BOSTON, MA - From now on, all affordable housing funded by Boston's Department of Neighborhood Development must be deemed "green." Under the department's new Green Affordable Housing Program, projects must meet the Energy Star standard, as well as the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver certification standard, or LEED, a nationally recognized benchmark for energy-efficient and environmentally friendly buildings.
Yesterday, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, along with neighborhood development director Evelyn Friedman, kicked off the program by naming six housing projects set to receive $2 million in grant money from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. The funding will be used to help them comply with green standards.
To achieve LEED's silver certification, projects must score at least 60 points out of a possible 136 - rated in part on water use, energy consumption, and how they dispose of construction waste. "Everything that is DND funded will be green," said Friedman, whose office has been working on the initiative for about two years.
The city's efforts, and the mayor's continued attention to affordable housing issues, were praised by Daniel O'Connell, secretary of the state's Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development. According to a spokeswoman from the Department of Neighborhood Development, since Menino unveiled his "Housing 2000" initiative in 1999, Boston has seen more than 22,000 new units of housing created; more than a quarter of them considered affordable.
"The mayor is the leading mayor in the country in the creation of affordable housing," O'Connell said. "And now he has become the leading mayor in the country in the greening of affordable housing." Menino said he hoped the new program would encourage working-class families to live in the city. "That's what we want to do, keep the working class in the city," he said following a press conference yesterday outside one of the funded projects on Dorchester Avenue in Fields Corner. "We can't be a city of the rich and the poor. We need to have the working class."
JoAnn Williams watched the gathering with a smile on her face. By December, she hopes to move into her new home on Sussex Street in Roxbury. The single-family home is one of the six green projects being funded by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative grant. "I had to have an imagination," Williams said of the first time she saw her future home, which she won in a housing lottery last October. "I said this old house is going to be The Great Makeover.
Source: Boston.com