Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country
Founded 05-05-05

February 21, 2008 issue

Counting the Days Until NAHB Green

By George Gilleland, President, High Country Home Builders Association

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

That’s because the National Association of Home Builders’ brand-new NAHB National Green Building Program launches in February 2008. For the first time, the dozens of local and regional green building programs whose members have produced more than 100,000 green homes since 2000 will be united under the banner of NAHB Green.

What’s in it for homebuyers? 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.

NAHB 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 NAHB National Green Building Program is being fueled by this growing acceptance and is based on the success of local programs that have been certifying and verifying “authentically green” homes for years.

The NAHB National Green Building 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.

The NAHB Green website—www.nahbgreen.org—has features for builders and homebuyers. Builders can use the site to create a document that describes the home they want to build and what green features they want to incorporate. An online scorecard then keeps track of the home’s growing “greenness” and can add and subtract features to keep that cost-effective and customer-preference balance.

Homebuyers can go to the site for educational resources and a national registry of green builders and green homes for sale.

One-stop green shopping with local flexibility: that’s the new NAHB National Green Building Program.