but many buildings are already greener than we think, and sustainable features are already operating at large scale. Read on to find out just how large and how today’s green building heroes are trying to save our planet.
Affordable housing retrofits in Brooklyn
The first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, and on that mucky spring morning, a young Benedict donned her rubber boots and went out into the woodlands and parks of Connecticut with a community team to pick up litter. She was shocked to discover that, by summer’s end, people had thoughtlessly spread trash in the exact same places.
Now an architect, Benedict is still trying to clean up the neighbourhood. But she’s using Casa Pasiva, a 146-unit project in Bushwick, as a model for healthy, cost-effective, deep energy retrofits to occupied buildings that are mostly affordable rental units. Her team is refining an innovative methodology to reach Passive House certification from Phius (Passive House Institute U.S.). “With retrofits you become inventive,” says Benedict. “We were able to get a zoning change approved so we could put eight inches of insulation on the outside of buildings. We all need to take action and take responsibility for climate change.”
The insulation, along with new windows, heat pumps, induction cooktops and energy recovery systems, will reduce energy usage by 60% to 80%, significantly lowering operational expenses and emissions. Tenants usually grumble about having to move out for a couple of weeks during renovation, but, Benedict says, “when they hear they will be able to control their air conditioning, they’re more motivated.”
It’s relatively easy to erect a few new low-carbon single-family homes or multi-unit structures. Benedict has worked on a number of them. But buildings last for up to 100 years and are typically replaced at a rate of about 3% annually. Most of New York City’s fossil-fuel-heated edifices will still be standing in 2040. Benedict is one of the few people anywhere successfully tackling this massive retrofit challenge – and the impacts are longer-lasting than picking up litter.
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