Green-home backers hope to be in the black

How do you build a premium home in a discount era?

The promoters of a hyper-green home planned for Felida, struggling with a national credit freeze and local housing glut, are looking into government or foundation grants to help underwrite construction.

It represents a shift from a year ago, when supporters envisioned recouping high upfront costs by finding a well-heeled buyer dedicated to living sustainably.

Builder John Fazzolari said he’s still committed to a goal of meeting the greenest of green certification programs — the Living Building Challenge. The house would generate as much energy as it consumes, capture and reuse all of its own water, and provide as much value to wildlife as it does to its human inhabitants.

“We just have to be really careful with what we’re doing financially,” Fazzolari said. “Our plan is not necessarily to pull back from this thing.”

As with any prototype, achieving a set of cutting-edge goals won’t be cheap.

Because designers envision using the latest in technology — solar panels alone will cost upwards of $80,000 — the 1,780-square-foot house will be expensive. A lender ultimately must be convinced that Fazzolari can find a buyer willing to pay top dollar for a house with a composting toilet.

Project Green Build President Brandon Tauscher, who founded his nonprofit organization to promote sustainable building techniques, said he now envisions the house as a demonstration home.

“We know we’ve got a good project, but how do we make it work?” he said. “The traditional way wasn’t going completely as expected.”

However, he said, the initiative has already stirred ripples of progress.

“Local building codes are in the process of being changed as a result of the project. Products manufacturers are rethinking how to bring goods to market. Water harvesting is being reconsidered at the state level, and our project is the first attempt at packaging these efforts and bringing them to market,” he wrote in an e-mail to Fazzolari, architect Timothy Buckley and designer Chuck Dougherty.

Meanwhile, a less-ambitious version of the same concept is moving forward.

Tim Leavitt, a civil engineer who serves on the Vancouver City Council, anticipates breaking ground on his own “mainstream green” home sometime in the next six to nine months. Leavitt, who plans to run for mayor next year, envisions a home that’s affordable in the short term while slicing utility costs by half in the long term.

“Policymakers are doing a lot of talking about green,” he said

His idea is to “walk the talk” by building his own 2,000- to 2,500-square-foot home in Vancouver.

In a concession to current reality, the house won’t be constructed with solar panels and a geothermal ground source heating system. But it will be wired and prepared so that those features could be installed later, when the technologies become more affordable.

“We’re not just throwing economics out of the equation and going full-tilt green,” Leavitt said.

Instead, he said, he’s incorporating subtle touches in the design. Rain will be captured from the roof and stored for summer irrigation. Counters will be made of recycled concrete. A relatively small footprint will make efficient use of space.

By maximizing efficiency, Leavitt thinks he can halve the cost of electricity, water, sewer and natural gas.

His goal is to build the house in a way that makes it no more than 10 percent more expensive than one built with traditional techniques. Leavitt, who currently lives in an apartment, said the home should be affordable for the upper middle class.

“I wanted to build a home that mom and dad and two kids could afford,” he said, “and yet it’s still making a reasonable statement about impacts on the environment.”