BuildingWell Episode 4 Bonus Episode Transcript

00:00:00 Music plays

00:00:03 Michelle Moran & Alina Michelewicz

Bonus Banter by BuildingWell.

00:00:04 Alina Michelewicz

Hahaha that’s hilarious.

00:00:12 Michelle Moran

Hahaha this is fun.

00:00:13 Alina Michelewicz

Let’s, let’s try it again.

00:00:17 Michelle Moran

Welcome to the very first bonus episode of the BuildingWell podcast, Alina and I thought it would be nice to just take a few minutes after the episode and discuss what we learned and just summarize for all of our listeners today.

00:00:30 Alina Michelewicz

I feel like that was such a

00:00:32 Alina Michelewicz

Great example of

00:00:35 Alina Michelewicz

Our work at New Ecology and it was so interesting to hear Pat and Marty talk about existing buildings. Like Pat said, it’s just such a huge portion of affordable housing and a lot of our work is new construction. But that’s just such a small portion compared to naturally occurring. So it’s interesting to hear about them.

00:00:56 Michelle Moran

It’s easy when we talk about high performance building or sustainable development to really only picture new construction because that’s what’s exciting, right? You can build it from the ground up. But as Pat and Marty were talking about, it’s like existing buildings are what we need to really work on. If we want to reduce our carbon emissions.

00:01:12 Michelle Moran

And you know, even some cities, like she said, have specific goals like Boston. That’s not all new construction buildings. It’s mostly existing buildings.

00:01:20 Michelle Moran

So it’s really interesting and also the different challenges, even though we don’t think of Baltimore and Philadelphia as that far or that different from Boston, really everything is different from the housing stock type to the type of players in the field, et cetera, etc.

00:01:37 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, and and just what he said about the energy costs themselves being that much lower in the Mid-Atlantic like it has a huge impact on what’s incentivizing people to reduce energy usage or to invest in improving envelopes and all those things like if it’s just so much more expensive up here in Mass.

00:01:59 Alina Michelewicz

And we’re also having heavier winters and using a lot more energy.

00:02:04 Alina Michelewicz

The built in incentive is is just more there for property owners than it would be in the Mid-Atlantic. So it’s a challenge, an interesting challenge, but it’s still really important to reduce energy in the Mid-Atlantic so.

00:02:17 Alina Michelewicz

How do you

00:02:18 Alina Michelewicz

Go about that and I think that’s what Pat’s been working on for a long time and increasing those incentives that aren’t going to be taking care of by the market like the basic market, it there has to be incentives coming in or regulations to improve energy efficiency.

00:02:34 Michelle Moran

Exactly, and not only incentives, but basically help you know, it’s great that Pat and his team are focusing on the naturally occurring affordable housing because, you know it isn’t regulated. There’s nobody that’s like at the top making regulations for all of these. It’s, as he said, it could be 20 row homes with 20 different owners.

00:02:51 Michelle Moran

Somebody needs to be like helping these people and guiding them through all this extremely complex landscape.

00:02:57 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, yeah. And especially like when you think about row homes.

00:03:03 Alina Michelewicz

And owner-occupied row homes and how much work it is to renovate one for an individual owner. Like I get overwhelmed just thinking about, I don’t know, getting new windows at my house like completely retrofitting one is so much work.

00:03:19 Alina Michelewicz

I’m fascinated by the state home repair programs. I think that’s a really interesting way to build capital in  underserved communities.

00:03:27 Michelle Moran

Absolutely. I’d love to expound upon that topic more.

00:03:30 Alina Michelewicz

That sounds great. More to come on that in future episode.

00:03:33 Michelle Moran

I think I think so.

00:03:36 Alina Michelewicz

Well, that was a great, great.

00:03:37 Alina Michelewicz

Episode with Pat and Marty, and it’s fun to chat with you about it, Michelle, looking forward to many more.

00:03:41 Michelle Moran

Yes, it really was me too. It’s nice how to build on the knowledge that we already have from the first three episodes. It’s really sequential learning, which I love.

00:03:52 Alina Michelewicz

Yeah, definitely.

00:03:54 Michelle Moran

Well, thanks Alina for taking the time to discuss this and thank you to all our listeners who stayed on and listened to this bonus content. We hope to make more of these in the future and we hope you enjoy. We’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks.

00:04:06 Alina Michelewicz

Thanks.

00:04:08 Music plays

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