Three Sustainable Design Questions for MAP’s Sara Bayer

East Clarke Place Senior Residence roof terrace

While the work of sustainable development is a year-round pursuit, Earth Day gives us an opportunity to reflect on our progress and advocate for more. So, we asked our Director of Sustainability, Sara Bayer, three quick questions to talk about where we stand.

In the last couple of years we’ve signed the AIA 2030 commitment and won 7 NYSERDA Buildings of Excellence awards, what are we learning right now?

Well, first and foremost that affordable housing is leading the way on this. With the sustainability requirements of the funding agencies our sector is out in front on sustainable multifamily development. That means the developers, contractors, engineers and so on, are familiar with the terminology, and things like Passive House. While everyone has different ideas of what to do, what’s hard to accomplish, or what’s too expensive, there has been a lot of great work in our world, and much better performing buildings are becoming the standard.

And we’re seeing that at MAP across our own portfolio. Because so much of our work is affordable housing, we’ve gotten exposure to the full array of building systems and technologies that are helping to transform sustainable development and we’re also seeing an accelerated shift toward the ultimate goal of caron neutral ready buildings, like those that the NYSERDA Buildings of Excellence competition is cultivating.

What are some sustainability measures that are hard to accomplish or maybe too expensive?

When it comes to achieving low-operational carbon, nothing is really that hard to accomplish at this point. Everything that we do in high performing projects, from building systems to construction methods has been implemented in our industry for a while now. The big moves like tight building envelopes, insulation, heat pumps, heat recovery and ventilation, even going all-electric, that’s all being done.

The other part of the question, what’s too expensive, that’s more a matter of interpretation. So, for instance ERVs are sometimes considered “extra.” But the reality is that if you are producing a very tight building, you really need ERVs, and that’s a whole separate explanation, but just as importantly, they provide energy recovery (it’s in the name) so including the technology should allow you to downsize your heating system which saves money.

We looked at this trade-off and those of many other sustainability measures at the Rheingold Senior Housing building we’re doing. It’s being built to Passive House standards, but we priced it as both a Passive House and a building that would have hit NYSERDA Tier 2 standards. On that one, we found the cost differential was not even 1%. It’s because there is a balance. Yes, certain technologies, methods, and materials cost more but they can also save money in other parts of the budget or in operating costs if one looks at a project’s cost holistically. There are a lot of things that make buildings expensive, but energy efficiency measures aren’t necessarily the driving factors there.

Is there one technology that everyone should be including in their buildings as a matter of practice?

There are probably a lot of great answers to this, but one thing that we’ve all been very focused on of late, particularly because of COVID, and something I care a lot about is air quality. It’s one of the many important places where sustainability and health overlap. So, my pick here might be ERVs. As I mentioned they provide energy recovery, so they make the heating and cooling system more efficient. They also proved filtered fresh air which is absolutely critical, not just in these new efficient buildings with tight envelopes, and even in buildings with current new energy code tightness.

If you have exhaust only ventilation (sometimes combined with trickle vents at windows) the system is flushing used air out of your home, but that creates a vacuum and new air rushes in to fill it. With a somewhat leaky building that air might get pulled in through the exterior which is definitely not great since you are essentially filtering it through your exterior walls, but in a building with a really tight envelope, the make-up air has to come from somewhere else. So, it gets pulled in under your front door from the corridor and even from other apartments. With an increased awareness of airborne pathogens, that is untenable. We’ve even seen how people get sick within the same living space so drawing air from one room to another within the same apartment could be a concern as well. ERVs are a safety issue (connected to sustainability) and should be standard, code even.