Once residential sustainability techniques were disseminated and demonstrated, as a plethora of ‘sustainable’ materials and technologies were produced, and as energy costs and concerns about the level of carbon emissions increased, theoretical life-cycle analyses and other research on sustainability-focused new builds and retrofits have come to show economic benefits.33 Thus, added to co-benefits in the areas of health and comfort, environmentally sustainable residential building seems to be the way of the future.34 But, is this how industry players, such as developers and builders, see it? Is this how it appears to house purchasers? Will these built sustainability advances be decisive for sus-tainability practices by householders?
Commercial fare and householder practices
The construction of an environmentally sustainable apartment building relies on the level of expertise of a developer and project manager orchestrating many different contributors in a complicated collabora-tion on a well-designed project abiding by government regulacollabora-tions and succumbing to commercial limitations centring on cost. The array of professional tasks include: cleverly locating and siting the block, and each apartment within it; sensible interior, exterior and landscape design;
using sustainably sourced materials with appropriate construction methods; sustainability advice and close supervision by profession-als and tradespeople, such as engineers, builders, carpenters, tilers, plumbers and electricians. Many regulatory requirements incorporate sustainability tools that rate qualities such as thermal performance and energy efficiencies of materials and appliances.
The independent US Green Building Council developed a building rating system, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), accrediting professionals accordingly with industry buy-in creating LEED as the primary reference point for the sustainability of buildings. This rating system has been taken up right across the world, in Europe, Asia and Latin America. However, a 2011 review noted specific challenges in the apartment sector, where:
owners and operators opt instead for a minimum threshold of sus-tainability necessary to obtain LEED certification, ostensibly for marketing purposes. In addition, the siting decisions and capital expenditures associated with green apartment living suggest that this particular type of niche housing is more suited to upper-income households. This particular inequity sparks outcries of social injustice, especially as the populations that could most benefit from the savings inherent within green housing are low-income.35
Moreover, another US study points out that LEED for Neighbourhood Development ratings relegate only a few percentage points to affordabil-ity and most accredited professionals suspect that developers decide not to risk losing profits or tarnishing such projects by highlighting accessi-bility to low-income earners.36 Furthermore, green building codes pay relatively little attention to size even though smaller apartments are key to householders practising sustainability.
Generally, apartments are built to economise on premium land at a high cost and in short supply. Moreover, as double-glazed windows, solar panels and hot water services, materials with high insulation properties, renewable or used materials, and energy efficient white goods now attract wider than niche markets, they are less expensive inclusions. Still, they often remain costlier than conventional options, and tradespeople can level hefty extra charges for working with unconventional choices.
Savings could be made by minimising apartment sizes, through clever design, integrating collective infrastructure and storage, and by bulk purchases. However, sustainability features increase the time profession-als spend on the job and collaboration takes time, both translating into greater costs. In short, despite the growing affordability of sustainable housing, commercial barriers remain considerable.
Both commercial and financial barriers include adversity to innovation or alternatives (see Chapter 9). For instance, many Australian mortgage lenders have tended to baulk at studio apartments less than 40sq m, especially if considered superfluous to market demand.37 A specific challenge relates to residential and industry cultures putting a premium on offering greater space, or following fashions, say in conventional eave-less building styles even where such eaves are essential to protect walls and windows from harsh sun.
The knowledge, skills, needs and practices of householders can optimise, or make a mockery of, the ideal sustainability functions of their apartment. For instance, a clothes line might exist in the ceiling of their laundry, or the balcony might easily hide a clothes horse for drying, but, instead, new owner-occupiers, landlords or tenants might install an energy-guzzling clothes dryer. A fan might offer basic cooling and opening windows make for natural ventilation but both options are neglected and an energy-guzzling air conditioner installed. The next owner or renter inherits such superfluity. Professional advice on energy- and water-efficient practices are more freely available today than yesterday, but cultural and personal habits can be as significant barriers to change as lack of sustainability knowledge and skills.
Sustainability: flexibility and adaptability
Built-in, or even accidental, ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptability’ of apartments enhances sustainability practices and dwelling performance. Ideally, apartments cater for the needs of inhabitants, and their visitors,
transi-tioning through life’s cycle from babies to seniors. Indeed, many building standards for new dwellings in global cities now include door and hall space for mobility aids, sloping bathroom floors without lips and edges for easy and safe movement, at least one bedroom on the ground floor of duplexes, and lifts and ramps instead of, or alongside, stairs. Apartment blocks can offer adaptability through diverse floor plans within and between units. Common spaces, too, need to accommodate all ages and stages to make everyday practices more sustainable.
Similarly, environmental sustainability criteria with respect to ideal heating and cooling ranges for maintaining internal temperatures, and ventilation, need to take account of levels of comfort necessary for maintaining good health. Air conditioning and heating have attracted special attention, with the focus on minimising use of both. Apartment dwellers can draw on traditional techniques to minimise the effects of heat waves, such as heading for the coolest place in the dwelling to retreat to and sleep in. Householders need to prioritise such space for those members especially sensitive, and vulnerable, to the impacts of heat stress.
Density in compact cities maximises opportunities for working at home or proximity to work. While work at home rarely parallels pre-industrial work–home spaces, during the twenty-first century we have seen increases in households with at least one member working from home. Work spaces can be provided by tidy cabinets opened and closed at will or located in mid-floor dens or lofts. Coworking in an apartment block space is a very useful option. Indeed, a range of options for working, gardening, child-minding, meeting and eating together can complement small apartment living in major ways. Because common facilities are used by multiple people in multiple ways up to, say 18 hours a day, they economise on space and equipment and optimise on neighbourly communal contact. Thus, attached dwellings in well-ser-viced precincts could become a natural home for cohousing, as discussed in Chapter 5.
Following the twenty-first century wave of suburban estates based on a cynical master-planned ‘community’ model,38 and a tradition of certain shared spaces and facilities in apartment blocks, a small number of contemporary architects and developers have been exploring ways to satisfy market demand for both sustainability and community in apartments. Constructing and selling eco-communities is the main topic of Chapter 8. It suffices to point out here that mainstream developments
promoted as high in sustainability and community features can be low performers due to overconsumption and relative cost, even commanding an above-average price on resale due to undersupply.
How sustainable?
Jaded by ‘the poor quality of housing stock in Britain ... plonked down with no regard for place or any kind of context’ and by ‘the dinosaur attitude of developers who were more interested in getting a return for investment in land than in making neighbourhoods that are decent places to live’, presenter of BBC Channel 4 program Grand Designs Kevin McCloud ventured into green social housing. Significantly, after several years’ experience as a developer, he concluded that while it was ‘easy to build an eco house’: ‘What is really hard is to convince people to change their lives and live more sustainably.’39 Everyday lives are constrained not only by costs but compulsion to live in a general merry-go-round of unsustainable practices – well-illustrated in a study of the Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED).
BedZED (2002) is 100 mainly apartment dwellings with 100 workspaces, communal facilities and amenities, built in south London by a well-established affordable housing association. Although a top-down market-oriented development, developer knowledge and skills gained in BedZED have been transferred to social housing more generally, contributing to the initial UK policy goal of zero carbon new homes by 2016 and the 2007 UK Code for Sustainable Homes (a standard for rating and certifying the sustainability performance of new dwellings).
BedZED won the Royal Institute of British Architects 2001 Housing Design Award for sustainability and informed the One Planet Living approach of its initiator and collaborator BioRegional.
A 2009 evaluation of BedZED referred to the Global Footprint Network calculation that, if equity ruled, each and every inhabitant of Earth would need to live off 1.8 global hectares (gha) of productive land – thus equating to a ‘one planet’ lifestyle (likely to shrink to 1.2 gha by 2050). Applying this approach, BedZED residents had an average ecological footprint of 2.6 planets and, even a highly motivated BedZED resident in the ideal circumstances would live a 1.7 planet lifestyle. The study pointed out that ‘residents cannot lead one planet lifestyles in a relatively small demonstration project like BedZED’ mainly ‘because the minute they step off site they are participating in the “three planet”
higher impact world and using the facilities we all share, such as the health service, roads, shops and government services’.40
Such post-occupancy monitoring of sustainable housing developments is often neglected or ad hoc. Meanwhile, residents’ practices and collective or organisational management varies, to produce different outcomes than the optimums indicated by ideal sustainability forecasts pre-occupancy. In practice, monitoring has many technical and practical difficulties, such as ‘monitoring fatigue’. Furthermore, while monitoring can have a positive social effect, pressuring sustainable behaviour, there is the risk that residents slacken off good practices when not observed or subject to reporting. Interestingly, a thesis examining data from 16 international sustainable community settlements revealed that European cases tended to be more studious, and followed up on poor sustainability performance, while it was characteristic of US examples to gloss over any weaknesses exposed.41 Many other questions can be raised, such as how much a greater occupancy rate might alter sustainability performance.
The 100 BedZED dwellings were occupied by just 220 residents in 2014.42 How affordable?
Two other cases illustrate points associated with affordability. The designers of a block of 24 one- and two-bedroom apartments, The Commons, located 6km from Melbourne’s central business district (CBD), incorporated small dwelling size as a sustainability criterion along with several key goals to achieve zero carbon through: both efficient energy use and solar energy generation in situ; sustainable construction and material use, including zero waste in demolition and construction through reuse and recycling; sustainable transport through public transit proximity, accommodating bikes, and not providing car parks to encourage walking and car sharing; sustainable water use through water collection, storage and onsite-use, and gardens and landscape designed to absorb and slow run-off with minimal householder water use through efficiency-based practices and devices; and – given that two-thirds of the average Victorian’s ecological footprint derives from their food and other goods and services consumed – a rooftop garden was created with 46 raised vegetable garden boxes, bee hives and green purchasing facilitated by bulk green contracts and composting. Other community amenity included a cafe and artist studios.
While a two-bedroom The Commons apartment of 72sq m sold mid-2014 for A$605,000 when the median comparable unit price was A$485,000,43 its developers stated that they intended to make subsequent projects ‘affordable’. In 2016, significantly ‘more spacious’ apartments in their neighbouring development integrated a caveat on each title to require owners to limit resale prices to equal (or less than) their purchase price plus the average growth in house prices for the suburb, for the initial twenty years of the apartment’s life.44 The developer economised by limiting apartments to one bathroom and no laundry (centralising shared access to laundry facilities on the rooftop). Moreover, given that promotion of The Commons resulted in a long waiting list of interested customers, financing, real estate and advertising costs were markedly reduced. Nevertheless, these apartments, and those in another more expansive development planned in a suburb several kilometres distant, were expected to sell for a similar price to those at The Commons.
Affordability remains questionable in these developments partly because the model, arguably, makes first owners bear the costs of the affordability caveat. Only post-occupancy evaluations will prove real sustainability gains.45
A final example shows similar sustainability and affordability challenges in a development in Issaqhah, a suburb east of Seattle in Washington State (US). The 10-townhouse transit-oriented zHome project was initiated to achieve zero-net energy use, ‘at least cost’ and specifically as a model for similar market initiatives. An interdisciplinary professional design process incorporated principles such as durability, maintainability and flexibility, minimising noise and maximising healthy conditions, such as sunlight and natural ventilation in dwellings.
Because the design process did not include them, residents became the
‘wild card’; various assumptions about lifestyle preferences were made on their behalf and technologies installed for them to monitor and modify their behaviour.
A ground source heat pump system feeds in under concrete slab and bamboo floors. Separate solar panels provide energy for each townhouse and for shared community facilities. Water and waste systems are similarly environmentally sensitive and ‘equally’ shared. Cars are housed on the margins, with extra parking and electric charging facilities in an adjacent street. The ‘solar courtyard’ and other communal green spaces, edible gardens and green walls (soil-free vertical gardens often watered by automatic drip irrigation) are maximised. The development has
functioned as an education centre. Despite its sustainability features, the project cost over US$3 million, relied on free land, and was developed without resident input, which risked jeopardising compliance.46
If conventional fare and innovative market players face massive challenges in meeting ideal levels of sustainability and breach afford-ability targets, another layer of complexity is in city and environmental planning where, interestingly, grassroots activity is becoming vibrant.