Counting the days until Built Green®

Sun., Nov. 11, 2007

Joel White Spokane Home Builders Association

Coming soon to a development near you: An affordable green home, with a regionally recognized certification to prove it.

That’s because the Spokane Home Builders Association’s brand new Built Green® Program launches in March, 2008.

With more than 100,000 green homes built nationally since 2000, it is time for the residents of the Inland Northwest to have a local green building program to call their own.

What’s in it for home buyers? Well, you can barely open a newspaper or magazine without reading about the “greening” of just about everything: schools, hospitals, office buildings, cars.

There’s a lot of fluff and even more hype — and worse, it’s hard to know exactly what you are getting.

SHBA members know that a green home is more than just a house with extra insulation or high-tech windows — and that it doesn’t have to be a yurt or a geodesic dome.

A home can be considered green when energy efficiency, water and resource conservation, the use of sustainable or recycled products, and indoor air quality considerations are incorporated into the process of home building.

The increased availability of education for builders, growing consumer awareness and the exploding market for sustainable, environmentally friendly and recycled building products has accelerated green building’s acceptance rate and move into the mainstream.

The brand-new SHBA Built Green® Program is being fueled by this growing acceptance and is based on the success of other local Built Green® programs in Western Washington that have been certifying and verifying “authentically green” homes for years.

The SHBA Built Green® Program will transform the market by allowing home builders to provide homes that are as green as homebuyers want and as energy- and resource-efficient as is economically feasible.

A Web site for the local SHBA program is still under construction, but you can visit www.builtgreenwashington.org which includes several valuable features for builders and homebuyers. In addition to general information on green building, the site also features numerous links to additional government and private sector Web sites to provide more detailed information to the public.

If you would like more information on the SHBA Built Green® Program, please contact Paul Warfield at (509) 532-4990.

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