How to Make Sure Your Green Building Performs Up to Snuff; Education of Residents, Staff Is Vital

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Tax Credit Advisor, October 2009:

You’ve completed your green apartment project.      

You’ve filled it with tenants.

Now what? How do you assure that the building will actually achieve the designed efficiencies in energy and water usage.      

The answer, one expert says, is taking pro-active steps to educate residents, property manager, and management staff. Otherwise your expected utility cost savings may melt away like an ice cream cone on a summer day.

“The maintenance staff and the residents are the critical element to realizing the green benefits that were designed into the building and the construction process,” says Dana Bourland, Senior Director of Green Communities at Enterprise Community Partners, Inc. Enterprise runs the Green Communities initiative, a voluntary national green building rating and certification program tailored to construction and rehabilitation of affordable homes and multifamily rental properties. Under Green Communities, housing projects are evaluated against a checklist of criteria relating to design, water conservation, indoor air quality, energy efficiency, and other areas.

Bourland recommends that project owners develop a manual, given to residents at move-in, which “explains what the green features are in their apartment and in the building as a whole, and their role in maintaining those features.” This includes information about green materials and features in the building, as well as housekeeping instructions. The manual can also suggest other ways that residents can promote greenness, such as by recycling or by using low-VOC paints if re-painting. “Get them engaged, both in their participation to keep utility costs low and to keep the indoor air quality as healthy as possible,” says Bourland.

Owners can educate tenants further, Bourland notes, by putting up signs in the building that explain specific green features, and by providing additional learning opportunities, such as informal meetings or creation of a residents green committee. “Once we learn more about a building’s impact on our environment and our own health, we understand we have a role in making improvements, and we understand how to make those improvements, then we’re more engaged,” Bourland notes.       Renters who pay their own utility bills certainly have an economic motive to cut their energy and water usage. But Borland says even those who don’t can come to understand that they are “part of the solution” for a better environment.

Managers, Maintenance Staff

Bourland also recommends development of a separate manual, or at least written procedures, for the property manager and maintenance staff. This explains the building’s green features, how they are supposed to perform, and how to maintain them. The intent is for the manager and staff to understand that there’s a specific baseline performance expected of the building, and to monitor future usage of utilities (e.g., electricity, natural gas, water) so that variations can be detected, and problems identified and fixed.      

Bourland said there should be a system in place to track a building’s actual energy and water usage against expected performance. One possible resource to do this is EPA Portfolio Manager, an online energy management tool offered through the federal government that can now be used for multifamily residential buildings. (http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=evaluate_performance.bus_portfoliomanager)

Probably late this fall, Enterprise will be releasing a new operations and maintenance “toolkit” designed for property managers. In the meantime, templates for separate manuals for residents and for property management and maintenance staff are available on the Enterprise Green Communities Web site (http://www.greencommunities.org).      

Enterprise also offers “sustainability grants” of up to $5,000 to affordable housing developers that can be used to pay for training of residents and management and maintenance staff of green projects.

Design Input

For new construction projects, Bourland recommends that the future property manager and maintenance staff be included by the development team in the project’s design and development phases. These individuals, she explains, “can provide input to how this building should be designed in a way that is going to meet their needs in terms of what they know works in operating and maintaining affordable housing.”      

Finally, Bourland says small improvements can be made even to existing multifamily properties not originally designed as green, to enhance their efficiency and cut utility costs. Examples include replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lamps or low-emitting diodes, insulating exposed hot water pipes, turning down the boiler thermostat, or selecting Energy Star appliances when replacing laundry equipment.