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This Week's Sustainable Building News: The Housing Reset Is Already Underway

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The Housing Reset Is Already Underway with housing policy, energy codes, and affordable housing innovation.

Judge blocks requirements from HUD and USDA enforcing 2021 IECC energy code on federally financed housing

White House executive order eliminates housing regulatory barriers

ROAD to Housing Act

HUD Green and Resilient Retrofit Program

Missouri HB2384

Link to oppose HB2384

Santa Monica’s modular, affordable homes

Vermont utility tries geothermal

LA 50L Home Coalition project with water conservation

Editors’ Product Pick: Focal heat system

Fairview Passive home

Nature-Positive Economy and Investment Report

COGNITION Hot Take: Healthy Home Data

The Impact Series with Dr. Jim White

Events

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SPEAKER_02

This week, housing policy took a sharp turn and it could redefine how homes get built in America, from federal rollbacks on energy codes to a major bipartisan housing bill, to states actively restricting green building. The rules are changing fast. I'm Katie O'Keefe. This is your weekly sustainable building news update. We'll start with a major ruling. A federal judge just blocked requirements from HUD and USDA that would have enforced the 2021 IECC Energy Code on federally financed housing. This means projects using federal funding are no longer required to meet modern energy efficiency standards. This is a major shift. Federal programs have been one of the strongest drivers of high performance housing, and that pressure just eased overnight. Are we stepping back from energy efficiency in the name of affordability? Then came the White House. A new executive order is directing federal agencies to eliminate what it calls regulatory barriers to housing. That includes energy requirements, water efficiency standards, even green building mandates. The goal is clear, lower costs and speed up construction. Are these actually barriers or safeguards? Because if states begin restricting green codes and bypassing permitting, we could see a broader rollback of sustainability standards across the country. And that's what's already started to happen. Last week we talked about Kansas City rolling back its energy code, and now, also in Missouri, a new bill just passed through the House of Missouri legislature, which, if passed, would prohibit local governments from requiring energy codes above 2009 standards. This would effectively freeze progress, impacting more than 80 jurisdictions currently building to higher performance levels. On March 12th, the Senate passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act with rare bipartisan vote. Inside the bill are more than 40 provisions targeting affordability, supply, zoning, financing, and permitting. But one of the most important shifts? Manufactured housing. For decades, the industry has been constrained by outdated rules, including a requirement that homes be built on a permanent chassis. That changes now. The bill allows more flexibility in construction, expands federal loan access, and relaxes zoning restrictions. In other words, it removes some of the biggest barriers to scaling this type of housing, and that matters, because manufactured housing is one of the few segments that can deliver real volume at a price point the market actually needs. What we'll be watching is whether manufactured housing players will continue to improve the resilience and energy efficiency of their housing units. Meanwhile, HUD is reshaping its green and resilient retrofit program. Key changes are grants will now be converted to loans, emissions tracking will be removed, and both solar and EV funding eliminated. Some efficiency targets remain, but the emphasis is clearly shifting from aggressive decarbonization to a more watered down approach. And one more to watch. New federal disaster recovery funds are going out, but this time there's no requirement to rebuild using green building standards, which raises a critical question. If we rebuild the same way after disasters, are we just setting up the same cycle again? Now let's shift to what's happening on the innovation side. In Santa Monica, California, a new modular affordable housing project just opened. The units were installed in three days. This is Berkeley Station, a 13-unit development for low-income residents paired with on-site support services. The homes are factory built, all electric, lead gold, solar powered, but the real story, speed. At a time when affordable housing projects can take months or even years, this project was delivered in days. Modular is becoming a serious answer to the housing crisis. In some other good news, in Heinsburg, Vermont, a natural gas utility is teaming up with affordable housing developers to build a 44-unit neighborhood powered by geothermal energy. No fossil fuels required. Instead of traditional heating, the project will use ground source heat pumps, pulling stable temperatures from underground to heat homes year-round. And here's a twist: the utility isn't being replaced, it's evolving. They'll install, own, and maintain the geothermal system and sell heat the same way they once sold gas. For developers, that solves one of geothermal's biggest barriers, high upfront cost. And for residents, more stable energy bills and less exposure to fuel price spikes. What if cutting water use didn't require behavior change? A pilot project in Los Angeles tested exactly that. 31 homes were studied, 15 were retrofitted with high efficiency appliances and fixtures. Participants weren't asked to conserve water and couldn't see the usage data. After two years, water use dropped by 56% and people reported their routines were actually easier. Better design and performance, not behavior, will probably be what drives the next wave of efficiency. This week's editor's product pick is a technology that makes us ask, what if we stopped heating rooms and started heating people? Focal is developing a system that delivers heat directly to individuals using AI, sensors, and targeted infrared. The system follows you, not the space. Early results show up to 80% energy savings. It's a completely different way of thinking about comfort, and it could change HVAC as we know it. 10 trillion. A new report says the nature positive economy could unlock 10 trillion annually by 2030. Meanwhile, the green economy has already reached nearly 8 trillion and has outperformed global markets by 59% since 2008. But here's a disconnect. 7.3 trillion is still flowing into activities that harm nature. Investors aren't just late, they're massively misallocated. The question now is who moves first? To learn more, link to the full report in our show notes. Let's talk about a project that challenges a long-standing assumption. For years the industry has said you have to choose affordable or high performance, speed or quality, sustainability or practicality. The Fairview Passive project proves that's not true. It's a net zero home built to be cost-effective, durable, and livable without overcomplicated systems. The success didn't come from adding more technology, it came from getting the fundamentals right orientation, envelope, and materials. The takeaway, we don't need more complexity, we need better execution, and to design homes and systems. Read about this project, including the specific products and systems that got it to net zero carbon in our show notes. This week's cognition hot take shows a shift in how people define a healthy home. What are homeowners' top priorities? Natural light, non-toxic materials, and fresh air ventilation. For kitchens specifically, better lighting ranks highest. This data suggests reviewing your window and lighting strategy might be in order. If you think climate change is just about rising temperatures, you're missing the real story. In our latest impact series, Dr. Jim White explains, sea level rise isn't something we can reverse on human timescales. So the real question isn't what's happening, it's what do we do next? Because this is no longer just environmental. It's economic, it's social, it's about where people can live and where they can't. From insurance markets pulling back to more extreme rain events expanding risk inland, climate change is becoming a human behavior story. And the biggest variable now is us. Watch the full episode at the link in our show notes. Here's a moment from that interview.

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Sadly, we are coming to the realization that it's not just on the coast that that um that's one of the things because I work on ice sheets, that's something that that I have worked on my entire career. But the reality is that the um the probability of a very large rainstorm, much larger than we've seen in the past, not much larger, but you know, certainly more frequently, uh very large rainstorms, that has gone up. And we saw that here in Western Carolina when Helene came through. It's like, wow, you know, when you can when you can get a couple of feet of rain, you know, in a in a short period of time, that has a devastating impact. And now we have an atmosphere which is warmer, which can hold more moisture, and you have these stars that can haul moisture in from the from the ocean and just dump it. And uh yeah. I mean, if you look at the the frequency of large rainfalls, particularly in the eastern United States, they've gone up and up.

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That's it for this week. Make sure to check out our calendar of important sustainability events in the links below and register for our next live webinar, 30 years of Energy Star for Homes, inside the origin story. It's coming up on May 6th. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

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