Habitat for Humanity East Bay - Green Building

Habitat East Bay received a GreenPoint Rated award at our Buena Vista Commons and Edes Avenue development. We passed both with flying colors receiving a score of 94 and 140 respectively (a score of 50 is considered green). Read more.

 

Green Building Partners

Green Building

Green building is a "whole systems" approach for designing and constructing buildings that optimize s energy efficiency, water conservation, and material resource consciousness. These buildings are designed with health, safety, energy efficiency, resource efficiency and comfort in mind.

How We Build Green

Habitat East Bay builds sustainable homes to care for the environment, Habitat homeowners, and volunteers by integrating environmentally preferable materials, energy efficiency, water conservation, and durability into the design of the buildings.

 

 

We started building green in 2000, and remain one of the leaders in affordable green building in the Bay Area. Since then, we have completed more than 60 green solar homes that have been certified through California's GreenPoint Rated system and the national Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). Most recently, we were the first Habitat affiliate in California to receive the Gold level certification on three homes at our Edes Avenue development in Oakland.

In the near future, we will include the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star certification process in building standards into homes that are in the design phase. Our goal is to integrate green building principles of design, execution, and product into all future projects.

The Cost and Benefits

Many think that green building costs more. We have found this is NOT true.

Most materials are comparable in price to their traditional counterparts and any extra cost is off-set by the savings on other materials. Many aspects of green building are simply design choices that utilize natural resources, like facing the homes south to capture passive solar heating and cooling.

The benefits of green building are many and varied. They include:

• Long-term savings on electrical bills, water bills, medical bills
• Indoor air quality: less allergens, mold and reduces incidents of respiratory problems
• Reduced water usage
• Maintain comfortable indoor environment with limited electrical use
• On-Demand hot water
• Less volatile chemicals released into indoor environment from building materials
• Lower house maintenance costs

Get Involved

Want to get help us build more sustainable, affordable homes?  Join our Green Team.

The Green Team is a group of volunteers that meet quarterly to discuss green building techniques, learn about cutting edge technology and drive innovation in the Habitat East Bay green building program.

More questions? Contact us at Volunteer@HabitatEB.org.