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ON-DEMAND WEBCAST

Affordable Housing or Green Housing? We Can Say Yes to Both Video, 56 minutes

Should housing be affordable? Or should it be sustainably designed, built, and operated?

When you put it like that, the question sounds absurd.

But the idea—usually unspoken—that sustainability wastes precious time and resources is painfully common in the affordable housing world. 

It’s time to bust that myth. In this webcast, you’ll hear from experts who are:

  • Dispensing with the sustainability “sales pitch” and centering people and community instead

  • Drawing on millennia of Indigenous knowledge and design to build contemporary, culturally responsive green communities 

  • Distilling the complex landscape of healthy building materials to help project teams make meaningful choices

  • Working at the leading edge of green affordable housing, climate disaster response, and community resilience on a national scale

Yes, available funding for building and rehabilitating affordable housing is inadequate—but that’s all the more reason to get this right when we get the chance. 

Panelists:

  • Katie Ackerly of David Baker Architects
  • Gina Ciganik of Habitable
  • Krista Egger of Enterprise Community Partners
  • Daniel Glenn of 7 Directions Architects/Planners

After viewing this webcast, you should be able to:

  1. Understand how sustainability and affordability can align during design, construction, and operation.

  2. Understand why cultural heritage and social equity must be central to sustainable housing design. 

  3. Describe how architecture and planning inspired by Indigenous models of dwelling can help us build more sustainable and resilient communities.

  4. Explain why it’s crucial to consider—and communicate to clients—the true life-cycle costs, rather than just the first costs, of integrative design as well as building products and materials. 

Presenters

Katie Ackerly is principal and sustainable design director at David Baker Architects, an award-winning architecture firm known for elevating the design of multi-family housing. Katie came to architecture from a background in building science and energy efficiency policy, and holds both a Master of Architecture and a graduate degree in Building Science from UC Berkeley, including studies with the Center for the Built Environment. Within DBA and beyond, she works to expand understanding, tools, partnerships, and best practices that advance climate responsive housing that supports thriving communities.

At Enterprise, Krista manages national sustainability efforts, including the Enterprise Green Communities Criteria, the nation’s only national green building program designed explicitly for green affordable housing construction. She led the technical development and public roll-out of the 2015 and 2020 Enterprise Green Communities Criteria, and provides strategic oversight for its certification program and Health Action Plan framework, which pairs public health professionals with affordable housing development teams. Krista leverages the Enterprise Green Communities platform, climate disaster response work and cultural resilience programming to deploy equitable climate resilience solutions across the country.

Gina is recognized as a national leader in advancing human and environmental health. A champion of equity and environmental justice, Gina is an innovator with a proven track record of creating leading-edge, nationally recognized sustainable spaces where we live, work, and play. Prior to HBN, Gina was Vice President at a real estate development firm, where she spent two

decades creating thousands of healthy, high-performance affordable homes. Gina completed the Achieving Excellence program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and holds a B.S. degree in Housing from the University of Minnesota.

Daniel J. Glenn, AIA, NCARB, is a nationally recognized expert in culturally responsive architecture and in green affordable housing with a focus on work for diverse cultures. Mr. Glenn’s work reflects his Crow tribal heritage. He has been featured in the film, Indigenous Architecture / Living Architecture, and four of his tribal projects have been featured in the book, Design Re-Imagined: New Architecture on Indigenous Lands published in 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press. He was selected to be on a national technical advisory team on greening Indian housing for the HUD Sustainable Construction in Indian Country program and is a regularly invited speaker at conferences and universities.

Also on BuildingGreen

Build More or Build Green? Affordable Housing’s False Choice