Schenectady's Habitat homes getting greener

PHOTOGRAPHER: Kathleen Moore

Habitat for Humanity of Schenectady has found a way to make its houses energy-efficient while not raising the cost of construction.

The latest house, at 329 Schenectady St., won the country’s second-highest level of energy certification: gold LEED status. And yet it didn’t include solar panels, bamboo flooring or any of the other top-dollar amenities that the city uses in its green homes.

“You don’t have to put in solar panels,” Habitat Executive Director Jeffrey Clark said. “They’re nice things to do, but they’re expensive. You have to draw the line somewhere. We are still an affordable housing entity.”

Clark initially refused to join the city’s green homes project, saying the houses would be so luxurious that low-income residents wouldn’t be able to afford the taxes. His prediction came true: The city sold its houses at a loss, but they were assessed at full value, leaving one family unable to pay a big tax bill.

City officials have since changed their program, scaling back the size of the houses while negotiating a lower assessment for the existing homes.

At the same time, they kept encouraging Habitat to join them. Now the organization has finally found a way to build LEED-certified houses without violating its basic principles.

Instead of fancy add-ons, Habitat switched to a new, denser type of foam insulation.

It found donors for a better type of siding.

It started using water-efficient faucets.

And all those little items added up.

Free help

“There’s a lot of things you can do,” Clark said. “Controlling the air flow, air sealing. We can afford to send a group of volunteers around to caulk the heck out of a place because it doesn’t cost us anything except a couple tubes of caulk.”

Habitat also won points toward LEED certification by using up its scrap wood, which volunteers turned into wind baffles to place between the trusses in each house frame. That’s only affordable because it uses what Habitat has plenty of: free labor.

“We do a lot of things like that, that a production building won’t do, because we have volunteers,” said Anne Rockwood, who coordinated the construction of Habitat’s LEED-certified houses. She is now filing the paperwork to get LEED status for 325 Schenectady St. and 841 and 881 Hillside Ave. All three homes are expected to achieve the high environmental standard.

She said that much of the group’s success came from donations.

“If we had to buy the stuff we use to achieve LEED certification, we wouldn’t have been able to do it, not affordably,” she said. “Quality Roofing donated about 10 houses worth of fiber-cement siding. No one will do that for a municipality, which is wrong, but that’s the way it is.”

The city can’t achieve the same level of savings, since the city projects don’t use volunteer labor or accept truckloads of donated materials. But Homeownership Coordinator Ann Petersen said the city has also found ways to reduce its costs.

“Certainly it’s taken us a couple years,” she said. “But this is a learning process. You have to start somewhere. This is what you should do after you figure it out.”

Among the surprises that Rockwood learned: framing a house off-site is considered better for the environment.

“The thought is that you’re more likely to be able to manage the waste [wood],” she said.

There’s also no need to buy expensive cabinets. Any non-tropical wood counts toward LEED certification.

“We learned that most off-the-shelf cabinets count,” Rockwood said.

So many little things add up that she thinks Habitat will soon earn LEED status on its rehab projectss, which the city has not yet achieved. Habitat and the city currently meet the lesser requirements for an Energy Star rating on rehab projects, but Rockwood thinks that Habitat’s house on Clarendon Street may be the last to score that low.

“If we’d worked out a procedure before we got into the house, I feel we could’ve gotten LEED,” she said. “I truly think we can.”