Energy Retrofits, for good reason.

Healthy, environmentally astute, efficient housing costs a whopping 3% more...

When my daughter designed a house for a math project that included energy efficient appliances and renewable energy sources, I wrote about it. It seemed significant to me that a basic staple of childhood dreaming - creating a house where the kids control everything from bedroom placement to entertainment room on a bottomless budget - had gone energy efficient. In my daughter's case, the driving force was grades. An inefficient house would fail. But that was just the catalyst. Once she got underway, she went over the top - creating gardens and windmills, and...

Today the Women's Media Center website revealed another kind of dream house, one of brick and mortar and soul, motivated by the desire to allow low-income women to live in beautiful, healthy, efficient housing. For Intervale Green Apartments, the budget was anything but bottomless. Which makes the decision to "go green" all the more significant. The building retrofit is a project of Nancy Biberman, founder of the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCo), and it is located in Crotona Park East, a South Bronx neighborhood despaired of by both Presidents Carter and Reagan, who compared it to the London after the Blitz.

WHEDCo, which maintained the integrity of the existing building, did not have the budget necessary to add solar panels in order to make their building green, so it decided to reduce emissions other ways....

...with properly sized boilers, efficient insulation, double-pane windows treated with a metal transparent coating to reflect solar heat outside in summer and radiant heat inside in winter, Energy Star appliances, compact fluorescents, and occupancy sensors to turn lights on and off as a person enters and leaves an empty room. The result: a 30 percent decrease in energy use over that of a conventional building, reducing both resident utility bills and WHEDCo operating costs.

The extra cost of these energy efficient steps came to about 2-3 percent more than conventional construction, a difference that will be canceled out by subsidies. And here's the best part. The benefits extend directly to tenants, who, Biberman points out, "Can spend the money saved on utilities on food and other essentials." The building's occupants may well save on more than utility expenses, as truly efficient buildings are healthier. Intervale Green Apartments  bear none of the tell-tale signs of low income housing. The building deliberately spills over with natural light, and uses a mechanical ventilation system to maintain healthy indoor air in an area renowned for high incidence of asthma. How about that?

As author Regina Cornwell puts it, "With buildings accounting for nearly 80 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions in New York City, greening and beautiful design are an unbeatable combination. And with Intervale Green, they are no longer an oxymoron with housing for the poor."