The basic gist: It’s really all about the energy efficiency much more so than about the materials in either direction – at least for residential. The question of the dollars and effort required to get as energy efficient as possible is the key — and how does new vs. retrofit effect THAT?

Certainly if you make sure existing homes are made not just a little but way more energy efficient, then things start to look a lot better. But doing deep retrofits is not always easy. Take a house I worked on in Ann Arbor: it was built with 2x3s! We blew in foam and it helped, but the only way to really get that thing decent is to remove all of the siding, add additional insulation and then re-side the house. We also had to re-do the windows (they were single-pane aluminum – one of the few times I’ll advocate for replacing windows at this point). Throw in an upgraded furnace and all of these efforts together put the house outside of it’s marketable value. But I could BUILD a comparable house with much better energy performance for less overall money.

Obviously part of the problem here is the financial context, right? And we need to fix how energy efficiency affects appraisals and home value — but in the meantime… I truly don’t know. The real question comes down to this: regardless of retrofit vs. new — how energy-intensive is the building designed to be for it’s operation? In either case, a bunch of factors from status quo to codes to appraisal systems to financing options all push people to do little to no energy improvements, and at that point, new vs. retrofit may not matter so much for the LCA. The real issue is how much you reduce the energy use by. So then we’re looking at cost and ease of implementation factors for creating seriously energy efficient spaces between new and retrofit, which is NOT what this study really does — and I think it may often be cheaper, and therefore more effective to make new building MORE energy efficient than a retrofitted existing building. At least for residential. It may be a very different story for a variety of other building types. THAT’s what I want to know, and that’s what this report implies, but I think it doesn’t know either.

We have other good reasons to invest in existing buildings, from cultural and historic to aesthetic considerations. Of course, we want to reduce our impact on materials waste. These are all good things. But if we want to talk what has the biggest impact on the environment for stopping climate change, that may be a different issue.

The study you sent is great – (See: http://www.otrfoundation.org/Docs/OTR_GREEN_HISTORIC_STUDY.pdf) — lots of good info. As for this topic, it only proves my point further. They all acheived LEED, but with minimal energy attention. Here’s how the 4 projects did for the Energy section, showing how many points they got out of how many possible for the Energy section of LEED: 4 out of 38; 4 out of 38, 5 out of 17, and 0 out of 38. They DIDN’T TACKLE ENERGY because it was hard to do so in an economically reasonable way.

Am I missing anything here?

You know, I’m a big believer in rehab — and there are many many good reasons for it. Personally, I just LIKE a lot of those older buildings more, and the history infuses a space with meaning — this is important! And other reasons reside as well — but I don’t want to claim that it’s better for our carbon footprint if it isn’t. What I want is a more reliable study.

For instance in the retrofitted single family home they do not include air conditioning in the retrofit, whereas the new construction has A/C.

Similarly the mixed use commercial has the retrofit get a ground source heat pump while the construction has a comparatively inefficient rooftop unit.

Am I missing something?

Thanks for writing – it’s good to have direct conversation! And it’s really helpful to hear about your experience in trying some of these other approaches. Certainly, the approaches I was suggesting don’t suddenly make things easy! What you say rings true, that when you try to clarify or set these things up at the beginning, a lot of pushback happens, and yet as the facilitator you don’t have a lot of recourse at that early stage of the relationship to push too hard.

And I thought / hope that I was being clear that I wasn’t trying to claim that these patterns don’t happen. They do.

It seemed to me that your original article was both an expression of your own frustration, and a clarion call to the challenges of this work. Both are reasonable, but I suspect it’s the frustration and the tone of “Well, the racist bastards can’t be dealt with” (paraphrasing…) that sparked a lot of interest with folks. Clearly it resonated with a lot of other frustrations. Also reasonable.

Yet, then it came across as the end of the conversation, and for me that felt untenable. So, this was an attempt to keep that conversation moving forward.

I’m sure that conversation moves forward within your own world all the time. Thanks for connecting with me on that.

I’d love to hear about more writing you do on this topic.

Jacob