A Guide to Green
The 2025 Green Home & Living Guide from the Asheville based Green Built Alliance has been released. It is the primary tool for education, outreach, and professional connection in western North Carolina’s green building industry. The magazine is a collective effort from professionals across the region, providing information and news for both building professionals and the general public.
Have a Gander! Find a Pro! Gain some Insights!
If the magazine does not display or scroll, read it here: https://www.greenbuilt.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Green-Built-24.pdf
Our own article and contribution unfortunately got bumped by Hurricane Helene and more important topics. But here it is. For your eyes only.
Happy Homes
Build Smaller, Build Better
By Toby Witte
We are committing collective suicide. We are laying waste to our habitat. We are actively stoking the cancer that is destroying the very shield protecting us from the outer universe. Be ashamed. Be scared. Our climate crisis is real.
If you are planning to build a home for yourself - don’t. The built environment alone generates 42% of all annual global CO2 emissions. Let me repeat that: the construction of buildings, their heating and cooling, lighting, operation, and decommissioning is responsible for 42% of greenhouse gasses blasted into the atmosphere. If you want to be sustainable, simply don’t use materials, don’t use fuel, and don’t destroy landscapes. Simply don’t build. If that is not an option, I urge you to build smaller and to build better.
Without any good reason our entire building and real estate industry has decided to value a home by the number of its square feet. Even though the squares of feet making up a floor plan don’t add any value to the quality of your life.
Every home development must build more square feet for less. Otherwise, the construction loan or mortgage won’t be issued. Otherwise, the developer’s calculations won’t add up. Otherwise, the builder cannot provide the expensive stuff, like heating and cooling systems or a kitchen. Otherwise, the architect won’t be asked to design any homes ever again. Otherwise, the homeowner won’t have the sense they beat the real estate market.
We are using three times as much floor area per person as our grandparents' generation. We have turned square feet into the holy grail of house construction. Yet, even though we saw their purported value pulverize in front of our eyes during the Great Recession, we did not learn our lesson. If our homes are built for their size, they are without any value.
Our homes are built to last a decade. That’s how long the court system cares to hold anyone responsible. If they don’t deteriorate on their own, we tear them down and build the next heartless carcass of industrial thrift.
If we value our homes by the number of their square feet, we don’t value them at all. Why bother?
Our homes shape us. We wake up in them, live in them, work in them, raise our families in them, and grow old in them. Even more so since the coronavirus pandemic cooped us up in our private, built surroundings. Our homes influence us. They influence our self-appreciation - how we greet the day, how we perceive ourselves as part of our natural surroundings, and how we interact with each other. Walk into a cathedral and you are drawn to the heavens. Walk into a prison cell and you are demoralized. Walk into your home and you better be infused with happiness.
For your home to be a place of joy, every piece going into it should be carefully considered. How does the natural light ripple along a surface to evoke a sense of serenity? Where was the material sourced and treated so that it can add to the quality of air we breathe? How were individual elements aligned with one another to avoid the growth of mold? How are all the sticks and bricks chosen, handled, and arranged to create an ensemble of such beauty it will have a chance to serve as a stage for a better life.
To figure it out, everyone has to pitch in: the architect, builder, interior designer, landscape architect, structural engineer, and material supplier. The list is long. Let’s ask them not to pull any punches.
As luck will have it, any such effort goes hand in hand with reducing the burden on our habitat. When you design and build green, you will design and build better. When you design and build better, you will live and feel better.
There are plenty of simple steps readily available to design and build in a sustainable fashion. Design your home to the site and the path of the sun to make solar gain work to your benefit. Create a continuous shell of insulation to minimize your energy usage. Provide a continuous air barrier in order to improve air quality. Pick sustainable and healthy materials that won’t endanger you or your habitat. Choose building methods that will allow your home to last for the next generation. Go all electric and use building systems that can rely on renewable energy.
It is simple. And it is expensive. Why? Because you ask everyone involved to show up with a caring eye and a loving hand. Because the cheapest stuff just won’t be up to snuff.
And so, I implore you: stop being so cheap! Spend your hard-earned money on what matters: a quality of life over a quantity of square feet. You don't have to increase your budget. Simply decrease the size of your home and increase the cost per square foot.
I love to make the analogy of comparing a school bus with a high-end sports car. You can buy both for the same price, roughly a quarter of a million dollars. Yet the square foot price of a school bus is vastly lower than that of the sports car. Hower, for the purpose of you cruising down the hairpin curves of a mountain road to the beach, which one would you choose? They cost the same.