Contrary to what I am seeing in comments on HN, this is not just for single family detached housing. If you go to the ZERH website, under Program Requirements it says:
Versions 1 and 2, Single Family, Multifamily, and Manufactured Homes
Additionally, one of the photos in the featured article has the following caption:
Lopez Community Land Trust built this 561-square-foot affordable home on Lopez Island, Washington, to the high-performance criteria of DOE's Zero Energy Ready Home program that delivers a $20-per-month average monthly energy bill.
I've said for years we need to go back to more passive solar design as our baseline standard because it is both more energy efficient and more comfortable for humans. It protects the environment while improving quality of life.
It's a myth that you can't see gains in both areas.
I'm also happy to see the caption because we need to do a better job of supporting high quality of life in small towns, not just big cities. Trends in recent decades mean small towns suck because they lack services and big cities suck if you aren't one of the wealthy.
That wasn't always true and programs like this can improve and strengthen both small town and urban environments while mitigating the burden suburbs currently represent.
What makes you think that project is relying on passive solar? In green building that concept has been largely superseded by newer standards like Passive House and Net Zero which generally rely more on air sealing and super-insulation with highly insulated windows.
In passive solar building design, windows, walls, and floors are made to collect, store, reflect, and distribute solar energy, in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. This is called passive solar design because, unlike active solar heating systems, it does not involve the use of mechanical and electrical devices.[1]
The key to designing a passive solar building is to best take advantage of the local climate performing an accurate site analysis.
I think of passive solar as the umbrella term for such strategies. My understanding is passive house comes from a German project. It shouldn't surprise anyone that strategies which work well in Germany differ from strategies that work in warmer climates.
There are also traditional building approaches in Middle Eastern deserts that keep the entire city at bearable temperatures. They historically built on a plateau, oriented streets to be cooled by prevailing winds etc.
Both in Mexico and Iran, they have passive air exchange systems that help cool homes. Stairwells in Victorian American homes have similar features and likely served a similar purpose and were probably not merely ostentatious.
If you know a better umbrella term for this approach, I'm open to suggestions.
> My understanding is passive house comes from a German project. It shouldn't surprise anyone that strategies which work well in Germany differ from strategies that work in warmer climates.
It actually started in North America around the time of the oil embargo as a mechanism to reduce energy costs. (See the history section of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house). Once that shock passed, people went back to not caring.
Even at the time, and still today, most write ups are focused on harsh climates like New England or Canada in Winter, because it's harder. It's also the case that in milder climates, the cost to make your home passive has historically been higher than just paying the subsidized bills (and/or requires capital). So most of the US hasn't cared (again) until recently.
Your own source indicates it was being called passive solar energy design in the 1970s and indicates Passivhaus Institut was founded in Germany in 1996.
As someone who has followed such things for decades, it is my personal recollection that this German project is the root source of the expression Passive House. Most passivhaus buildings are in Germany and Austria and everything your source says suggests to me that passivhaus falls firmly under the umbrella term passive solar design.
So I stand by what I said unless someone can find a better source that somehow actually rebuts my understanding that passivhaus is a German project that popularized the term passive house and construction techniques associated with it, but it is simply a subset of the general concept of passive solar energy design.
I believe passivhaus as a term did originally arise/derive from solar house, but since then the terms have come to mean very different things. I wouldn’t say that solar house is still considered an umbrella term for passivhaus nowadays.
I did exactly that and provided a link to a source in an earlier comment.
I wanted to be a translator at one time. I've had Intro to Linguistics as a college class.
I genuinely have zero problem with people wanting to use the term passive house to refer to a distinct set of building techniques and passive solar to refer to a different set of building techniques. Living languages evolve. It's a known phenomenon.
And, yet, so far no one has suggested to me a better umbrella term than passive solar design.
I defined the term thusly in one of my comments here:
Passive solar design is about creating a home which needs little energy to stay at a comfortable temperature.
My best understanding of life, the universe and everything is that without energy from the sun, earth would be extremely cold. And also wind energy is a form of solar energy which arises from air movement caused by temperature differences.
So to my mind, any technique that tries to keep a home a comfortable temp using sunlight to warm it and air flow to cool it with a minimum of electricity, oil, and other energy sources is using passive solar. It's trying to primarily use energy from the sun in a passive fashion by means of elegant design suited to the local climate conditions.
I guess I need to start defining my terms up front on HN for this topic because I do understand why people want to make this distinction in building techniques, yet I still need an umbrella term for this and I don't currently know of a superior umbrella term to the one I'm currently using.
FWiW and simply as an additional point of interest;
the 1992 second edition of Energy Efficient Australian Housing has an entire chapter entitled Passive design strategies with a section on the use of passive solar energy.
In a sense the entire book is about passive design, optimal placement coupled with sensible insulation to create optimal (and ideally passive (no additional energy inputs)) heat sinks, sources, and flows .. sometimes to heat and sometimes to create a draw and cool as a side effect.
Historically much of this goes back thousands of years to designs that draw in water from a height and use heat towers to create flows through water sprayed gardens, etc.
Early American "superinsulated houses" (the term-of-art at the time) used 12+ inches of foam, but often forgot about humidity and ventilation. As a result, many early examples became mushroom food.
Modern passive houses use HRV/ERV technology, so they achieve high efficiency while avoiding moisture and mold.
As usual, it's the early adopters that find the problems.
There is going to be a lot of health fallout though as people start having oxygen depletion from tightly-sealed houses.
It's important that even well sealed homes have both A/C fresh air sources as well as ERV/HRV systems that can recapture the heat/cold the house has while replacing the CO2 with outside air.
I wish people would stop conflating low oxygen with high CO2.
Even at 5000 ppm CO2 (which "significantly impair" attention, executive function, and risky decision-making[0]), the oxygen has only dropped from 20.95% to 20.45%. This ~2.5% difference is negligible, equivalent to natural variations in atmospheric pressure.
The buildup of CO2 is the issue, not the depletion of O2.
In addition to concerns relating to carbon dioxide levels, when I contemplate the push for ever-more-tightly-sealed homes and particularly smaller homes with lower ratios of internal air volume to internal surface area (of walls, built-ins like cabinetry, and furniture), the issues stemming from outgassing of volatile organics from the adhesives and sealants as well as from the materials (solid wood became plywood with wood veneering, became sawdust-and-binder with plastic faux-wood veneer, etc.) now composites made of multiple substances and multiple binders and glues.
Some years back, "sick building syndrome" was a prominent topic of discussion and there was a push for fresh air, windows that opened, etc. but this seems to have largely dropped off the radar, afaict.
ERVs and HRVs are generally part of these designs. Also, nothing stops people from cracking open their windows. The windows are meant to insulate well when closed.
You'd have to put so many plants in your house that the interior would look like one of those rainforest exhibits at the natural history museum. A couple of houseplants on the windowsill won't even move the needle on CO2 levels in a house occupied by a family.
I’m still with you and your point remains, but the plants do release O2 and just retain the C if I recall. Your plants only need to weigh 27% of that at the end of the year, or about 100kg :D
I followed you up to the end when you say cities didn't always have more services than small towns and that life in a city wasn't that bad if you were poor. If I think of industrial era first bigger cities, this doesn't seem true? It was way bigger gap between rich and poor quality of life and I'm pretty sure cities always had more services, that's what makes them cities.
I can see why you read it that way, but that's not the point I was trying to make.
These days, a lot of small towns don't even have a full-service grocery store and many people who want to live in a small town have to commute a long ways to get basic essential food they need.
Historically, they may also not have had a full-service grocery store, but a lot more people lived and/or worked on farms and a lot more food was sold locally, not far from where it was grown.
There are essential services that have been unraveling in recent years, making it really challenging to baseline survive in a small town in a way that wasn't always true. And it should not be true that you have a gun to your head to own a car in order to have any hope of having an adequate diet. That's just seriously problematic for individuals and even potentially threatens welfare or survival of the human race.
Something has gone very wrong that it's so hard for so many people to get a decent meal when we are awash in so much societal wealth, yet our systems for how it gets distributed and such have gotten so out of whack.
It doesn't negate your point, but here in the UK, in a village of <1000, mostly elderly people; with a couple of buses a day; nearest market town is several miles away .. people order shopping online, and some suppliers (eg fresh fish, local farm vegetable boxes) bring a van around.
Even in rural areas you can get supermarket home delivery, it costs a few quid for the delivery but is considerably cheaper than car ownership.
“ a lot more people lived and/or worked on farms and a lot more food was sold locally, not far from where it was grown”
But they’re not living/working on farms, nor are they living near where the food is grown. Our agriculture system is capable of delivering huge amounts of food for people (including the people who live near fields), but it’s not exactly trying to do that as doing that is not economically efficient.
Maximum solar energy is on the equatorial side of the house.
Full-sun plants prefer maximum solar energy.
10ft (3m) underground it's about 75°F (24°C) all year. Geothermal systems leverage this. (Passive) Walipini greenhouses are partially or fully underground or in a hillside, but must also manage groundwater seepage and flooding; e.g. with a DC solar sump pump and/or drainage channels filled with rock.
Passive solar greenhouses (especially in China and now Canada) have a natural or mounded earthen wall thermal mass on one side, and they lower wool blankets over the upside-down wing airfoil -like transparent side at night and when it's too warm (with a ~4HP motor).
TIL an aquarium heater can heat a tank of water working as a thermal mass in a geodesic growing dome; which can be partially-buried or half-walled with preformed hempcrete block.
Round structures are typically more resilient to wind:
The shearing force due to wind on structures with corners (and passive rooflines) causes racking and compromise of structural integrity; round homes apparently fare best in hurricanes.
(Trifuel) generators do not have catalytic converters.
Wood stoves must be sufficiently efficient; and can be made so with a catalytic combustor or a returning apparatus (and/or thermoelectrics to convert heat to electricity).
Gravitational potential energy is less lossy than CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage is less lossy than thermal salt is less lossy than chemical batteries.
For which types of compost is there risk of spontaneous combustion?
What design safety features are necessary for a heat pump to efficiently extract the heat of a wood boiler or a compost pile? Is it safe to locate them next to a heat pump or a dwelling or a thermoelectric boiler?
Passive solar design is about creating a home which needs little energy to stay at a comfortable temperature. It's unrelated to generating electricity via solar power panels.
The northwest US doesn't seem* to be worse than most of the Europe, where we have a veritable boom of solar power. Granted, it produces next to nothing during the winter, but the yearly production makes it profitable still. Even for well insulated house you need some heating in the north, but it can be surprisingly little. It's not like these houses are going to be built totally without network mains.
Solar is more effective in low temperatures than in high temperatures. Also northwest US is max around 49 degrees north, which is around Paris in Europe and it is normal to have solar much farther north in Europe
Solar panels are extremely popular in Stockholm, 59 degrees North and less than 1,000 km from the Artic Circle. During winter, they produce very little electricity, admitedly... but they work well in all the other seasons so they still significantly reduce electricity consumption.
I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments.
The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments).
All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.
American housing is a Ponzi scheme and this only helps perpetuate it. We need to reverse this trend with significant investments in public transportation and other alternative forms of transportation which can scale to meet the needs of the future. We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design (ie, highways, parking lots, parking garages, roads, street parking) and re-allocate it for more housing, businesses, and public transportation. Entities that can generate new income for the municipality and city.
In parallel, can work to preserve our existing natural green spaces and hopefully over time expand those green spaces which give us breathable air, drinkable water, protection from natural elements (ie, floods or long periods of torrential rain), and help keep viruses and other bad elements out of human populations.
I'm no expert in this field, but I think that changing zoning in current suburbs to mixed use would go a long way towards fixing them. The central wards of Tokyo are surrounded by such mixed use residential areas and it works extremely well, with most necessities being within walking distance or at worst biking distance.
It wouldn't fix the suburbs' lack of density, but it'd still be a marked improvement. It'd theoretically lighten the burden suburbs place on cities too, since there'd be a lot more corner shops and the like paying taxes.
People keep bringing up Tokyo but it's not really relevant. Yes, Tokyo has mixed zoning. But it was developed the way it is because the people who live there want it to be that way. It's also only livable because the people there have a culture that makes it possible to live in high density without high levels of crime, noise, and filth.
Americans in the same situation would not have built something like Tokyo.
If you're going to bring up Tokyo you should also bring up Houston. Houston is what most American cities would look like if the people who lived there were able to build what they wanted. Most Americans want to live in detached homes that they own, and they prefer cars to public transit.
> Most Americans want to live in detached homes that they own, and they prefer cars to public transit.
Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.
We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."
This isn't some immutable law of the damned universe.
> We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."
That's quite a strawman there.
Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too.
I'm seeing a ton of strawman arguments, totally inaccurate descriptions of suburbs, unsourced hyperbole about "subsidies" and "externalities", and conflation of "suburb" and "rural" in this thread which certainly does not apply to any suburbs I've ever lived in.
> Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too.
I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure. Strong towns talks about this in great detail.
> I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure.
Again, that is something that might be true for some places but not others.
I know of suburbs that definitely pay for themselves. And it's not hard to see why -- the property taxes are high and many of the residents are paying high income taxes too. Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.
I also know that some of the new subdivisions outside of Sacramento have paid for all of their infrastructure via their HOA, so that all of the money to build and maintain the roads, sewers, and power lines was 100% paid for by the homeowners. That's also apparently a common model for new housing in Nevada.
These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.
> Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.
But often not by enough to balance the amount of publicly-funded road space and parking they use.
> These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.
We absolutely get these arguments on other topics when public money is being spent on luxuries for the wealthy, which is what suburban living is. Police, fire departments, and schools are necessities. Zillion-square-foot homes and lawns are not.
> Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.
People with more resources and more power have taken larger living spaces for centuries, the idea of wanting more space isn't some creation of post-WWII America.
Nowdays we talk about trains in the US as a "let's get away from suburban development" but the train itself was a driver of suburbanization from London, historically - people opted for more space and a train commute when they got the option.
> Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.
Do they really?
My country is a textbook case of the opposite, where the general population suddenly decided they don't really want to live in apartment blocks in the city - especially the type which was built in the communist second half of the XXth century.
What happened next was intense proliferation of sprawl. It actually was seen as a status symbol back then to be able to afford a detached house.
So much so that the urbanization rate actually slightly fell in the past 20 years.
People gravitate towards comfort and apparently needing to drive everywhere but having enormous living space is preferable to living in a relatively small apartment and walking/cycling.
And it has much lower overall population density, so diversity and affordability clearly aren't automatically driven by density.
Houston has space to expand so it can easily keep building outwards without bulldozing shit (which requires people wanting to sell their land, etc, etc). Development is easy if there's nothing to displace. NY? LA? SF? Not so much. No coincidence that Chicago is much cheaper than those geography-bound places too.
Compare Houston to other cities in Texas *that have plenty of zoning of the sort that would be immediately recognizable in the Bay Area) and it no longer looks like any YIMBY miracle of affordability. Just... basically the same...
Perhaps since the US is something like 26 times larger than Japan while only having less than 3 times the population, we can avoid making comparisons that don't make sense.
It's non sequitur argument since this 26x land does not magically spawn in middle of land starved urban areas. The fact that Wyoming or Idaho exist does not matter there.
The idea that the US has land starved urban areas is mostly a myth. Or more accurately, it is mostly a self-inflicted problem. Drop the urban growth boundary nonsense and embrace multi-core urban areas instead of trying to build supercities.
Why do we need to convince someone they don't "need" anything? Each person has the best information about their own situation to decide what they need (or even want - you don't have to _need_ something to have to justify _wanting_ it)
If you think about it, younger market participants are being effectively priced out with just about every expense set against that generation. Even if they feel/think ( depending on philosophical bent in that area ) they need X, they may not simply be in a position to do that.
I am obviously biased given that I currently exist in a suburb.
My somewhat libertarian take is that they themselves are best suited to judge what they should or shouldn't want.
Not that there isn't a time for trying to bring a different perspective. But we should do it with humility, rather than assuming they're just wrong or misguided.
So... yes "stop convincing them" is a valid argument. "convince them not to" is slightly shakier moral ground.
"What they should or shouldn't want" is already deeply influenced by housing policy. Cheap suburban homes which don't fully pay for their externalities are one result of this housing policy, and children grow up accustomed to this bizarro-world reality where increasingly tank-sized cars (this is—astonishingly—not even hyperbole) are the only practical means by which one can go from Point A to Point B.
Meanwhile people in Europe live in denser areas with smaller, more fuel-efficient cars or where they can do most of their commuting by foot, bike, or rail. That is the norm for people from those cultures, and so they—like us—largely choose to continue living in a world similar to that in which they grew up.
Given that one of these modes of living reliably produces a happier population and is significantly more environmentally and economically sustainable, that we're already in the business of promoting one style over another via housing policy, and that one of the core purposes of cooperative government is to find ways to promote outcomes that benefit everyone despite going against individuals' self-interest… what on earth is the problem?
> Given that one of these modes of living reliably produces a happier population
Is that really a "given"?
> Given that ... one of the core purposes of cooperative government is to find ways to promote outcomes that benefit everyone despite going against individuals' self-interest
As I see it, government promotes outcomes that benefit "everyone" only by protecting individuals' self-interest.
Everyone already actively works at protecting their own self interest. We don’t need help promoting good societal outcomes when those are a natural result of people looking out for themselves. Government exists for us to collectively agree that there exist goals that require us to set aside self-interest for the better of everyone.
It’s in my self-interest to take everything you own and to dump my waste in the nearest available yard that isn’t mine. Nobody wants to live in a world where people act like that, so we collectively agree that things are better off for everyone if we respect one another’s property rights and pay someone to take our trash and sewage somewhere else to be dealt with.
I see what you're saying .. and yes, it's (obviously) true that in order to protect individuals' rights we necessarily have to restrict some: to protect individuals' property rights means we have to restrict what non-owners are allowed to do with that property.
But to say that Government exists to promote outcomes that benefit everyone against individuals' self-interest is like saying that pit-mines exist because we enjoy creating giant pits. Or that cars exist so that we can burn a bunch of fuel. The restrictions on individuals' rights are necessary evils, which need to be carefully considered and minimized.
Hearing it framed the way you did does help me understand many peoples' points of view better though.
That would be like saying government exists because we enjoy bureaucracies.
We accept bureaucracies because it helps us achieve common good that wouldn’t exist if everyone only looked out for themselves.
Roads and other infrastructure. Plumbing and water treatment. Sewers. Building codes. Schools for everyone. On and on and on these are things we’ve decided we’re better if everyone has access to or has to abide by, even if individually nobody would make it happen.
Well in the city where I live (Minneapolis) they've been tearing down houses in several areas of the cities where post-world war II architecture was abundant. Small houses (under 1,500 sq ft) with a small front yard and back yard. The very typical "American Dream" kind of a starter house.
Now they're getting bought up and the people are literally building houses from every end of the lot, often time getting variances for setbacks. They've decided that yards and green space are no longer important. They want wedge a three story 5K sq ft house on the same lot where a much smaller home fit.
So, I would agree and say to an extent, people are already there in terms of dealing with no lawns, now its just getting them to accept several houses on the same lot instead of their massive mcmansion.
At least in my corner of South Minneapolis, the houses being built that match your description almost all appear to be built by investors, not owners (and the design incentives for investors are clearly to maximize square footage). They are also being listed at about 2x the neighboring house values.
That increased demand for extra space I’m sure was bolstered by the pandemic and ongoing wave of WFH. The downsides and annoyances of small houses/apartments become much more evident when you’re staying home all of the time instead of only being there at nights and on weekends.
If you can find a way to convince Americans they don't all need a yard that can easily fit 6 (japanese) houses, we'll be well on our way.
I think we are on our way there, most new developments around here have houses that are nearly the size of the lot, with a tiny back yard and smaller front yard, and little room between houses. Developers get more money by making lots small and houses big, so there’s little incentive to have the large suburban d yards that wises to be common.
Of course, the houses are much larger than their Japanese counterparts. My Japanese mother in law thinks we are wealthy based on the size of our house, but we’re one of the smallest homes in the neighborhood,
Most people don't use their yard. They don't have more than a few flowers in the garden. 20 minutes with a push mower is enjoyable exercise but they wouldn't want it to take longer.
The yard isn't necessarily there to be used in the way you mean. Often the yard is a buffer between you and your neighbor. Your noisy neighbor who smokes, swears, and plays the most disagreeable music at the highest volume late into the night. Any distance is helpful.
I don't mind city life for the most part, except for the whole thing with most apartment complexes being built of cardboard, which means that every single thing your upstairs neighbor and many of the things your adjacent neighbors are doing can be heard loud and clear, and this problem plagues even newer construction. And then you have people on the street yelling, vehicles modified to be as loud as possible driving by, etc.
If these buildings were properly soundproofed, in many ways I'd prefer living in the city, but as things stand the only people who get to enjoy that in cities are those at the tops of skyscrapers renting penthouse suites, all of whom reside in a plane of existence entirely separate from my own.
The number one thing I've enjoyed about suburb life, particularly as a remote worker, is how much more dramatically quiet it is, primarily thanks to not sharing a wall with anybody.
This. I see so many people say, build vertical, density. Then when 80% of the people explain that everyone is fucking noisy, the vertical people don't reply.
I live in a house with a large yard for the exact reason you point out :).
I do enjoy walking on the grass and taking care of some plants, but I didn't really need so much land if not to keep neighbours away (I used to live in an apartment where a neighbour made my life hell, never again).
Eh. How people use their property is really their own business. I might disagree. I might despair. I might even tell them it is a bad idea, but how and whether a person uses the thing they buy is not up to your neighbor ( or non-neighbor for that matter ) to decide ( within reason, you will hear complaints about practicing on electric guitar or repairing your muscle car at midnight ). It is just a bad argument to use.
My family member just bought a ridiculous gas-guzzler to drive even more ridiculous distance to their job and still manage to muster up courage to complain about gas prices to me. It is not the use ( or lack thereof ). It is the lack basic sense.
I don't have a mega yard, because I can't afford the upkeep. If I could, I would consider it.
The issue with the megalawn is that it wastes water, a shared resource, create weed killer runoff issues and generally bad for the local flora/fauna, which again, are shared in ways which aren't obvious, and costs more carbon to sustain. It's an embarrassment of riches. To dispair and disagree is human, if you think you can't change people's minds then that's a self fulfilling prophecy.
In the case of your family member sure they lack sense, but I've found for lawns at least, to lean into that and use arguments like, 'hey clovers are better because you don't need to mow and barely need to water, this means you can sit on your ass more!' (something like that).
In large parts of the US you do not need to water you lawn as rain will provide all the water you need. You never need to put weed killer on a lawn, just a regular mowing (ideally with a reel push mower) will be enough. Most of what people call weeds are harmless biodiversity. In some parts of the US lawns are native grass, though that isn't common.
Understand that most people over manage their lawns. You can get your lawn a little more green (the color, not the environmental green) with excess water and chemicals. They are not needed at all though.
That level of space-hungriness isn't universal amongst American suburbs. In the neighborhood I live for example, houses have only around 6'-8' between them and their "yards" are a small patch of dirt in the front and back.
About a 12m walk away. Where I live shops are somewhat intermixed with the neighborhoods, albeit not to the degree that they are in Japan or parts of Europe. Not all American suburbs are composed solely of houses.
Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it.
The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers, but instead they choose to suffer long commutes and expensive transportation in order to enjoy a different lifestyle.
I think it's naive to suggest that "American housing" is a Ponzi scheme.
"Happy City" by Charles Montgomery brings an interesting angle on the typical urban planning story by focusing largely on how we can plan cities and communities to maximize happiness. In the book, he discusses that people have this "ideal" of moving to the suburbs, owning their own house, etc, but then the long commutes, isolation of living in a car-dependent neighborhood, dangers of living among high-speed cars, etc. all lead many people to actually be less happy overall after moving to the suburbs.
So I think that some of this fact that the suburbs are desirable is not necessarily completely rational, and may instead be heavily influenced by the idea that moving to suburbs is what they grew up seeing as their future (due, of course, to federal programs that incentivized suburbanization) and by auto-industry lobbying and marketing that idealizes a car-dependent lifestyle.
Obviously there will be variability and I'm sure many people enjoy a suburban/rural lifestyle more than they would a city lifestyle. But I don't know if a preference for suburban living is really part of our human nature, and I think assuming that it is can be detrimental as it can take effort away from recreating the peace and quiet and nature access in a way that is accessible to all in a more efficient urban setting.
> The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there.
The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course! The problem is externalities.
Dumping sewage into a creek is an externality that is bad.
Someone preferring to live in a suburb does not mean they're generating externalities at that level.
The very reason I pushed back on the comment was because of this black and white thinking.
Saying
> The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course!
seems condescending to me. As though "those" people don't have the character or moral rectitude to live in the city. Maybe I'm reading in more than you intended.
Suburban development, as it stands in America today, has enormous levels of externalities. The roads and sewers of suburban developments are subsidized by downtown areas which are more tax-dense. Suburban development requires cars which are always the least efficient way to get around vs. walking/transit, regardless of electrification. Suburban homes are large and freestanding both of which detract from building energy efficiency. Most suburban homes today are built with only a 50 year expected lifespan making them incredibly wasteful compared to construction in other parts of the world.
People keep talking about the "subsidies" as if they apply to all suburbs. It seems to be an article of faith. It really needs some evidence (preferably from an unbiased source).
There are probably exceptions, of course, but surely the basics are not controversial, e.g. that public infrastructure spending per capita tends to be much higher in suburbs than in urban areas, carbon emissions per capita are much higher in suburbs, etc. Not to mention that political representation in the United States favors lower density areas.
This is false. The tax districts are independent in the suburbs in many locations. Sewers and water are local city taxes are paid for out of the suburb property taxes. The only “city tax” subsidizing suburbs would be state taxes and that’s if and only if more people lived downtown than in the suburbs, which is not true in California.
Driving is straightforwardly bad for everyone around you. Carbon emissions, particulate emissions, traffic congestion, noise, safety, you name it. The more of it you do, the worse it is. Suburbia is built around lots and lots of driving. It’s not complicated.
I'm not arguing there are no externalities (there are externalities in just about every choice we make). I just haven't been convinced that there are common egregious externalities at the level of dumping raw sewage into the creek.
Of course it’s not going to be on the same order as literally dumping raw sewage into the surrounding area. But there is an enormous body of research demonstrating the overall drain of resources from economically-productive urban areas out to costly suburban ones.
Then there’s the carbon cost of enormous, congested highways and stroads where people idle in traffic for hours of their day. Or the overall inefficiency of providing general city services (water, power, sewer) to people in comparatively sparse areas (which ties back into the resource drain imposed on denser areas).
I would, personally, love to read at least one source. Which you didn’t even provide for some reason. And I mean that, I would happily read any source you provide, with a preference for more academic sources.
Do people prefer to dump sewage in creeks? The GP said people live as close to their ideal as they can within their means. Generally, people with the means to afford sewers or septic tanks choose to use them.
Ponzi's are very attractive too, for a while. People get a lot out of Ponzis.
"the revenue collected over time does not come near to covering the costs of meeting these long-term obligations. Development spread out over a broad area is very expensive to maintain. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability... Decades into this experiment, American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates deferred maintenance at multiple trillions of dollars, but that's just for major infrastructure, not the local streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that directly serve our homes. Every mature city has a backlog of deferred maintenance, a growing list of promises with no discernible path to make good on them."
I'm a fan of strongtowns too. To the degree that that analysis is true, it will sort itself out. We don't need to do anything to save our neighbor from themself. We can make a lifetime of difference solving our own problems.
You need to quit reading strongtowns and start thinking.
Every city has deferred maintenance and unmeetable promises, most of it is maintenance that it is more cost effective to defer. We don't need perfectly smooth streets, so defer minor maintenance makes sense. Most unmeetable promisees are things they never intended to meet.
Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.
> Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.
"We've been throwing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for hundreds of years. If this was a problem we'd be seeing the consequences of it by now."
Anyone who's looking does see the problem. Meanwhile there's a critical mass of people whose lives and identity revolve around the status quo and who simply prefer not to see it. The people who see the problem have been trying to tell you (and everyone else) about it, and it continues to fall on deaf ears.
No one is questioning that people want to live in suburbs. People object to the government power preventing any additional development in these low density areas. These areas are desirable, but economically uncompetitive.
Lots of suburban countries here— Arlington, Fairfax County, Marin, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Westchester, from the ones I know at least. The only two that seem quite urban in the top 15 to me are New York County and San Francisco County.
I think this is incorrect. One way to think about it is that usually infrastructure costs scale with distance. So you need much less infrastructure per person in dense places. However, everyone pays the same tax rate (or more in dense areas because the property values are higher) which means that in reality the dense areas usually subsidize the suburbs.
There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.
Citation needed. Everything I have seen shows that suburbs are a net drain in contrast to dense urban areas. Infrastructure has very high fixed costs that require more people to net even.
Citation needed on what you have read as well. I too have read the same, but it conflicts with the reality that suburbs have existed for more than 100 years now, and those old ones have added and replaced infrastructure many times over their history.
That nothing i've read acknowledges that fact suggests they are cherry picking evidence instead of giving an unbiased analysis .
Well in my state generally the wealthiest people live in suburbs and pay all the taxes. The poorest areas are in cities and get the subsidies. So the suburbs are subsidising the cities. And that was before everyone started WFH so downtowns are now really empty.
What subsidies? What about businesses and their taxes? Wealthier people don’t always pay more in taxes, even at a localized level, and businesses tend to be based out of the cities.
When people talk about the “subsidy of the suburbs” they usually talk about the cost of maintaining suburban life, vs the tax base that supports it. Eg property tax usually goes to the town to pay for the town’s infra, while income tax goes to the state to pay for other thing. When the town can’t cover its cost and depends on the state’s money or when the state pays to build things in the town, that’s where the “subsidy” comes in. Often towns just can’t cover the cost of their basic infrastructure maintenance, but even when they can, the state usually still build highways and other big projects which can cost $10s to $100s of millions, and rarely can be affordable by the actual tax base of the town.
> The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there.
A major reason for the preference is the lower price per square foot in the suburbs than in higher density areas. They can't afford that much space in the city, which in turn is so expensive because the amount of high density housing is artificially limited by zoning.
You have to let the market decide how much high density housing there should be before you can score "the market has decided" as a point.
That argument doesn't work either. If you pass a law restricting the supply of A and then notice that A costs more than B, it could as easily be because of lower supply as higher demand.
If you want to know what happens in a free market you have to let a free market happen.
I think the original comment proposal was (my, slightly sarcastic, paraphrase) "stop incentivizing anything but urban infrastructure and living, everything else is a ponzi scheme"
I agree with your proposal.
I have no objection to removing laws against high density housing.
I agree the original comment was ambiguous. It's widely discussed that the incentives for suburban housing are the laws prohibiting high density, e.g. minimum parking requirements or zoning rules that just expressly ban tall buildings. But in theory you could get there by e.g. prohibiting parking areas, which is silly and pointless because the reason for the existing laws requiring them is that a free market would produce less of them than there are now.
I called it naive because I believe it is an oversimplification.
Strong Towns has an agenda (which I mostly agree with), and in order to promote their agenda they have a straw man argument that broadly categorizes _all_ suburban development as an unsustainable venture that is borrowing against the future.
I agree that there is (in many cases, but not all) some deferred costs and externalities that are not being fully accounted for in new development.
However, I'm not nearly so pessimistic as to think that the people living in those developments won't make changes to account for those deferred costs and even possibly some of the externalities.
Why the hell would I live in an American city? I live in Colorado. Denver is our 'city', there is no parking, no room for my 2 dogs and my kid would not have a giant backyard to play in.
Instead, I have a 3400 sq ft house on 10,000 sq ft of land with giant trees everywhere. I'm within 2 miles of lightrail, that I will never use.
I work from home, I have a home office with a indoor, led powered garden with fresh fruit and flowers year round.
My wife works 30 minutes from home, she's a school teacher. We wanted to live closer to her school but we'd get a much smaller house with no parking and no room for the kids and dogs to play.
Again, why would I buy near or in any city? 15 minutes from downtown Denver is to close for my taste.
I love theatre, I love restaurants but honestly, I hate driving in Denver. The traffic sucks. I love driving. I love craft coffee, my house is 1 mile from the coffee factory that makes the coffee whole foods uses; I enjoy a craft coffee from that place once in a while.
Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.
Denver banned the scooters and other options from lyft and bird, so I have to lug my giant body from location to location? No thanks, I'll take my 4000 pound car to the restaurant instead.
Then I'll go home, enjoy my big beautiful yard and not worry about living in the city.
I don't go to the gym, instead I have a treadmill and a bike in my basement. If I want to do something, I just get in my car and go. I want to get a solar system and buy an electric car but so far no one will install on my style of roof
> Denver banned the scooters and other options from lyft and bird, so I have to lug my giant body from location to location? No thanks, I'll take my 4000 pound car to the restaurant instead.
Is there a source for this? I live in Denver and am currently staring at a dozen Lyft scooters and a few bikes parked on the corner next to my apartment. Lime also operates scooters and bikes, which I usually see parked across the street at the apartments next door.
There are a few places that are geofenced (e.g. along 16th St Mall), but judging by how many people I see riding them on e.g. Cherry Creek trail as I'm biking, I don't think they're generally banned.
Cities are terrible to get around in by car, that’s for sure. But why you feel you need to, and why there aren’t better options, ultimately trace back to the city’s concessions to suburban auto-centric attitudes. In cities whose populations actually embrace their being cities (vs. centers of suburban agglomerations), you find destinations close enough to walk, safe and plowed bike paths, fast and frequent buses, and extensive train networks.
> Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.
This is an amazing example of the terrible disease that is Car Brain.
Instead of having a walkable city where you can walk to the shops/gym/restaurants, take convenient public transport to the theatre, and take the kids/dog to the park next door, live in a massive isolated bunker, drive your massive pickup truck to buy groceries, and wonder why the city is so congested with cars and trucks all doing the same thing. Madness.
However much or little road space you build in cities, it will always be congested with cars (unless you charge or ban them). So the trick is to waste as little space as possible on that.
"If one simply becomes wealthier than the Earth can even potentially sustain for more than a tiny portion of the population at once, living within visual distance of any other person becomes undesirable."
I appreciate this argument - and there is some truth to it, but certainly not to the point of (paraphrasing here) "anyone who doesn't want to live in the city is participating in a Ponzi scheme"
> the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers
Have you seen what condos cost? This is not true. Homeownership in walkable neighborhoods is basically reserved for plutocrats.
Clearly walkable neighbourhoods are highly desirable, and in the US people pay a massive premium to get them because they are so scarce. Yet, for some reason, new construction in the suburbs is all disconnected and almost never walkable.
There's a huge disconnect between what people want and what developers are actually building. The kind of density that leads to walkability seems to only occur in older and already expensive areas with infill development, never green field construction further from an existing city center.
Maybe it's impossible to build new walkable areas in the US.
Almost all actually-existing cities replaced less intense uses on the same land. They simply had the foresight to get this done before we recognized a community’s right to veto such changes. The next ones will not come until we have stopped recognizing it.
Agreed. Although I think it has to do with more than location. For a childless couple, the cost of a 3 bedroom house in the suburbs might be the same as for a one room apartment in the city. If they choose the suburbs, maybe they're choosing more than location, they're also choosing quality of life.
That's on an individual basis, but it can have collective side effects. For example, most would rather a personal car rather than the bus, but that makes bus stops less frequent due to less ridership which then makes cars even more desireable.
Or flight from urban crime to the suburbs then makes urban crime more likely for the remaining people, who then have more reasons to flee.
Would they prefer the car, or is it just that the bus with poor routing and infrequent service is not a viable alternative and those in charge waste a ton of money which makes useful expansions not affordable.
They are able to make that choice because we pretty heavily subsidize it for them. Rural communities receive a disproportionately large amount of federal aid per capita in order to build and maintain the infrastructure that makes that lifestyle possible.
If the individual cost of buying a house "in the sticks" was reflective of that, people might start to think twice.
Is a pretty general term that's hard to respond to.
Yes there are rural subsidies, but I'm unconvinced that the per-capita subsidization of rural and suburban dwellers is so much greater than their urban counterparts.
You may have a very good argument, but I don't know the numbers, and I haven't seen anyone provide the numbers for this yet either.
It's important not to conflate "suburbs" and "rural."
For example, most of the Santa Clara Valley is suburban, consisting of subdivisions of detached homes with front yards, driveways, garages etc. But the area is definitely not rural: millions of people live here and 4 of the 5 FAANG companies are headquartered here.
You could say similar things about LA, or the areas outside Chicago and NYC, etc. They are definitely suburban, and definitely not rural.
It is partially supply and demand, and partially the sticks have much less services. Gravel roads are cheap. Libraries cost money, so rural areas do without
> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.
That's not generally how this works. There aren't necessarily highways and new paved roads going to rural properties. Electrical service isn't only downtown in cities but for miles outside of them or from solar, propane, or any one of the many other technologies.
As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety. Water almost always comes from a well on the property, and sewage tanks are how the sewage are handled.
Later, if Frank & Martha's property gets annexed into the city, they will pay taxes and will be just as entitled to city services as others. They already pay county, state and other taxes, which means they are entitled to whatever their taxes pay for.
"In general, rural areas in the United States have higher homeownership rates than urban areas. Compared with urban areas, where the homeownership rate was 59.8 percent, rural areas had a homeownership rate of 81.1 percent." [1]
> As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety.
I've read recently that as of right now, if you're more than 1000 yards from the branch point the electrical company would run wire from, it is already cheaper to go fully off-grid. Not 100% true that this is true or at least universally applicable, but the curves all point in that direction.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I'm pretty sure there has been some cutoff like that for as long as there have been utilities.
I don't know exactly how many yards the breakeven point is. However, from what I've seen it is almost always monetarily cheaper to create your own services when possible - unless a neighbor has paid for services to get really close. It might make sense for neighbors to pool money for pulling services out. It all depends on the specifics, right?
> Suburban developments in the US are often in food deserts. There's usually nothing within walking distance and if there is it is prohibitively dangerous and unpleasant to walk there.
Is there data to back this up, particularly the "usually" part?
Having nearly always lived in suburban areas (a few times rural), food shopping is nearly always within an easy walk. I'm sure there are some cases where this might not be so, but I doubt it's the norm. For rural areas, sure.
If you have to cross a 40ft+ road with vehicles traveling at 50mph (i.e. 40mph speed limit), I consider that not walkable.
And 5 lane 40mph arterial roads (two each way and 1 turn lane), seems to be a standard feature of all suburbs all around the country, on which most grocery stores and shopping are located.
> If you have to cross a 40ft+ road with vehicles traveling at 50mph (i.e. 40mph speed limit), I consider that not walkable.
Ok, but that's a quite radical limitation to the definition of walkable. What is the reason to put up self-imposed limitations like that?
I mean, by that definition even most of Manhattan wouldn't be called walkable even thought it's the most walkable city in the US!
In my very suburban neighborhood, I can very easily walk to a 24hr supermarket in about 5-6 minutes, so I often do (except when it's super cold/raining).
Yes, I do have to cross a 4 lane road (two this way, two that way). I press the pedestrian crossing button, wait a handful of seconds and once it's my turn I cross the road with cars traveling at 0mph since they all have a red light.
> In my very suburban neighborhood, I can very easily walk to a 24hr supermarket in about 5-6 minutes, so I often do
some anecdata as a counterpoint to the "everything being super close to you in urban areas" narrative: i live in a pretty damn urban neighourhood ("old" or "core" Hollywood, CA), and it takes me ~15 minutes to walk to the nearest supermarket (just under 1 mile).
historically, there were a number of closer supermarkets but those large buildings & their parking lots tend to be eventually razed and replaced with luxury apartment buildings.
huh, actually i just checked and it looks like there is not a single 24-hour supermarket within any kind of reasonable walking distance of my home (2-3 miles). i am pretty sure the local VONS was 24hr before COVID, i wonder if that is why? now all the local VONS or Ralphs or what have you all close between 11pm and 1am.
> What is the reason to put up self-imposed limitations like that?
Because I have seen how risky it is to cross due to speeding drivers in large vehicles looking at their phones. It is a large distance to cross, and if someone is mobility impaired like an old person or handicapped or child, it can be quite harrowing.
Also, NYC is completely different because the speed cars travel at is actually 25mph. A world of difference in being able to stop or avoid a collision at 50mph.
And this is a best case scenario in many suburbs. I come across 7 to 9 lane wide arterial roads all the time. 3 lanes in each direction, 1 to 2 turn lanes and shoulder. Even as a healthy young guy, I feel intimidated walking across 80ft+ of vehicles that can be traveling at high speeds.
> NYC is completely different because the speed cars travel at is actually 25mph
Unless there's traffic jam, driving speeds in the 4+ lane avenues in Manhattan is certainly higher than 25mph. (Source: used to spend all my weekends in Manhattan so I've done a lot of walking and cycling all over it.)
> Even as a healthy young guy, I feel intimidated walking across 80ft+ of vehicles that can be traveling at high speeds.
You should not be crossing when cars are traveling at any speed other than zero, that's what the pedestrian crossing lights are for.
In any case, you're right in that if you set a personal limitation on what is walkable that excludes nearly every part of the country (including Manhattan), then you won't find any walkable areas.
Personally I don't mind crossing a street (with a red-light protected crossing) so I find suburban areas to very walkable since I can (and do) get to any stores I want within an easy walk.
>You should not be crossing when cars are traveling at any speed other than zero, that's what the pedestrian crossing lights are for.
You would never finish crossing then. Lots of times there are cars traveling in the lanes that are approaching the intersection, and you have no way of knowing if they are paying attention or not to the traffic lights.
At low speeds, you can eyeball them sufficiently decreasing their speed and confirm they are stopping, but at high speeds, it is impossible to tell.
> >You should not be crossing when cars are traveling at any speed other than zero, that's what the pedestrian crossing lights are for.
> You would never finish crossing then.
Well I don't know what to say, it is quite the wild west wherever you live.
Around here (California) and everywhere else I've happened to live, all kinds of people (including the very old with mobility problems) finish crossing safely all day long without any trouble.
And when someone particularly slow is crossing and doesn't get to the other side before the pedestrian light goes red, cars just wait. Nobody's going to run them over just because the light changed.
I’ve lived in various suburban places around the bay and always had stores within a mile. My current place has three grocery stores within half a mile!
I also think suburban areas are nicer for bikes because there is no theft. Biking in SF is pretty rough for example. Here I don’t even have to lock my bike.
Many of your points are valid for many suburbs but also not for many others. Talking generally like this is weird, I've lived in about 6 different suburbs my whole life and nothing you listed was true for any of them.
I'm not a fan of suburbs but I'm tired of people holding up the worst possible examples and saying "SEE, SUBURBS SUCK!"
They certainly don't seem to be talking about suburban homes.
> But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments).
I don't think you're using the term "food desert" properly like you think you are. In the suburbs, it's expected that you'll get to your local grocery store and find healthy foods available at reasonable prices. In a food dessert, your local 15 grocery stores/bodegas/whatever you all them, won't have access to healthy foods. You might see a banana, or something, and it'll cost 4x what it would cost at a regular grocey store, hence there's an affordability aspect, to it, too.
Your points require a very specific definition of suburban. Many cities in the western US are almost 100% suburban, but if that gets brought up the goalposts move.
Is that really a city though? Wouldn't that more accurately described as a big collection of suburban sprawl? I don't have a particular people/sq mile/meter figure in mind, but if it's not dense enough to justify public transportation and for it to be comfortable to live without a car (ie a single train/bus/tram per hour doesn't count), I say we don't actually call it a city because it really isn't.
Is Portland a city? Because it is almost 100% made up of what would otherwise be considered suburban neighborhoods. Single family homes with yards. There is a tiny core nestled between the river and the hills with a few blocks of urban city. The city does have public transportation. Though you'd mostly find that living without a car would require sacrifices that people aren't willing to make.
And what about out west of there? Beaverton, is that city? Hillsboro? These places are suburban cities with public transit.
Could also look north, to Seattle. Larger than Portland for sure, but fundamentally similar concept.
So this is where I see the goalposts getting moved. Lots of people say 'suburban' and only think of the endless tracts of housing with no commercial or retail space. That's just one kind of suburbia. Common in some regions (midwest comes to mind), less so in others.
Whether an area is a suburb has nothing to do with whether people live in single family homes with yards. A suburb is an outlying part of a city or town or a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city. [1]
> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure.
If you're 20 miles outside a town, you almost certainly have electrical service, but are on a well and septic system. City water and sewer doesn't make sense at those sort of densities. You also probably have the land to easily put a nice ground mount PV array in, and grow a good bit of your own food, should you care to.
It depends. We have a lot of small water coops around here and water lines ran nearly everywhere a road goes, even if the nearest city is 50 miles away.
Suburbs aren't generally described as the "sticks." That would be exurbs or lower.
A typical suburban subdivision will have city water and sewage, though depending on the details, you might have a couple community wells and individual septic fields (or a link to city sewage).
Suburbs are often on city utilities. And they pay for the infrastructure. You won't generally find septic systems on properties under about an acre. Not that it never happens, obviously, but a septic field has geographic requirements that means you won't often see it in a suburban neighborhood.
It’s not precedented, wise, or even realistic to expect all of civilization to live in cities surrounded by unspoiled wilderness.
Highly efficient low density housing has a place. So does high density housing.
Everything you say about improving urban development practices is valid, but doesn’t mean that efforts to improve suburban/exurband/rural development are problematic. They’re all inextricably part of the future and they all have their own development needs.
You can roughly double the volume of a single story building by adding a floor. Taken to extreme, we could make sure a square kilometer is at least two stories tall, but we don't do that. We live mostly a in 2.5d environment.
The skyscrappers that we see in our skylines are not even the majority of what we see. A lot of place will benefit from being 3-4 stories tall.
A lot of space that is developed is hugely wasted, devoted to storing cars, or roads to facilitate car movement. Meanwhile, a human being is very compact in comparison.
I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying, but those slightly denser and taller districts are historically called villages and they died, tragically, with the rise of national retail chains.
Walmart and Kroger like having big operationally efficient stores that they can operate like all their other stores, and can’t scale their model well to oddball village locations. So they make or buy a big building with a giant parking lot and underprice all the local stores with their hyperoptimized business model until the village is dead.
At that point, there’s nothing left to do in your dense housing district and everybody needs a car anyway, so you may as well have some breathing room and a garage.
If people want suburban density, it won’t come from zoning changes (although that will help urban density) — it’ll come from somehow making village commerce more economical. But good luck getting that kind of effort past national-retail lobbyists!
Ultimately, again, the fact is that urban development issues are different than the issues in other areas and the solutions don’t need to come at the expense of each other or in competition with each other.
> All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure.
What if this was done this brownfield development in areas with existing infrastructure? New development doesn't need to be coupled with sprawl. There is a significant amount of multifamily development that looks exactly like that. The IRA also included large incentives for the retrofit of the existing housing stock.
Complete nonsense. Power lines last 100+ years with little maintenance. Roads may need to be repaved after 30 years, but it's only fraction of the cost of building them from scratch. Stop promoting StrongTowns nonsense, his analysis were shown to be completely off base.
Their infrastructure lifetime numbers may be overly pessimistic, but nothing in your statement rebukes Strong Towns' thesis that the maintenance costs of infrastructure for sprawl were not realistically projected or accounted for.
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, and the inner ones have been boxed in that long. They have a proven history of fixing and replacing things.
Those older suburbs are not much denser and they often often don't have transit. People who lived in streetcar suburbs generally expected go get a significant amount of food from their garden which meant lots had to be fairly big, and if you look you discover they were larger lots than current suburbs (or at least that is the case near me). The newer suburbs tend to have dense apartments someplace as well bringing the average up.
Of course new suburbs rarely are built with transit in mind while the oldest were built around the long gone streetcars. This build form doesn't have any affect on solvency though.
> People who lived in streetcar suburbs generally expected go get a significant amount of food from their garden which meant lots had to be fairly big, and if you look you discover they were larger lots than current suburbs (or at least that is the case near me).
It's the opposite in my 1920s streetcar neighborhood (alas without streetcars today). The average lot size is 1/10 acre. That's enough for some small scale gardening (tomatoes, potatoes, broccoli), but nothing that is going to produce a significant amount of food. Walking distance grocery stores (and even street produce vendors) were a big thing in those days. Cars were shoehorned in during the 1950s.
Our lots are tiny compared to the typical suburban California lot, which is more like 1/4 acre, and dwarfed by typical American suburban lot sizes.
What does this mean exactly? Like we should be forcing people to move into big cities? What about all the people that don't want to live that kind of lifestyle?
What about those of us who live in suburban towns that are doing just fine for well over a century and not getting any subsidies from this mythical 'inner core'? From where did you pull that $20K number?
Because the county and city government budgets are public. We get no direct money from the nearest urban core and the only method of transfer would be through the state. We get very little of our yearly revenue through the state general fund, and we pay enough income(and other) tax to completely offset it.
We're self-sustaining primarily through property taxes and have been that way for more than a century.
Then I don't see why you're worrying for government subsidies to be removed from your neighborhoods. I'm sure that paying for the water, road and electricity infrastructure is accounted in your numbers and you won't need anyone else paying for them.
Like how the residents of New York City are able to get the food and water it needs all produced within the five boroughs? Or is that a different kind of "subsidy" from the hinterlands.
In my experience, rural folks go to small towns and small cities for services, not to suburbs. There are no services provided in suburban sprawl except for housing for the residents.
A subsidy means you pay less for something than you would on the open market. Cities not only pay the market price for all those products the majority of their taxes go out to the hinterlands on top of that.
Cities pay market price for food coming from the hinterlands but at the same time they pay a subsidy to the same hinterlands that grow that same food? Doesn't sound like market price anymore.
It's nonsensical to say that just because the tax receipts of a suburb doesn't pay in full its roads and bridges, its existence is necessarily subsidized by the rest. Does a city pay in full for its share of the US Navy whose protection of global commerce it depends on to survive? Are cities subsidized by the blood of those in the armed forces, who primarily come from the hinterlands?
> It's the hinterlands that are free riding on the US armed forces.
Yet.
"In every region of the country, recruitment rates were higher in rural and exurban counties than in urban counties. Only urban counties in the South had recruitment rates above the national average. Cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West all had rates well below the national average." [1]
Could you provide a source? I live in a suburban neighborhood built in the 1950s (> 60 yrs ago) bordering a major US city. The neighborhood is thriving (by most metrics) and still relies on a mix of original and upgraded infrastructure.
> We should be sunsetting suburbs, not expanding them.
You missed a very good option in between: incrementally densify them, which also has the effect of increasing the tax revenue per unit of infrastructure.
So 15 years ago, urban dwellers had higher incomes and therefore paid more income tax, and as a result there was a net flow towards rural areas. I wonder if they'd prefer to be paid less.
But the discussion was about suburbs. The number of people living in rural areas is by definition low enough to not be a meaningful concern.
Not to interrupt a good rant, but the program includes duplexes, townhomes, multifamily projects, and mixed use buildings with residential less than 6 stories. It's a sensible plan that was passed by sensible people who actually do have climate goals in mind.
This is shockingly dumb. Please lookup the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
First, you do know that when you get a house you actually get the house, right? That’s the value residents extract from the house. Whether my parents could resell their house was only relevant when they needed to, big shocker, move to a different house in another area. Apart from leaving something for inheritance the re-sale value was irrelevant to the utility. That’s antithetical to a Ponzi scheme.
Second, anyone can build more housing and there is tons of land to keep building in 90% of the country. That doesn’t work in a Ponzi scheme if the real value that sets the price is margin that can be captured by builders.
People are going to build new homes outside of dense urban cores and suburbs either way; may as well build them 'green'. We need to be more flexible and realistic with our environmentalism--people just aren't going to give up meat, cars, or houses overnight so we need to allow progress where we can actually get it.
We already have solutions in place being implemented in the next 10 - 15 years for electric cars and car-based carbon emissions. So carbon based commuting is going to get fixed.
People in the U.S. won't be living in dystopian China-style 40 floor housing anytime soon, in ways that is sounds like you're hoping for with dense city living.
> We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design
There are many small towns in Europe surrounded by networks of even smaller towns and one or two house farms. There is nothing to claim back there: they've been like that since well before any European moved to the Americas. That was a way to be close to fields, when economy was mostly farmers and herders and people mostly walked or at best moved in animal powered carts.
Some people move from there to big cities now, some people move from big cities to there. Everybody has a car, it can't be helped. I think that people in big cities will end up with public transport and few cars, but people in small towns and in the fields or in the hills or mountains will keep having a car, maybe just use it less if it costs too much.
I live in one of these small European towns. It is honestly mind boggling how far some people drive to go to work here. I'm in The Netherlands around Eindhoven. We have colleagues in Den Bosch, Utrecht and Maastricht driving to work every week. Eindhoven is full of commuters.
Some people take the train, but that isn't always convenient, especially with strikes! Your boss doesn't care that you were 3 hours late due to a bus skipping out on work. Your paycheck cares a lot though.
Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem owing to the size of the country, but I don't see how they can reduce car usage without significantly more investment in public transportation. By the looks of the current state of the government, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
> Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem
This isn't a uniquely Dutch problem. The longest commute you mentioned:
Utrecht -> Eindhoven: 1 hr 4 min (92.2 km)
isn't unheard of in the US. These are the commutes for a cousin, and a friend's uncle:
Colorado Springs, CO -> Denver, CO: 1 hr 19 min (113.5 km)
New Britain, CT -> New York, NY: 2 hr 4 min (177.1 km)
These are memorable though because they are so long. Many of the people I know have far shorter commutes. For example, my mom would drive 30 min (21km). But, these long commutes definitely exist.
In 2019, 10% of US workers had a 1-way commute of over 1hr. (The average times for transit are quite high in the US, but 90% of commutes are by car so a large portion of that 10% are by car).
Sorry, I should have clarified. I'm American and grew up in the DFW area. I know long commutes are not unheard of in the US, but like you mentioned, it is pretty rare for someone to commute that far long term. Generally, I think most people might commute for a year or two and then tend to relocate closer unless they only need to visit the office every so often instead of every single day.
The Northeast US is also an outlier because they have commuter rail that can reliably connect places like DC to Baltimore or NYC to Philly.
what a privileged life style one must have. you realize that there are entire metro areas where you can drive in 20 miles in any direction and still be in urban environment, yeah?
also, thinking 20 miles is just oh so far away is so outside of my world experience that I just don't easily understand your situation of think that it is so far away. clearly, you and I have grown up in totally different situations, and it is interesting to me that one can be so restricted in their movement and consider that normal just as you clearly think anyone traveling > 20 miles is just from Neptune or something.
i'll chalk this up to a nature vs nurture kind of experience
> Suburb dwellers, at best, are indifferent towards their neighbours.
Huh? Where did you get this nugget of wisdom from? We have great relationships with almost all of the neighbors I can see from my porch. It's called community. I've lived in urban high rises and known fewer neighbors.
> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.
Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.
If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too.
It'd be nice if property taxes were slightly higher in suburban areas to make up for the higher costs - but it really wouldn't need to be that much higher. Houses usually cost more than condos - so you're paying more property tax already by having a more expensive home...
Sure, there's exceptions like condos in Manhattan and near the beach and ski resorts, etc...
According to some quick googling, about 26% of roads are financed by gasoline tax, another 11% from tolls, and the rest from federal and state general funds:
> roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.
This is a common misunderstanding of how roads are funded. Roads are not solely funded by gas taxes and are predominantly paid for by funds raised from sources other than gas taxes.
> Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.
I don't think that's true. Gasoline taxes aren't high enough to pay for roads.
It seems as of 2015, 50% of road related costs came out of general taxes. And as gas taxes have remained fairly constant, while roads have become more expensive to repair as they get worse, I can only think that number has gone up since then.
> It seems as of 2015, 50% of road related costs came out of general taxes.
Note that in the context of the "half came from gas taxes," the article is only talking about highway funding. Local road funding isn't covered by Fed gas taxes at all.
> roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.
Do you have any sources for that? I'm in Australia, where fuel costs about twice what it does in the US. A decent portion of that is taxes/duties, but road spending is taken from consolidated revenue, and fuel taxes ultimately contribute a minority of the spending on roads. So unless the cost of fuel production is massively lower in the US, something doesn't add up.
GP is likely talking about US federal gas taxes -> Highway Trust Fund -> Federal highway spending.
Notably, though, the HTF spends more than it earns in gas tax revenue; the shortfall comes from the general fund. And also Federal highway spending does not cover all highway spending; the rest comes from the states[1][3]. Federal highway spending also does not cover local roads at all.
Roads are absolutely not financed by gasoline taxes. They are massively subsidized by the federal government. Watch some videos about Strong Towns to learn about the problems that is causing in regions that are not experiencing constant growth.
Indeed. Time to break out the omnitool Hackernews favors for solving very large scale problems: government regulation. Nationalize zoning laws, ban home ownership, and herd the population into bughive arcologies in major cities, where they'll be fed vegan or insect-protein-fortified food brought by Amazon delivery drones.
If Hackernews believed in god, surely this would be their idea of heaven.
When you've confused "per kWh cost" with "energy to the house delivery costs," this sort of stuff sounds good on paper, but it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem that in the winter, homes use a lot more energy than they can generate, and in the spring/fall, they will generate a lot more energy than they need.
I've got a large ground mount solar install I put in a few years ago (15.9kW nameplate, though mostly east-west facing panels so a bit less annual production than you'd expect, just more "sunup to sundown" production), and it's been a chilly winter, so with an air source heat pump and keeping the house fairly cool, I'm still net +4MWh from the grid in the last 4 months.
Meanwhile, when it warms up a bit more, I'm generating 10x what the house uses during spring/fall mornings (10+ kW production on a sub-1kW house draw for long periods of the day). It's not a big deal with only a few people on the grid, but if every house were doing this, it would be a very big problem for grid stability.
I've also got experience with the off-grid lifestyle, as my office is 100% off-grid/standalone, and I don't pretend that system is cheap. Just neat. And even with 5kW of solar hung for a ~100 sq ft shed, I still need propane or a generator in the winter every now and then to keep things sane in here.
This isn't a problem as long as your grid does dynamic minute by minute pricing.
When the price of power drops to zero in the spring/fall, you can be sure there will be plenty of people lapping it up to smelt aluminium, make glass, make steel, make cement, liquify air, make hydrogen, etc.
When the price of power is high in the winter, companies will swoop in with gas turbines, power cables from other places, and extra insulation to keep houses warm with lower energy costs. Entrepreneurs will see this coming, and will be there ready to provide power or power-saving measures to those who did not prepare.
As long as the market can set a price, the market will solve each problem. The people to lose out will be customers who don't adapt to keep their costs down - for example those who heat their 1960's uninsulated home with electric baseboard heaters.
There are already plenty of seasonal industries - like tourism. Power hungry industries will become seasonal or migratory too.
> Power hungry industries will become seasonal or migratory too.
Electricity will have to become orders of magnitude more expensive for this to be true. After you've bought the building, the smelter, and the guy to operate it, the cost of electricity to smelt aluminum is negligible. Its never going to make sense to leave all that idle if the cost of electricity bumps up a few cents.
I work for a.company that melts steel. Cost of electric is a very large issue. We pay workers extra to work overnight shifts when electric is cheaper and shut down during the day. We also shutdown for annual maintenance in December when Christmas lights raise electric costs.. not one that melts metal, but I know one plant runs 5 months and does maintenance the other 7.
Note, the above is as of 10 years ago. Now wind provides most electric so hours may be different to account for that.
We have Nucor in West Seattle and rumor has it running 24/7/365+ because the cost of shutdown/startup is too high. I've seen steel coming out is there everything I've driven by regardless of hour.
Seattle has far more stable power costs because they have lots of hydro.
Hydro has a fixed amount of water they can generate energy from, but can do it daytime, nighttime or weekends - whenever the users want the power they can have it.
I do like the dynamic pricing idea. If you're not well situated for panels you can invest in batteries and sell at night what you bought during the day.
I don't have your faith in markets though. The invisible hand is a potent force indeed, but it's just as likely to flip you the bird as it is to solve a problem that you have. There's nothing about a market, for instance, that knows to keep prices high enough to prevent the wintertime aluminum smelters from burning all the stored energy and causing a humanitarian crisis a month later when there's not enough to weather a blizzard.
Imagine you see all the power being used up ahead of winter, and you predict this problem... Yet it seems like nobody else has noticed...
So you swoop in and, with profits in mind, you buy up some electricity futures contracts for December. They're quite cheap right now, and you suspect that when the blizzard hits they'll be really valuable. By doing so, you push the price of them up a bit.
Meanwhile, Fred over at the hydro plant sees that futures contracts for electricity are higher in December than now, so he'll make more money by switching off the generators now and using that water later in December when he'll get paid more for it.
Bob at the aluminium smelter sees that spot prices for power now are higher (because the hydro shut off), and futures prices suggest they'll be even higher in December too. So it's probably more profitable to shutdown the plant for repairs now, and restart production next year.
See how you noticing this problem started a chain of events that solved the problem? That's the power of markets - they can use the collective knowledge and intelligence of all the participants to solve a problem.
If everyone has perfect information and my speculative advantage has only to do with some insight that I had, then yeah it all works out.
But once I've bought those futures, I have an incentive to spread misinformation about just how bad the shortage is going to be, and to make it difficult for others to have the same kind of insight in the future so that I can have the same advantage next year.
If I'm successful, I'll have created a situation where actors that can store energy hoard it, only parting with it at prices that leave people struggling to survive the winter. We end up losing that energy to inefficiencies in the storage media, and we end up losing people to warmer climes--people who would have otherwise contributed to energy projects that increase supply.
Markets work out in the abstract, but unless they're watched closely they sabotage the conditions that made them initially useful.
Energy efficiency is always good, and I'm glad the government is incentivizing it.
A passive house can have 10% the energy cost/use of a regular "code" house. Even off grid, this can immensely help in the size of your battery required.
As someone with a smaller scale version of the "problem" you describe (3x overproduction from our ground-mount 6.7kW array in summer, 1/3x production in winter given air source heat pumps), I'd say this is where, even with this amazing contemporary technology, we need to get back to ... insulation.
As others have noted, passivhaus standards would help fix the "in the winter, homes use a lot more energy than they can generate" part of this. I've read of homes in Scandanavia that are heated by their inhabitants plus the output equivalent of a few candles. Not totally convinced by these stories, but they point the way: once you've got the carbon-reduced/free energy supply in place, work on massively (if possible) reducing how much of it you need.
We have an old adobe in the high desert, and it is so far from passivhaus as to be a joke. I'm fairly sure that if this was built to passivhaus standards, even our currently undersized array could handle the heating needs.
I live on the east coast, paid for excellent insulation and thick windows with good seals, installed solar, and don't pay a dime more for energy. That includes heating, cooling, hot water, and our two EVs. This is possible almost entirely because of the insulation.
We were generating a surplus, so we installed an electric clothes dryer, which seems to have balanced everything nicely.
> it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem that [...]
Is that the "fundamental" problem being solved, though? Or is it just an externality that needs to be addressed? It seems like the "fundamental" problem here is trying to maximize deployment of renewable generation, and that construction like this is a great step in that direction. (Not the least of which because it pushes the investment required onto consumers willing to bear the costs, and "generates jobs" in the process. Siting a new wind farm is a ton more complicated, and let's not even talk about the difficulty of installing a scratch-built reactor.)
I mean, it's true, that at the end of the day home energy generation is just PV solar, and PV solar doesn't behave like gas plants and that needs to be addressed at the grid level. But that's not an argument against PV solar, it's just an engineering problem.
It can certainly be an argument against residential rooftop solar.
In general, "industrial solar" (ground mount, high voltage strings, single axis trackers) is sub-$1/W installed. Residential rooftop solar is still $2.50-$4/W depending on where you are, because it has quite a few additional requirements (per-panel rapid shutdown in NEC 2017, various other requirements on the panel and interconnects that add cost), and, often, poor siting from partial shading reasons (chimneys, vent stacks, trees, other bits of roof, etc).
I don't mind making homes more suited to solar (oversize the main busbar with a "solar ready" panel, route conduit up to the roof, require all vent stacks be on the north side of the roof), but it's a rather uncontrolled solution that's of limited "actually solving the problem" use. Low levels of penetration are easy to deal with, higher levels start to get really hard, when you've got whole subdivisions shifting from "lots of production" to "lots of consumption" as clouds go over.
Or, we get used to less reliable, more intermittent energy again, and a lot of the problems go away. Just, that generates other problems.
The power grid is a lot more fragile than most people assume.
> Low levels of penetration are easy to deal with, higher levels start to get really hard
Well, yeah. So pick the low hanging fruit and sell it to the FAANG hippies. I still fail to see the problem here. No one is promoting rooftop solar as a one-stop-shop trip to renewable utopia, just as a effective and immediately deployable generation mechanism in a regulatory environment not well-suited to agile and rapid solutions of any kind.
If we get to the point where the hippies are buying up all the panels and the grid solutions can't get them cheap enough, that's the time to start complaining. Not now.
It's the fundamental problem that needs solving in order to achieve what this announcement claims is the ultimate end goal of all this - a "net-zero carbon economy" for the country as a whole - and it has been the fundamental obstacle to achieving this for decades now. So long as this problem remains unsolved, no amount of supposedly zero energy homes will ever get the country as a whole to that goal because they're still reliant on selling excess energy to the remaining "non zero energy" parts of the country in the summer and buying energy back from fossil fuel plants in the winter.
So.. you're saying this specific technology can only get us 60-70%[1] of the way to the "ultimate end goal". Ergo... it shouldn't be deployed and we should whine about it on HN?
No, that's silly. Build the panels. Build the solar. Fix the externalities, but absolutely pick the low hanging fruit. Every panel on a hippie's home means less total joules needed elsewhere.
To be blunt: the kind of argumentation you engage in is absolutely toxic, and HN is awash in it. Engineers love to scream about perfect solutions, but real engineering is about tradeoffs. And folks here are absolutely terrible, just really, genuinely shit-tier, at discussing them rationally.
[1] Depending on locale, obviously. In e.g. Arizona it's probably much closer to 80-90%
I have been toying with the idea of buying used panels in bulk and doing the same, but the payoff just isnt there at the current battery price. What kind of frame did you install to mount the panels? I have tons of room for ground mount and would love to do it diy as soon as the costs line up.
My system is grid tie, because the local plans review process and I didn't see eye-to-eye on batteries. I have a solar power trailer for backup power.
https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar2020/ documents the build. My frames are timber, though a neighbor built a very similar system with metal frames and 72 cell panels, and got his costs down quite a bit further - he's around $1/W installed, mine was somewhat higher at about $1.50/W (more expensive panels and a good bit more expensive frame setup).
If you can weld, and find used pipe to build your frames with, you should be able to do sub-$1/W for a DIY install.
No welding is needed, you can use metal clamps to hold the pipes together. I have my panels on metal structure with no welding, I used bolts for joins.
Yes, but the clamps I've found designed for that sort of use are quite expensive, and add a substantial margin to the project cost - and they're not needed if you can weld it up, or have someone else weld it up.
As I understand NEC from talking to various people and reading quite a bit of it myself, someone else can do the frames for a homeowner installed solar project, but "rails and up" has to either be the homeowner or a licensed electrician, because the rails are typically considered part of the grounding system and therefore electrical work.
In any case, costs doing it yourself are far, far lower than paying someone else to do it. And ground mount is an awful lot nicer to work with than roof mount.
> but "rails and up" has to either be the homeowner or a licensed electrician, because the rails are typically considered part of the grounding system and therefore electrical work.
Here in NM, you can (fairly easily) get licensed as the homeowner to do your own install of such a system. That's what did. My total cost (with those expensive metal clamps and nice aluminum panel rails etc) was around $1.80/W
In think in my country I can do all the work myself and I need a certified electrician to connect it to the grid, nothing else. The law is very different from country to country, for me the labor was extremely cheap while the panels and MPPT are more expensive than in US.
What if instead of batteries you hooked up a boiler to heat water or a deep chest freezer to cool water and then used heat exchangers to heat or cool overnight when solar doesn't work? I'm assuming no one does this because batteries are likely cheaper than this type of setup.
You're welcome to do that, and it's something some off grid systems use, but the energy storage in that sort of thing is fairly poor. Go do the math on it, but you'll find a 55 gallon drum of water, from "room temperature" to "really darn hot" holds 15-20kWh of energy. It's useful, but not a staggeringly large amount for a typical house, that can easily use more than that on a single day's heating.
Thermal mass storage requires a lot of mass to do anything useful, or the ability to run exceedingly high temperatures. Or a phase change. Molten salt storage can store a lot of energy, but you're at "very hazardously hot" temperatures with "stuff that's mind-bogglingly corrosive when hazardously hot." It's not the sort of thing most people would want to mess with at home. Myself included, and my tolerance for experimentation is pretty darn high.
> It's not a big deal with only a few people on the grid, but if every house were doing this,
"Renewable is great, but if we're already generating all our power by renewables then..."
This argument is silly because we are nowhere close to having this problem yet. And as we start to approach that golden age (I mean, "problem") we'll have other alternatives.
Iowa is actually close to having the problem of more renewable power than demand. We are a small state yet ranked number two in wind production: your state should aim to overtake us.
This is not really a problem. You just send out a signal to shut solar off. Then people and businesses buy batteries to take advantage of the free power and sell it back at night.
I live on what can be reasonably approximated as a "pile of rocks." It's fairly thin dirt on top of a lot of basalt. I've considered it, but the cost to install such a unit is quite staggering, before I buy a backhoe to install it.
I'll consider one of those if I have to replace my unit at some point, but I'm far more interested in adding simple solar thermal collectors to directly add energy from the sun on the partly cloudy or clear days we have, vs ripping up half an acre of rock to put the loops in, or figuring out where I can punch another well for heat exchange.
If you had a modern well insulated house you could heat your house with a hair drier in the dead of winter in climate zone 5. If your stacking up to 4mwh then your house is not really a good example.
I mean... that's all our energy inputs, including pumping water from a fairly deep well, almost all our transportation miles (300-400kWh/mo), heat, hot water, etc. It's a ~7 year old manufactured, 2k sq ft, 2x6 exterior walls, pretty tight (blower door and ducting tests have concluded "Nothing to fix here"), though I'm still running down a few weatherstripping issues on one of our doors.
A 1800W hair dryer running constantly is 1.3MWh/mo, and this isn't 4MWh/mo, it's since about Nov, on a colder than usual winter. I'm right on the north end of Zone 5.
In any case, I've yet to figure out how to get our heat pump outdoor unit from freezing up in icing fog, but neither is it worth $20k to put a ground source unit in right now.
Once use cases like yours become more common (e.g. 4MWh surplus), industries will adjust and buy surplus power from homeowners like you, and the nation as a whole will spend less time and effort on maintaining the grid and power plants that generate electricity.
We will be able to run power-hungry industries (e.g. steel-aluminum/smelting) for very little cost.
> And even with 5kW of solar hung for a ~100 sq ft shed, I still need propane or a generator in the winter every now and then to keep things sane in here.
What about a large thermal mass wood/pellet stove? There's plenty of wood waste floating around that could heat a small house/shed in the couple of winter months when the solar panels don't do the job.
Wrong way. The house has pulled an extra 4MWh from the grid during the winter months (and pushes more than that back during the rest of the year). I'm past net zero on an annual basis, but that doesn't mean that even a large array is able to cover my energy needs in the winter few months.
I'm grandfathered into an arrangement where I pay my $5/mo and get unlimited net metering, but it's not remotely reasonable to pretend that I'm not heavily using the grid overnight, in the winter, etc.
If we expect industry to take up the excess, than either 1. that industry will only operate according to the weather or 2. We'll still need some variable power generation that can be switched on when wind or solar isn't producing enough
A few industrial users can weather changes in supply, with notice of the expected price in advance.
The aluminium smelter can heat to x+250°, let things cool to x° while people cook their evening meal, then heat up again afterwards.
A large supermarket chain can set their refrigerators to 5°, but by allowing the range to move between 3° and 7° can save significant power. (One of the big British supermarkets already does this.)
That only works on short timescales, which isn't the main problem because there are so many ways of solving that (for example batteries or thermal storage for home heating).
Seasonal operation is not desirable and has lots and lots of side effects.
As an example, a smelter that operates half the year takes twice as much capital to produce the same throughput as one that operates year round.
That’s before we get into all of the reasons that seasonal labor is undesirable, or how much additional warehouse capacity would be required to stockpile the metal which will needed over the unoperational months, or the raw material being stockpiled while it’s unable to be processed, or the impact on just in time supply chains, etc.
You don’t really get any more Solar after dinner. If everyone gets a big battery (expensive) then they could slowly offload the charge overnight but that would need to make financial sense to the house owners somehow.
At a minimum you’d need to recuperate the wear on the battery as they all have a finite amount of cycles
You still have to maintain the grid for others to buy it and to balance it. The maintenance costs of the grid are going no where but up. More usage, more right of way, more towers, more wire, more labor.
So it seems in practice the main way you achieve this certification is to dramatically cut heating losses by using a lot of insulation and make the house essentially air-tight. Obviously you can’t have an air-tight house for very long, you need fresh air. So you have explicit vents for incoming and outgoing air, and you run the incoming air (which is fresh, but not the temperature you want) through a heat exchanger with the outgoing air (which is stale, but is at the temperature you want). This recovers most of the heat you put into your inside air, so you need very little heating to maintain the desired temperature.
This is actually a really good thing, I think. The minimum airflow rating these houses have to meet is of course going to be suboptimal, but the hard part of airproofing is already done and it’s easy for the homeowner to simply beef up the heat exchanger and air pump to get ideal airflow. The homeowner can also install an air quality filter on the airpump and now their entire house has filtered air. Great way to get that PM2.5 level down to where it should be!
Disconnecting from the grid is overly romanticized. What you get from paying the utilities is a team of people who will fix equipment issues due to failure or the environment.
If your home battery system has issues, scheduling someone could take a day or more. Off grid electrical services isn't popular enough to be on call 24/7. And getting parts may get take even more time. Equipment failure could take your electricity out for days or weeks. Being fully off grind means over provisioning your electrical storage and production, adding to costs. You also would not be able to sell your excess electricity. Also, in terms of house value, I imagine more people value the peace of mind of a connected electrical grid over saving the small fixed monthly connection fee.
> What you get from paying the utilities is a team of people who will fix equipment issues due to failure or the environment
Friends have lived off-grid in the Yukon in a very nice house for 20 years.
It's hard to get house insurance when you're not on the grid, and whenever they get asked about it, they ask the insurance person on the phone "When was the last time you had a power outage?" (inevitably the answer is sometime in the last month or three - the power grid in the Yukon is a fickle thing).
In 20 years, they've never had a single second of power outage in their very nice off grid house.
I totally agree that it is not for everybody, but I think there is a place for it and think there should be fewer barriers .
I've seen a few people quoted more than 500K for PG&E to run power to their house. That can buy a lot of redundancy and peace of mind. Similarly, many cities have power outages longer than 24 hours on an annual basis in California. At this point most people in my neighborhood have gas generators for when the grid goes out.
I'm just curious: what happens if a home owner installs a bunch of solar panels and batteries, declares the property "off grid" (for electricity), then simply stops paying the local utility. I'm sure the local utility will stop service, which is what the home owner wants by going "off grid". But does it go beyond that? Will the local utility put a lien on the house? Will the local utility send any unpaid "fees" to collection? Does the local municipality condemn the property (or something similar)? Are there potential criminal charges?
The duty can remove your right to live in the house. Utilities serve the whole city, if you don't connect you are violating the unwritten agreement to help the city exist. Even if you don't use power you need to pay your share of the power lines.
Paying for what? You pay for the kWh you use and the transfer of said energy. If you don’t use any energy or disconnect your service I don’t see why would that be a problem
Electricity grids have two parts -- the infrastructure that moves the electricity and the actual power.
Before home generation, everyone needed both. The cost of the infrastructure was amortized over all of the customers. As it turned out, rich people used more power, so by having a single charge just based on usage but that covered the cost of both usage and the grid, rich people subsidized poor people.
But the home solar came along, and the rich people started getting it. So now the power companies have a problem. They still have to maintain all of that grid infrastructure, whether you're connected to it or not, and they need rich people to subsidize it.
The could have simply split the bill up and put the infrastructure on the property tax bill and then just charge people for their actual usage, but that would be complicated and would reveal how much they pay for each part.
So instead they lobbied for laws that don't let you go off grid and force you to pay a minimum "connection fee" each month.
In the context of the OP, which is a federal agency, whether or not you can build a house that is disconnected from the electrical grid is determined first by your local laws, and secondly by your state laws. You can certainly build houses in the US that aren't on the electrical grid, demonstrating that there's no federal prohibition against it.
> Permitted grid connected solar costs 5x that and disconnecting from the grid is not permitted.
Why not treat them as independent problems - an off-grid solar system for most of your electricity, while also maintaining a nominal (/backup) grid connection? If your home is already connected to the grid, then I would think the ongoing cost would be minimal and could be viewed as just another tax.
That's a fair question but it doesn't really save you any money, and just costs more for a breaker to switch back and forth. Everything still needs to be inspected and permitted to the same level of rigor because it is still technically wired to the grid and you just have more elements which could malfunction in a less standard configuration
If a hardwired interconnect to the grid is what triggers your permit/license requirements, then forget that I threw out the "backup" functionality. Ignore the grid connection and just treat the monthly service charge as another tax.
Or if you can get away with having a power inlet on your off grid system and powering that system from the grid with an extension cord during temporary backup/maintenance conditions only, go for that.
For my own AHJ, grid interconnect has nothing to do with whether permits/licenses are required (and for homeowner work, they're not). So an off-grid system and grid-connected are under the same requirements there regardless. A grid-tie system that can feed back power to the grid requires additional signoff/agreement with the POCO though.
(I'm very sympathetic to the situations where the utility will demand some stiff fee to build out a grid connection to a new residence, while local regulations require this connection for occupancy. But this isn't what you described)
They are most likely referring to many/most counties require a grid connection for the home to be considered "habitable". Refusing and living in a un-habitable home can have all sorts of fun consequences up to and including the seizure of your own children by the state.
Every other home in the US isn't up to code. The code changes over time and governs all kinds of mundane things that you as a homeowner don't pay attention to (and shouldn't be forced to). Not being compliant doesn't make a home illegal to live in.
This is different. Many municipalities specifically require all dwellings to have basic utilities (water, sewer, electricity, garbage service), even if you're not using them. Not having that will get you in trouble pretty quickly.
To be fair - technology is lacking for people living in the city to be able to go off grid in a meaningful way.
Disconnecting from the grid - that sounds like there's some kind of clause in the area that you live that essentially ties you to the utility. You must live in on the pacific coast or SW.
EDIT: To all the responses - I'm talking off grid as in all functionality. Sure you can add solar / solar thermal etc though in many places it isn't cost effective and doesn't make a lot of sense in a city where the alternative is that those costs are defrayed across a large base that provides reliability and service. I don't have much love for utilities but they do provide a valuable service.
Things may be different now but some cities used to the condemn the house if it did not have electricity from a provider. It is a scam, considering most people did not have electricity even 100 years ago.
That's fair if you're talking about all utilities in the city. Sewer and water are the main problems in an urban environment. Rooftop solar on the other hand is dirt cheap and only slightly more complicated to install then plugging in a toaster.
Actually rooftop solar isn't dirt cheap where we are. And typically requires an electric service upgrade - you also need to make sure you aren't near the end of your roof life as you'll need to upgrade your roof as well.
I'm all for it where it makes sense but it isn't a blanket statement.
I totally agree and fixed it in the post you responded to. At the end of the day a panels and electronics are a minor contribution to the project cost.
I think in most of California it is still legal to do home electrical work, provided it is permitted and inspected, but I'm not sure if this is true for solar as well.
How would you get enough panels and all the support equipment for $10K if there were no regulations? I'm looking into it right now and I don't see a path to that.
It all depends on what your need is in terms of power consumption and storage.
New bulk panels can be be purchased as low as $0.7/w or $7,000 for 10 kw nameplate. You can get 10kwh of lead acid batteries for another 2 grand, a 10kw combo MPPT for ~1 grand or a 10KW charge controller + 5 KW AC inverter for the same.
I'm out of budget so I guess I'm racking with 2x4s and using chicken wire for cabling, but you get the point
Buying used panels bulk, DIY most of the the install.. I’m not sure how much kWh you would end up with but could be a decent amount. Battery storage is probably the most expensive part if you want overnight power
OP links to https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home... , which explains that its definition of a Zero Energy Ready Home is "a high-performance home that is so energy efficient that a renewable energy system could offset most or all the home's annual energy use".
Those dehumidifiers make these places uninhabitable for me. Constant low humidity is really unhealthy. Without them these ultra insulated homes have major vapor and mold issues. Being highly insulated is good but at a point it's just silly. I'd rather see efforts to insulate old trailers, manufactured homes, etc. Rich people experimenting with zero energy homes don't need a credit.
I agree on low humidity being bad, but your remark on insulation does not seem correct. I'm only familiar with cold climates, so perhaps I'm overlooking something, but mold needs moisture to grow, so it will appear where water condenses out of warm air on a cold surface. You can typically see this in windows.
So you need to prevent cold surfaces. The best way to do that is improving the insulation. The reason you can see water drops in the windows is precisely because they are inadequately insulated (e.g. only double paned).
Now, it's true that if you make an airtight home, then you need some kind of air exchange. And if it's really cold outside, then even if it's wet, once that air is warmed up, it ends up at a low relative humidity. In that case you need a humidifier. I guess depending on the outside air, you'd probably need both to stay in a comfortable range.
It's not super intuitive at first, but its cold climates were this is actually a big issue. Water vapor "wants" to equalize from a more humid to less humid environment. So when it's cold out - the humidity can drop rather low. Then you take a shower and create water vapor - which flows into the walls, through the insulation, and condenses against the colder exterior. Open a wall in any stick frame house in the rocky mountain region and mildew will be present. I am building a highly insulated house in a cold climate area and have blasted all the wood with copious amount of a silver based coating to inhibit mold growth.
Ah, I see where you are coming from. The standard solution (for > 25 years) where I live is that you install a vapor barrier (plastic) to prevent the moisture from diffusing outwards. It needs to be on the interior side of the insulation in a cold climate.
Edit: Sorry, I can see that you're aware of these. Perhaps my point is just that all standard houses where I live in cold climate uses vapor barriers. Moisture control is part of the building code. Trying to solve the problem with overly dry air does not make sense to me - the whole point of a house is making a comfortable living space.
Have you investigated a combination of additional vapor permeable exterior insulation and impermeable primer for the interior walls? You may be able to minimize the amount of moisture staying in the walls and still hit your thermal goals.
Great insulation and hermetically sealed homes increases the needs for good ventilation. You can't just build a super insulated home without great ventilation. And obviously for energy efficiency you need heat exchangers between in/out air (Alternatively as a slightly cheaper and easier to retrofit option, a heat recovery in your heating system such as an exhaust air heat pump). Maintaining good humidity in any weather also isn't very difficult.
I agree subsidizing new homes doesn't seem necessary. This is simple to enforce in building codes. Defined efficiency limits for construction and building components (e.g. requiring triple glazing and 12in insulation in all walls) would be trivial to mandate and it's as reasonable in Florida as it is in Maine.
The location of the home (Fairhope, Alabama) is in a humid subtropical climate where the average humidity is above 70% year round. I couldn't find any data but seems possible that the net average interior humidity is not actually that low?
That's part of what bothers me when they combine residential and commercial use into a single figure, and then put all the onus on making homes as energy efficient as possible while entirely overlooking one of the major functional purposes of a home: to provide comfort.
It's a daffy one-sided approach that is unsustainable.
I live on campus at Cornell Tech. The student residence hall[0] there is built following Passive House standards and it is actually surprising how good it works. My one complaint is the heating and cooling systems in every apartment unit are very heavily regulated, so at times the inside feel and temperature aren't ideal. It's a minor thing though.
Passiv Haus (or loosely equivalently the US Passive House) is supposed to be a shorthand to express it takes less energy than conventionally required to achieve Net Zero. But not all Passiv Haus designs are necessarily Net Zero, and not all Net Zero designs necessarily use Passiv Haus to accomplish their rating.
What about the existing housing stock? There's a lot of energy upgrades that pay off well over a couple decades, but not when you move an average of every 7 years and the new homeowners don't know how or care to value your upgrades.
I think the government could create regulation to fix the incentives here. Something like allowing enhanced energy efficiency to be paid over time by creating a lien on the house that a new homeowner has to continue to make payments towards.
$5000 tax credit for a ZERH home that may cost $400k to build. Just from an incentive pov is it enough to swing the needle? Most probably I am glossing over something.
My take on this is that they are making the equivalent of an Energy Start certification for housing. In theory, having this cert should raise the value of the house. I view the $5k as a way to offset the cost of applying.
For someone already wanting to build a house, maybe. You're probably already going to insulate because it pays for itself. The tax credit makes it possible to go the extra mile.
Yeah I'm laughing at this too. With land prices being what they are, this just means builders will make only luxury multi-million dollar homes with these codes in mind.
Am I the only one who was still wondering what a 'zero energy ready home' is after reading the entire article?
So I followed a link, that led me to this definition:
> A DOE Zero Energy Ready Home is a high-performance home that is so energy efficient that a renewable energy system could offset most or all the home's annual energy use
And now I still don't know. What is a 'high-performance home'? And what exactly is the criterium to decide if 'a renewable energy system could offset most or all the home's annual energy use'?
Interesting. Is there a good consise page detailing the main differences between this and older standards? Stuff like cost and ease of maintenance comparisons?
To get really high R value on insulation, often that means a 2x6 or 2x8 framed outer wall to allow for the additional thickness needed by the insulation. Double pane windows are well-surpassed by those with many panes and carefully designed frames with low thermal bridging. Aside from more insulation you need great air sealing, across every joint and in every window and door frame. Older construction had no explicit ventilation, just a lot of leaking such that the house "breathed". On modern, efficient homes, the air seal is very tight for efficiency reasons, so you need an ERV/HRV system to exhange air for you to keep the air healthy, while minimizing energy loss for that airflow.
Insulating materials used inside the roof and sheathing are typically closed cell foam or rockwool, or in Europe they sometimes use a wood fiber based insulation. There are lots of caulks and adhesive tapes for getting a good air seal, and there's also a technique where one pumps the house frame full of a vapor that reacts across pressure drops and plugs any holes it flows through.
Last, well insulated homes can get cheap heating and cooling from modestly sized heat pumps which are very efficient. One zero energy home I saw has heat exchangers on the roof to capture energy from the sun for warm water as well, supplemented by heat pumps powered by photovoltaics.
Modern houses have gone back to 2x4 walls. Then the put 2 inches of foam under the siding so the thickness is equal to a 2x6. There is already on the market standard doors and windows that fit this. Though 4 inches of foam may make more sense yet, but there are no standard doors or windows for that thickness so costs go up.
Things switched from insulating the wall cavity to insulating the outside of the house. Engineers started to factor in the insulation value of a 2x6 compared to the insulation it was next to and the heat loss in cold climates. Same applies for hot climates. Now these homes are being wrapped in insulation on the outside with all joints sealed, then insulated on the inside and essentially pressure tested for air leaks. The houses can be "tight" enough that you have to have a system to cycle in fresh air in a way that it heats/cools it with the air that is leaving. You also need a makeup air vent for things like a stove hood.
There is a new system that before drywall goes up, they pressurize the house and spray a caulk in the air that finds its way to all the pinhole leaks and seals them to further reduce air leaks during the building process.
> You have to have a system to cycle in fresh air in a way that it heats/cools it with the air that is leaving.
This is quite nice regardless. Houses are unlikely to be so drafty that the air inside is always fresh, and a real ventilation system will deliver fresh, filtered air all the time.
> You also need a makeup air vent for things like a stove hood.
You need this anyway, at least in CA, if your hood exceeds 400cfm, and it’s probably a good idea regardless. Sadly, high end hoods seem to mostly have way too much airflow, and decent makeup air systems are rare and complex.
Heat exchangers are a big one, but they are not yet that common in the US. They are used to pre-heat the makeup air. I'm looking into one atm as part of a HVAC upgrade as currently running a bath fan with all the windows closed will draw air down the chimney.
Heat exchangers have been code for more than 20 years. Maybe not common, but only because there are a lot of old houses. Or maybe where you live didn't adopt the new code?
I have a house that's less than 20 and it doesn't have a heat exchanger. I haven't heard of the new construction around here having any. Perhaps it's only in certain states?
How will I get to experience opening up a wall in the house I have lived in for a decade to find McDonalds trash stuck in the wall instead of insulation?
I’m not at all convinced that exterior insulation would have lower labor cost. You have to competently install sheets of rigid insulation, and then you need to competently install siding over it.
Insulating cavities needs some skilled labor if you use mineral wool, but a skilled installer goes fast. Or you can use some kind of blown in product, which takes very little labor. (I have never seen competently installed fiberglass batts. I’m not sure they really exist.)
Insulting cavities well is immensely labor intensive and unfortunately is still required in homes with exterior insulation so you're kind of getting the worst of both worlds. Exterior insulation is an absolute breeze in comparison though, there are tons of product on the market that integrate the sheathing and insulation into a single unit so it installs just like any other exterior sheathing would.
I watched a crew install a blown fiberglass product: they stapled fabric over the walls, poked holes in it, and stuck a hose in each hole so a machine in their truck could flow fiberglass into the cavity. It went very quickly and fully filled the cavities.
John Mansville Spider Plus looks like another interesting product — blown fiberglass that is just sticky enough that it can supposedly be applied to walls and even ceilings without anything to contain it.
Exterior typically requires sheathing and insulation is attached to that sheathing. Extra work is required to tape up the seams though it eliminates the plastic house wrap required in most areas in the US which is attached with staples or a nail gun.
I understand you can just check the pressure during a blower test to see if there are leaks, but how do they actually identify where the leaks are? Go around all over the house with a smoke gun?
Largely yes. You don't need to survey every inch though since leaks aren't present in the middle of walls, but typically at complex areas (around windows, roof penetrations, can lights, outlets, rim joists, etc) so a little smoke quickly IDs those issue areas. Another way way to find leaks is to run the blower door tests on a day where there's a large temperature differential (ideally when it's very cold outside). You can use a thermal camera before the test and then after you depressurize the house for a 10 or 15 minutes - the leaky areas are perfectly obvious on the thermal since the cold outdoor air is washing over the walls near the leaks. Taking the before/during thermal videos on a walkthrough lets you compare the side-by-side later on and ID which spots need attention.
If there's a good thermal difference between interior temperature and exterior temperature, a thermal imager will help catch an awful lot of the leaks.
There are tax credits to the builder to offset some of the increased up front cost, $2000 + $500 for some systems, and 22% on PV systems. It looks like the homeowner can get a $5000 tax credit for 10 years.
The goal is to transition to housing which can be powered by renewables. To that end there are requirements for the thermal integrity of the envelope and windows, there must be electric run for HVAC heat pumps, hot water heat pumps, and at least one EV parking space. Lighting must be modern high efficiency stuff. Ductwork must be inside the thermal envelope. There are indoor air quality standards to meet.
> A DOE Zero Energy Ready Home is a high-performance home that is so energy efficient that a renewable energy system could offset most or all the home's annual energy use.
"Most or all" and "annual energy use" allow for some massive wiggle room. Annual energy use by who? A family with a couple teenage girls is going to likely use a lot more hot water than a family with a three year old boy.
I can't find any actual concrete details on it, annoyingly. So I have to agree that it's more of a feel-good listing until proven otherwise.
I was really interested in the insulation part and building design. The only thing I could find was that it has to be energy star, which is only 10% better insulation than code.
ACH2.0 in most of the upper part of the country is pretty aggressive. The 2015 ICC isn't a slouch either -- say you're in Chicagoland building a new home, this would mandate R49 in the attic, R20 in the walls (or R13 in the bays + R5 exterior), R15 on basement walls, R30 in the floors.
It could of course be much more aggressive, and likely will be eventually, but if you had a ACH2 house with those insulation values, minimum U-0.3 windows, >0.94 efficient gas furnace / high quality heat pumps, it would be a very efficient house.
I’m also curious if there is a path to upgrade existing homes to this standard or do you have to demolish and rebuild (which is not legal in many cities).
There are some good ideas here that I hope take off like ventilating dehumidifiers. So much of what we perceive as discomfort in our homes comes down to the humidity rising and stale air.
Wildly tangential, but can I sign a petition somewhere for energy capacity to stop being measured in Wh? It's such a dumb unit of measurement. We already have a base unit of energy, which is Joules. Dividing J by seconds to get W and then multiplying that by hours to get franken-joules is so unnecessary and makes the math harder for no reason and it makes me mad every time I deal with it.
The world has had "zero energy" homes for like fifty years now in the form of earthships, but government entities have prevented them from reaching a wider audience because of laws which prohibit most non-stickframe homes.
This would be more effective if California would force its energy suppliers (PG&E, SCE, Etc.) to offset watts for watts on Solar installs. They won't because people like me would then no longer pay for electricity.
Generally, yes. They tend to have a lot of corners (for their "architectural features" checklist), and those are really hard to insulate well.
They also tend to be purchased by people who don't care in the slightest about energy efficiency, because if you can buy a $10M home, the difference between $500/mo or $1500/mo in energy costs doesn't matter to you.
Competing element though is they probably have more land to put solar on, so if they don't find it to be aesthetically incompatible, they could probably push through those energy losses.
Sure, and they could shrug off the cost of installing a ground-source heat pump[1] too, which would be too expensive for more modest homes. But they'd again have to give a damn, which I am only semi-optimistic about...
In theory, taking something people were already buying in a highly polluting form, and giving them the option to buy the same thing in a less polluting form.
Crazy how the Americans try to create "zero energy homes" (whatever that means) using basically wood structures. Wood is a very, very bad heat insulator.
The best proven heat insulator when it comes to building a home is earth itself, that's why for hundreds to thousands of years dug-out huts have been the norm on several continents, for different cultures/civilisations. Granted, you cannot build a macmansion-like house using only earth+some wood.
Yeah, maybe I used the wrong word, as I'm not a native English speaker, I meant it as good at keeping the heat in during winter and the cold air also in during summer.
And for that the houses made (partially) out of earth itself are pretty good. You have to be careful not to allow water infiltrations, but other than that those houses are pretty durable, even against earthquakes (my grandpa from my mother's side used to live in one).
>The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake (Postal romanization: Shensi), known in Chinese colloquially by its regnal year as the Jiajing Great Earthquake "嘉靖大地震" (Jiājìng Dàdìzhèn) occurred in the early morning of 23 January 1556 in Huaxian, Shaanxi during the Ming dynasty.
>Most of the residents there lived in yaodongs—artificial caves in loess cliffs—which collapsed and buried alive those sleeping inside. Modern estimates put the direct deaths from the earthquake at over 100,000, while over 700,000 migrated away or died from famine and plagues, which summed up to a total loss of 830,000 people in Imperial records.[3][4][5] It was the deadliest recorded earthquake in history, and in turn one of the deadliest natural disasters in Chinese history.[6]
It's very reasonable to build a masonry structure that is safe in a large earth quake. They are however more likely to suffer major damage during an earthquake. Wood framed houses are less likely to be damaged, and have much cheaper repairs when they are damaged.
Builders themselves are slow to adopt new technology vs. do what they’ve always done. Part of that is because it’s hard to learn news things. Part of it is because new things have lots of unknown and builders shoulder that risk.
Then what is this regulation solving exactly ? Building standards just make building less than standard illegal. They don't increase building buying power.
People go broke if their utilities go up $100 a month. It's better if houses were built to not depend on volatile energy prices. Net zero homes basically move the monthly utility cost from an ongoing variable bill and basically prepays it into the mortgage which would have more predicable pricing. All that extra cost should also stay as value to the house.
why down-vote? was making fun of 'zero energy' being a useless & inaccurate term since energy is required, there's no such thing as zero energy in that context.
This is good, in the way that filtered cigarretes are better than unfiltered.
As long we we keep building & being forced to live in low density, single-family houses, we'll keep consuming the huge physical and energy resources necessary to sustain them.
I'm not saying we have to turn every neighborhood into manhattan, far from it. But this is similar to the gas -> electric car change. Yeah, it's a marginal improvement on what we're doing now, but its so far away from the kind of changes we need to make that it's almost dispiriting to see it presented as some kind of remarkable progress.
A GPT blurb about what goes into a zero energy ready home:
>
There are several core technologies and products that go into creating a Zero Energy Ready Home. These include:
Advanced insulation materials: These materials are used to reduce heat loss and gain through walls, roofs, and floors. Examples of advanced insulation materials include spray foam insulation, rigid foam insulation, and blown-in cellulose insulation.
High-performance windows: These windows are designed to minimize heat loss and gain and to improve comfort and natural lighting. They typically have low-e coatings, multiple panes, and insulated frames.
Efficient heating, cooling, and ventilation systems: These systems use advanced technologies to reduce energy consumption and provide a comfortable indoor environment. Examples include geothermal heat pumps, air-source heat pumps, and energy recovery ventilation systems.
Solar panels: These panels are used to generate renewable energy and can be installed on the roof or integrated into the building envelope. They can provide enough energy to power the home and even send excess energy back to the grid.
Energy-efficient appliances and lighting: These products use less energy than conventional models and can help further reduce energy consumption in the home.
Building automation systems: These systems allow homeowners to control and monitor energy use and other home systems remotely, which can help optimize energy efficiency and comfort.
Producers of these products include a variety of companies, from large multinational corporations to smaller regional manufacturers. Some examples of companies that produce products for Zero Energy Ready Homes include Owens Corning and Johns Manville for insulation, Andersen and Marvin for windows, Carrier and Lennox for HVAC systems, SunPower and Tesla for solar panels, and Nest and Ecobee for smart thermostats. There are many other companies and products available, and choosing the right ones depends on factors such as climate, building design, and budget.
Congratulations, you've found something to describe, in a dull and useless way, the concept of energy efficiency in a home. Blown-in cellulose is "advanced," huh?
It doesn't answer any of the specific questions about what's specifically different in a Zero Energy Ready Home from something Energy Star rated, and it's filled with weasel words and vague handwaving statements.
I could nitpick the response further against the actual PDF linked elsewhere in the thread, but there's no particular point.
Versions 1 and 2, Single Family, Multifamily, and Manufactured Homes
https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home...
Additionally, one of the photos in the featured article has the following caption:
Lopez Community Land Trust built this 561-square-foot affordable home on Lopez Island, Washington, to the high-performance criteria of DOE's Zero Energy Ready Home program that delivers a $20-per-month average monthly energy bill.
I've said for years we need to go back to more passive solar design as our baseline standard because it is both more energy efficient and more comfortable for humans. It protects the environment while improving quality of life.
It's a myth that you can't see gains in both areas.
I'm also happy to see the caption because we need to do a better job of supporting high quality of life in small towns, not just big cities. Trends in recent decades mean small towns suck because they lack services and big cities suck if you aren't one of the wealthy.
That wasn't always true and programs like this can improve and strengthen both small town and urban environments while mitigating the burden suburbs currently represent.