Green home award winners flunk walkability test - Green House - USATODAY.com

Green home award winners flunk walkability test - Green House - USATODAY.com
Green home award winners flunk walkability test
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By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY
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How green are they? Most of the homes picked by the U.S. Green Building Council as its 2009 award winners flunk a walkability test. In other words, you basically need a car to visit them.


CAPTIONBy Flying Eye Photo
Finding a walkable neighborhood is one of the most important steps to building an eco-friendly home, for obvious reasons: It cuts down on how much you need to drive.

Not to boast, but as I reported earlier, the property for the green home I'm building in Falls Church, Va., scores 94 points out of a maximum 100 on the Walk Score website, which dubs it a "walker's paradise." That's a big reason we picked it. We can walk to just about anything -- except, alas, my office in Tyson's Corner.


CAPTIONBy Central Oklahoma Habitat for Humanity Inc.
This is not the case with the USGBC's green-home award winners, as the Natural Resource Defense Council's Kaid Benfield reports. Benfield looked at the Walk Score of each and found that only one of the six non-military projects got a score higher than 50. He adds:
"The rest are in locations best described as varying degrees of automobile-dependence and sprawl."

Like Benfield. I agree that USGBC's LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) has done an amazing job at inspiring people to build green, and these homes are ultra-efficient models. But does it value walkability enough? Here's what Benfield found:

Affordable housing project. Central Oklahoma Habitat for Humanity's Hope Crossing project won this award. Walk Score: 3 ("Car-Dependent/Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car")


CAPTIONBy Trent Bell
Innovative project. The BrightBuilt Barn project in Rockport, Maine, won the innovation award. Walk Score: 6 (same category as above)


CAPTIONBy Eric Jamison
Production builder. This honor went to Pulte Homes for its Villa Trieste project in Las Vegas. Walk Score: 38. ("Car-Dependent: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must")

Single-family project. Arbor South Architecture won for The Sage in Eugene, Ore. Walk Score: 43 (same category as above)


CAPTIONRosewood Hills project
Affordable developer. This award went to the housing authority in Columbia, S.C., for its Rosewood Hills project. Walk Score: 48 (same as above)

Multifamily project. Wakeland Housing & Development Corporation's Los Vecinos project in Chula Vista, Calif. Walk Score: 72 ("Very Walkable: It's possible to get by without owning a car")

Commitment to Leed for Homes. This award went to Hunt Yates for its Keesler Air Force Project in Biloxi, Miss., which includes 792 single family homes registered for LEED certification. No Walk Score available.

Benfield says these aren't bad projects and the ones with subsidized affordability are "praiseworthy apart from environmental concerns." But like Treehugger's Lloyd Alter, he argues LEED should give walkability more weight in its scorecard. He writes:

Don't you think that, if we're going to highlight not just certified projects but award winners deemed to be the very best, we should select more of them in high-performing (or, jeez, just better than average) sites?

One result is that the added environmental benefit of the residences' laudable green features will be offset by the environmental damage caused by the sites' automobile dependence, poor environment for walking, and relative distance from jobs, shops and services.

Another result is that the public, the building industry, and policy makers will continue to be misled about how best to achieve true environmental performance in our built environment.

As he points out, LEED for Homes assigns only 10 of its 136 available credit points, and none of its prerequisites, to the "location and linkages" category.

I see his point. My house should get all 10 of these "location and linkages" points, but my husband and I -- having spent a fair amount to buy a walkable suburban property -- may not be able to afford some of the green features that would get us even more points.

To be fair, though, I wonder how much our walkable neighborhood will reduce our driving and hence our carbon footprint. We certainly walk more, to the library, restaurants, farmer's market. The other day while I was working, my older daughter walked a mile to pick up my younger daughter from a friend's house. Together, they walked a mile home, stopping at Starbucks for a treat.

Still, as I mentioned, I have to drive to the office. It's only four miles away and I'd like to bike it, but because there's so much traffic and no consistent sidewalks, doing so would be too dangerous.

My husband, who works downtown on Capitol Hill, tried for several months to walk the mile to the subway station and use mass transit. He even bought a new backpack and walking shoes to take it on. Unfortunately, this doubled his commute time, and because he often works late hours, he found himself walking home in the pitch black. So for winter, at least, he's gone back to driving his beat-up Saab 9-3 sedan, which still gets pretty good gas mileage.

When I first wrote about the Walk Score for my new green home, my colleagues went online to see how their houses stacked up. It became a sort of parlor game -- who's better than whom. One got only 13 for her suburban McLean, Va., home while another got a perfect 100 for her Arlington, Va., apartment.

My editor, who got in the low 90's for her Capitol Hill townhouse, questioned Walk Score's accuracy, saying its satellite imagery didn't reflect changes in her neighborhood. So maybe I'm really not a 94?

Readers: What's your Walk Score and how important do you think walkability is for green homes?

See photos of: Habitat for Humanity, Chula Vista