00:00:00 Music plays
00:00:01 Marty Josten
What we’re doing is trying to help building owners and operators just methodically, slowly and really smartly reduce their use of fossil fuels.
00:00:12 Michelle Moran
Welcome to building, well, sustainable homes, equitable communities, your new podcast from New Ecology. Join us as we explore real life stories from key players in green building and community development. We’ll examine exciting new innovations, highlighting practical solutions for creating more affordable, healthier, more resilient, equitable communities. We’re building well together.
00:00:35 Molly Craft
This episode was made possible by the Mass Save Community Education Grant.
00:00:37 Music plays
00:00:40 Michelle Moran
Welcome to building well the podcast from New Ecology. My name is Michelle Moran. I will be your host today. I’m joined by my co-host, Alina Michelewicz. She is the principal director of finance here at New Ecology. We are also joined by our guests, Pat Coleman and Marty Josten. They’ll be telling us a little bit.
00:00:59 Michelle Moran
About their work in decarbonization and affordable housing.
00:01:03 Michelle Moran
Let’s take it away. So welcome, Marty and Pat. Marty, could you please introduce yourself?
00:01:09 Marty Josten
Yep, I’m Marty. I’m the principal director of building decarbonization. I have been at New Ecology for over 16 years, so I’m not only the oldest employee, but I’ve been here the longest at this point. I first started as a part-time consultant. We were developing first of its kind.
00:01:29 Marty Josten
Benchmarking tool for multifamily housing and it’s known as WegoWise and we are no longer involved in WegoWise but I’m glad to say it’s still around today and still serving a purpose.
00:01:39 Marty Josten
I moved on to serving as a senior project manager where I did a number of things. I helped shepherd through some of New Ecology’s very first Enterprise Green Communities projects and did them in places like Mississippi and in Maryland. And the work in Maryland.
00:01:59 Marty Josten
Helped us get a tow in the state to begin work there and we now have an office there.
00:02:06 Marty Josten
For over eight years.
00:02:07 Marty Josten
I most recently served as the director of Product and Service Development, which was envisioned.
00:02:15 Marty Josten
To be the place where kind of new lines of business and services were incubated at New Ecology, things that we really collectively thought would serve the marketplace, spent some time working with Pat during that time. Most of my time in the.
00:02:30 Marty Josten
Past.
00:02:30 Marty Josten
Five years or so.
00:02:32 Marty Josten
Was spent working on developing and.
00:02:35 Marty Josten
Getting out our service.
00:02:36 Marty Josten
On remote monitoring where we were collecting data real time data from mostly central HVAC systems and really trying to figure out how to make existing.
00:02:46 Marty Josten
buildings operate more efficiently because we were seeing repeatedly a lot of those savings that we get from a project drop off over time through the operations.
00:02:57 Marty Josten
So we learned a ton through that project. A lot of really good information, but we decided to shut that service down in January.
00:03:06 Marty Josten
And we still do some monitoring work for our own our own purposes.
00:03:10 Marty Josten
And for the past year or so, I’ve been working to build out our decarbonization division, and that’s where the engineering team resides. And we do a lot of building audits. We work with others on research projects, we do building commissioning, things like that. We participate and run some programs.
00:03:29 Marty Josten
Like the Energize Delaware program, the engineering team serves that program as well as the LEAN program here in Massachusetts and Electrify Cambridge.
00:03:39 Marty Josten
We’re also trying to grow kind of our strategic and portfolio services for building owners and certainly have been involved kind of a little bit at HUD in workforce development. So we’re working hard on that and trying to figure out exactly where our efforts are best applied with teams and on our own in workforce.
00:03:59 Marty Josten
So I’ve been really blessed to have a great team here at New Ecology and a long and interesting career here and doing good and important work. So that’s what pretty much keeps me coming back year after year.
00:04:12 Michelle Moran
Thank you, Marty. Pat, would you like to introduce yourself?
00:04:14 Michelle Moran
Please.
00:04:14 Pat Coleman
Sure. I don’t know that I can be as thorough and comprehensive as Marty was, but my name is Pat Coleman. I’m a principal director of our Climate Smart Communities division here at New Ecology. I’ve been with the organization for almost 10 years. I joined the organization similar to Marty as a consultant when I moved from Boston to Philadelphia in 2014.
00:04:39 Pat Coleman
Where my first job was to work with the Philadelphia Housing Authority and support their efforts to benchmark their portfolio in the WegoWise tool that Marty and others had worked to create. And then I joined the staff of the organization, the beginning of the following year.
00:04:56 Pat Coleman
I’ve had a couple of different jobs at the organization. You know, early on I worked for a number of wonderful years under Marty. Marty was my boss. And you know, we were working on a bunch of different things to try to build demand nationally for energy efficiency and affordable multifamily housing alongside a number of partners.
00:05:18 Pat Coleman
Elevate Energy and others in coordinating a multi-state benchmarking initiative. We also were developing some tools and services to try to support.
00:05:29 Pat Coleman
Owners to identify the needs and kind of plan around energy efficiency from a portfolio perspective, which kind of funny, we’re now coming full circle there with so much of the IRA Inflation Reduction Act resources now kind of prompting everybody to.
00:05:50 Pat Coleman
Focus on where their best opportunities are within their portfolio. New Ecology had the.
00:05:56 Pat Coleman
Fortunate opportunity in late 2016 to begin work with the Delaware Sustainable Energy utility. They requested our help to design, launch and implement program in Delaware to serve affordable multifamily housing and so.
00:06:11 Pat Coleman
I shifted to work on that initiative, helping to launch and then administer that program, and then in more recent years have been focusing on trying to define New Ecology services and operations to move the needle in terms.
00:06:30 Pat Coleman
Of sustainability and building performance outside of the regulated affordable multifamily housing space, though more in what’s called naturally occurring affordable housing, which we’ll talk about a little bit.
00:06:41 Pat Coleman
Later.
00:06:42 Pat Coleman
So you know, my team is pretty small at New Ecology, small but mighty and we.
00:06:50 Pat Coleman
We manage programs, we run some projects and they get a lot of the focus is trying to advance the organizations mission in those unregulated housing sectors and a little bit kind of closer collaboration with community based organizations.
00:07:06 Michelle Moran
Awesome. Thank you both so much for that overview.
00:07:10 Michelle Moran
Marty, I know that you gave us a brief overview, but would you please give us more detailed information on what exactly decarbonization is? Why it’s important, like why I should care?
00:07:21 Marty Josten
Be happy to so decarbonization is essentially the process of weaning the building off of its use of fossil fuel. Its need for fossil fuel, typically over time, so a lot of people.
00:07:35 Marty Josten
People think of it as equivalent to electrification, but that’s not entirely true. Efficiency is a form of decarbonization, right? It’s our way to get people to use less fossil fuels in their building, and ideally, it also is including the adoption of renewables can further reduce.
00:07:55 Marty Josten
The use of the grid which is heavily dependent itself on fossil fuels at the moment, So what we’re doing is trying to help building owners and operators just methodically, slowly and really smartly reduce their use of fossil fuels.
00:08:11 Marty Josten
There’s really, you know, there’s so many studies that speak to the to the importance of this work and just a lot of opinion out there. But, you know, essentially there’s not too much disagreement in the public sphere about the fact that the climate is changing and we’re all experiencing really kind of epic weather.
00:08:30 Marty Josten
On a more frequent basis. So that’s why we’re doing this work. You know, there’s a lot of buildings in the country, buildings are have been identified over and over again as a leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and that’s why we do this work. The other part of this is, you know, doing this work and the urgency of this.
00:08:50 Marty Josten
Work enables us to get some other things right in a building that might not be right. My team works only in existing buildings, and there’s just a lot that can go South over time. In these buildings, there’s always deferred maintenance, a lot of times affordable housing is constructed in old buildings that are in rough.
00:09:11 Marty Josten
To begin with, right, so we’re trying to take this moment in time and actually every time we interact with the building team to really correct some of those things and to make sure we’re really thinking hard about the health and safety of the residents, the comfort of those residents.
00:09:27 Marty Josten
The resiliency of the building so that they can shelter in place during the weather event and with the operations teams, you know, I’ve spent enough time working with operations teams to know that they’ve got pretty demanding and chaotic lives, so they’re usually in a posture of just responding to some emergency or some chaos.
00:09:47 Marty Josten
So trying to put them in a better place just in their day-to-day job and their ability to keep that building efficient, healthy, safe, comfortable.
00:10:00 Alina Michelewicz
I have some follow up questions.
00:10:02 Alina Michelewicz
First one is our last episode. We talked a lot about new construction and you were talking about existing buildings.
00:10:11 Alina Michelewicz
Can you talk a little bit about why.
00:10:13 Alina Michelewicz
It’s so important for us to focus on existing buildings as well as new construction. There’s many, many existing buildings
00:10:22 Marty Josten
There’s a whole lot more existing buildings, so that’s why it’s you know.
00:10:25 Marty Josten
So in some respects I kind of tease the new construction folks that you know that they’ve got the easy job and we’ve got the hard job. You know there’s something to be said about having a clean sheet of paper when you’re starting work on a building. Of course it’s not that simple, but there’s a lot of things that are driving people to.
00:10:46 Marty Josten
Better, healthier buildings from a new construction standpoint, it’s just a lot harder from an existing building standpoint because you know there’s so many different types of buildings you’re dealing with from one day to the next. There’s so much that’s happened in that building over time by so many different actors.
00:11:05 Marty Josten
You know, contractors and HVAC companies that you’re really going in there and unraveling a puzzle.
00:11:11 Marty Josten
A lot of times there’s a lot of time that has to go into. How is this building operating now and what’s wrong now and what are the parts I can’t change in this upgrade process, right? Where’s my starting point here? Because I can only go so far. So it’s interesting, but challenging in that regard.
00:11:30 Alina Michelewicz
Hmm.
00:11:31 Alina Michelewicz
You have to be pragmatic and prioritized. It sounds like where new construction you can dream a little perhaps, depending on the financing of the situation. But you can kind of make it however you want, but you go into an existing building and you you’re already restricted just by what’s in.
00:11:48 Alina Michelewicz
Place.
00:11:48 Marty Josten
Yeah. I mean, there’s just typically a lot more money right for the for the new construction process. That’s why there’s that happens at a slower cycle.
00:11:56 Marty Josten
And when we go to a building, we’re also like, we also have to think about the types of residents in the building, how the buildings used. Now we know what’s the capacity of the operations staff. So there’s just a lot of a lot of those kinds of pieces you have to do investigate all of the maintenance requests that they’ve gotten. There’s a lot of that.
00:12:14 Marty Josten
And homework to get to know the building before you even start
00:12:18 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, that’s cool.
00:12:21 Alina Michelewicz
You talked about.
00:12:22 Alina Michelewicz
Decarbonization and its connection to climate change, and I know you. So I know you’re very passionate about climate change and decarbonization, but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what gets you most excited about coming to work.
00:12:40 Marty Josten
There’s a lot of things, actually. You know, I mentioned it earlier. One thing that gets me excited is being able to, like, lead a team that’s equally as passionate and that really like everyone.
00:12:53 Marty Josten
That we work with here.
00:12:54 Marty Josten
They’re just givers and they are smart and they keep me on my toes, you know? So that’s that’s really good. And I don’t pretend to know as much as many of them, you know, I’m just. I’m kind of good at being the conductor. It’s very rewarding. On the other side. I mean, I feel that I’m good at being a conductor and I’m good at getting.
00:13:15 Marty Josten
The most out of others, and that this is a team that really can solve a lot of problems and we.
00:13:20 Marty Josten
We get to do that on so many levels. We get to do it on the ground level with the buildings and the owners and the residents to some degree, and then we get to kind of pull out into the workforce and the education piece and then we can, you know, we work in the policy realm and then we take what we know and we get to bring it to a national audience. So all of that’s just.
00:13:40 Marty Josten
It’s very rewarding and there’s just enough, you know, zig and zag and all of it that just keeps it very fresh and interesting.
00:13:50 Alina Michelewicz
Yeah, that’s cool.
00:13:51 Michelle Moran
I’d like to hear the same from Pat, if you don’t mind.
00:13:54 Alina Michelewicz
What gets you up in the morning, Pat?
00:13:57 Pat Coleman
It’s usually either the dog or my 4 year old.
00:14:00 Pat Coleman
But then.
00:14:02 Pat Coleman
After that I mean I would echo a number of the comments that Marty made. I think that the team that is at New Ecology has always been exceptional. And so the opportunity to work with people with such diverse experiences and expertise.
00:14:20 Pat Coleman
And the kind of mission elements of what we do is aligns really closely with.
00:14:27 Pat Coleman
My personal beliefs and how I want to spend my time, the reason I work on buildings is because I’m kind of impatient and not that things necessarily happen quickly on our projects. Some of them take many years, but there’s something very satisfying about being able to see the concrete.
00:14:47 Pat Coleman
Change in the physical space and feeling like we’re able to help provide a family with a stable and safe.
00:14:59 Pat Coleman
And comfortable home is very satisfying for me, and I would also say like again back to kind of the team is like people are pretty tenacious and they’re not afraid to take on difficult challenges here we face.
00:15:14 Pat Coleman
A lot of serious problems as a society and as is the world, and we’re not going to solve all of them here in New Ecology. But like people are encouraged and take on pretty ambitious projects and sometimes we end up working with partners who think that we’re crazy. And I mean on Friday I heard of a story from a colleague who.
00:15:35 Pat Coleman
Talked about being in a meeting with a partner on one of our projects who a year ago I think did not find us particularly helpful and has come full circle and you know kind of appreciated the.
00:15:49 Pat Coleman
The role that New Ecology has played to create a better set of homes for a group of families, so that’s very satisfying and kind of, you know, it’s nice to have a little win here and there like, alright, we got one more rowing in the same direction.
00:16:04 Michelle Moran
It’s always nice to have a little win, especially in this industry, right?
00:16:08 Michelle Moran
I would just like to follow up a little bit since we’ve been talking a lot about decarbonization and the intricacies of it. We used some terms earlier that I’d like to define better. One is commissioning and one is benchmarking what is commissioning and benchmarking and why is it important to decarbonization.
00:16:26 Marty Josten
So commissioning is a pretty.
00:16:28 Marty Josten
Is a standard process of most.
00:16:30 Marty Josten
New construction projects where it’s really the guarantee the owner has that the formal process has been followed to make sure all the systems are functioning properly and you know that the design intent is met.
00:16:46 Marty Josten
To some degree and things like that. So it’s a pretty standard process for new construction. There’s also retro commissioning where a similar type thing is done on.
00:16:56 Marty Josten
Part or entire building for an existing building. More often now, there’s sort of this concept of continuous commissioning or monitoring based commissioning where you’re really using data from some type of a system like the one we used to operate to collect real time operational data that then you can use to alert.
00:17:16 Marty Josten
maintenance when things are operating in an out of spec condition or you can download that data later for analysis and make recommendation. So it’s just really keeping the eyes.
00:17:27 Marty Josten
Either at a point in time on the operation or my preferences overtime to help those facility managers. So that would be the continuous commissioning idea.
00:17:37 Pat Coleman
And the idea of benchmarking is there simply is just to kind of track performance over time. So you know when we talk about benchmarking building performance, usually what we’re doing is we’re collecting combining two different data sets, one being the physical characteristics of the subject buildings and the other being.
00:17:58 Pat Coleman
the utility.
00:17:59 Pat Coleman
Performance metrics associated with that building. You know, we combine those data sets and then we can get an understanding of how that building is performing, whether it’s, you know, just looking at kilowatt hours or gallons of water consumed every month or running metrics like energy use intensity.
00:18:19 Pat Coleman
Of you know, BTU’s of energy used per square foot. And when you normalize it in that way, you can enable comparisons to other buildings. So maybe you’re running some benchmarking exercises to see how this building A compared to.
00:18:36 Pat Coleman
Building B maybe you’re running a comparison of how this building a compared to the entire portfolio of properties that may be under somebody’s ownership for management, maybe it’s a comparison of those buildings, one or many of those buildings against the national benchmark, some external standard. But basically the idea is you’re tracking.
00:18:57 Pat Coleman
Performance and giving a directional sense of how am I doing ?
00:19:04 Pat Coleman
Am I Performing better?, worse, or at some particular benchmark. Usually you know again back to kind of the portfolio perspective.
00:19:13
Of.
00:19:14 Pat Coleman
In terms of decarbonization or energy efficiency projects, you’re going to get your biggest bang for your buck if you go after the worst performers. So it’s oftentimes a helpful way to get a sense of where you might want.
00:19:26 Pat Coleman
To start.
00:19:26 Marty Josten
That was the reason behind the creation of WegoWise way back in the day is that there was a push because multifamily housing was being sort of left out of the energy efficiency programs. It wasn’t really considered residential. It wasn’t really considered commercial, so it was just this, this thing that was being ignored and.
00:19:45 Marty Josten
There’s enough pushback on that that it enabled things like, you know, conversations around well, you know, how should these buildings be performing? And nobody could answer that question. So we said, you know what? We’ll figure it out. We’ll start collecting this data and then that turned into, you know, doing this with spreadsheets. It’s just got awful. As much as I love spreadsheets.
00:20:07 Marty Josten
But it just was hard and messy and.
00:20:11 Marty Josten
You know, so then that turned into a platform that could be applied and available to others nationally, and that’s how you get some of those benchmarks that Pat was talking about, that large volume of buildings, all that data feeding into what those benchmarks can be. So it’s pretty powerful stuff. And this was before Energy Star portfolio manager existed.
00:20:31 Marty Josten
So yeah, it’s good.
00:20:33 Alina Michelewicz
I didn’t realize that the multifamily had been left out. That’s interesting.
00:20:37 Marty Josten
It had been, yeah.
00:20:39 Michelle Moran
Sounds like back when this stuff was first being established, data collection was important because you didn’t really have any concept of what was going on in affordable or multifamily housing. And now it’s equally important because of all these efforts that we’re trying to do with decarbonization and maybe even the Inflation Reduction Act funding and stuff like that. So it’s just as important now as it was when we first started all of this stuff.
00:21:03 Michelle Moran
And I assume it will continue to be.
00:21:06 Marty Josten
Yep, you’re right.
00:21:09 Michelle Moran
Marty, since you were just talking about some of some of these topics, I’d like to ask you, what are the drivers, if any, that are encouraging property owners, especially of affordable multifamily housing to move towards decarbonization work?
00:21:22 Marty Josten
It depends on where you are, but you know, like anything else, there’s carrots and sticks, so we’ve got.
00:21:29 Marty Josten
You always want to start off with the incentives, but that isn’t always enough. In the state of Massachusetts, we’re very lucky in that we have had and continue to have really robust incentives and funding for all kinds of things. We have the LEAN program which is directed specifically at multifamily affordable housing.
00:21:51 Marty Josten
It has long been a reason to get people to do things in their buildings to, you know, improve, replace equipment with higher efficiency equipment.
00:22:01 Marty Josten
Do air sealing, insulation and things like that and it’s been a very generous program. There’s also, you know, the state and Mass CEC, the Clean Energy Center has different programs that are targeting sort of different things that people want to learn in the industry, you know, might be focused on and equipment. It might be a pilot.
00:22:21 Marty Josten
They actually helped fund the startup of our remote monitoring work. That early investigation work that we did. So they’re always, you know, looking to push the envelope a little and learn more about buildings and how they can work better.
00:22:35 Marty Josten
And then in Maryland, say, where other offices in the Mid-Atlantic, you don’t have that same those same kind of incentives, there’s fewer incentives and there’s fewer, there’s fewer sticks, there’s less regulation. So it’s a lot harder to get some of this work going. Some of the things are really it’s regulatory. And we learned early on that.
00:22:55 Marty Josten
Unless you.
00:22:56 Marty Josten
Make people do things they’re not likely going to do it right. It’s just there’s just a lot going on and being able to say, OK, these are the performance standards you need to meet. So here in Massachusetts and in Boston specifically, there’s BERDO the Building Emissions Reporting and Disclosure Ordinance.
00:23:16 Marty Josten
So that takes buildings of all different types, multifamily being one of those types and says, you know, you need to reduce your overall emissions per square foot over time to 2050.
00:23:30 Marty Josten
So those types of ordinances are growing in number. They can be local, they can be statewide, they can. You know, there’s national benchmarking coming. So there’s all of that, all of that kind of stuff is just growing for people, providing more impetus for, for doing some work now and figuring out what you need to do now.
00:23:48 Molly Craft
I’m Molly with your Mass Save minute. Today, we’re shedding light on the weatherization options available to homeowners and renters throughout the Mass Save program. What is weatherization? Weatherization means making your home more comfortable and energy efficient by sealing leaks and adding insulation. Mass Save offers a suite of weatherization incentives to improve your homes energy efficiency, reduce your utility bills and enhance your comfort.
00:24:10 Molly Craft
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00:24:21 Molly Craft
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00:24:42 Molly Craft
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00:24:57 Molly Craft
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00:25:17 Molly Craft
Remember weatherizing, your home isn’t just about saving energy. It’s about creating a more comfortable and sustainable living environment. Until next time, stay informed and energy conscious.
00:25:28 Pat Coleman
I guess I would say that there’s two primary drivers of decarbonization or.
00:25:35 Pat Coleman
You know high performance buildings, if we’re just thinking about kind of a policy or programmatic field taking the you know operators out of the equation for a moment in terms of their individual goals. And as Marty said, like first and foremost the most efficient things are regulation that just requires somebody to do.
00:25:54 Pat Coleman
X and then secondly, the incentives are certainly helpful to enable people to achieve more ambitious targets. But the third thing I would add is especially in the affordable housing space and in underserved markets and enabling elements that is critical.
00:26:15 Pat Coleman
Is the provision of technical assistance so that people know what to do if we’re asking them to achieve these really ambitious building performance goals, whether it’s a new construction project or a decarbonization project.
00:26:30 Pat Coleman
Even those of us that own our own homes often times don’t really know how to take care of them. And so if we’re asking the general public to achieve these more ambitious goals, some of which are very, very new, right, we’re looking at massive decreases in the energy usage.
00:26:50 Pat Coleman
Of the properties, it’s not reasonable to expect that most owners and operators of those properties know how to get there.
00:26:58 Pat Coleman
And they need help to be able to do that. And you know, I would just flag.
00:27:02 Pat Coleman
That New Ecology has had a really fortunate opportunity of working alongside some of the country’s largest and most sophisticated owners of affordable multifamily housing.
00:27:14 Marty Josten
We work for a lot of large owners and operators and even they are struggling with knowing exactly.
00:27:21 Marty Josten
What they should do and where they should do it first, and you know we’re still learning. There’s enough change right now that that we’re still learning and forming opinions about that. And you know that’s exactly right on the technical assistance part.
00:27:37 Marty Josten
We’ve been fortunate. You know, we’re nonprofit, so we can apply for grant funding, and we often often do apply for grant funding that we can then turn around and make available to our clients and people that we work with to get things done, to help get them started along a journey with the building or portfolio.
00:27:55 Alina Michelewicz
What might that technical assistance consist of?
00:28:00 Marty Josten
More and more actually and especially.
00:28:03 Marty Josten
In other parts of the country that are not as far along, it’s sitting them down and really going through their portfolio with them.
00:28:10 Alina Michelewicz
Hmm.
00:28:10 Marty Josten
It’s like a methodical logical process, as Pat mentioned earlier, to kind of like marry some of their building characteristics and what we know about their operation with their utility data historically and then you know that enables us to, you know just starts a conversation, we’re able to graph that information, we’re able to.
00:28:30 Marty Josten
You know, use it.
00:28:31 Marty Josten
To probe a little further on certain buildings or building types and it gets that conversation going that helps them start to understand how we’re thinking.
00:28:39 Marty Josten
About it, you know, we’re helping build capacity a little bit of that organization and then it just leads naturally to some planning of next steps because that’s you can’t do a lot with what we do at that stage other than plan. OK, so here’s what you should do next and that can include helping them do the audit work. You know, we do a lot of we get a lot of grant.
00:29:00 Marty Josten
Funding that helps subsidize our audit work, it can help find.
00:29:04 Marty Josten
Funds for them help them do things that produce certain outputs that help them apply for grants for their own funding. So kind of we try to have that technical assistance be what they need, and if it’s not something we do, we try to make those connections for them.
00:29:15 Alina Michelewicz
Hmm.
00:29:19 Alina Michelewicz
So it’s like connecting the reality of the building to the energy bills and understanding how those two things are actually related, like why one is causing the other.
00:29:29 Marty Josten
Exactly.
00:29:30 Alina Michelewicz
What different kinds of audits are there?
00:29:33 Marty Josten
You know an energy audit a lot of times we’re looking at efficiency. We’re looking at strictly at consumption, where a Decarb audit it’s about the carbon. We’re looking not only at efficiency and what comes with efficiency, but it’s also understanding.
00:29:50 Marty Josten
The impact in particular when in Massachusetts, say when you decarbonize a building and you, you’re electrifying it as a step, you are drastically increasing the cost to that owner, possibly the residents of that, because you’re going from a cheaper fuel to a more expensive fuel
00:30:10 Marty Josten
So then the only way for it to make sense is that you have to look on how do we significantly address this. The envelope and lower the load of this building. And that gets into some very expensive retrofits. So there’s just a, there’s a lot more options and trade-offs and considerations for how you approach things from a decarbonization standpoint.
00:30:32 Marty Josten
Versus kind of the more.
00:30:35 Marty Josten
Energy efficiency standpoint, where a lot of the utility program, you know, utility grade audits, we call them is just you know you’re looking for specific things that fit within the program decarb audit. You’re looking at a lot more measures and then you’re trying to look at them over time and what’s a logical sequence for implementing those measures from a cost.
00:30:54 Marty Josten
Perspective from a carbon impact perspective, from a compliance.
00:30:59 Marty Josten
Perspective. If you’ve got a building standard you’re trying to meet, it’s a more detailed view and a more strategic thinking about the results. You’re not coming up with a list of things you’re coming up with really a strategy that you need to apply over time.
00:31:12 Alina Michelewicz
Hmm.
00:31:13 Alina Michelewicz
OK. And then to dig into two things that you said lowering the load that’s making the appliances more efficient and lowering the usage potentially.
00:31:23 Marty Josten
It’s when I say load. I’m sorry. Talk about it’s like, what does it? How much area does it take to heat this building to cool this building to ventilate this building?
00:31:31 Marty Josten
So needing to bring that way down as you are going from, you know, a gas system to a more expensive electric system in within Massachusetts, it’s less of an issue in the Mid-Atlantic. They’ve got buildings that are already all electric, which they may not be efficient, but they’re all electric, you know.
00:31:47 Alina Michelewicz
Hmm.
00:31:51 Marty Josten
So then you’re looking more at efficiency, but here and in colder climates, it’s a big it’s a big deal. There is a lot you need to address with the envelope.
00:31:59 Alina Michelewicz
And the envelope would be air sealing.
00:32:02 Marty Josten
Yep, it’s the air sealing. It’s the insulation. It’s the windows. It’s the basement.
00:32:06 Marty Josten
It’s a roof, you know, all of that, and you’re just trying to minimize that exchange.
00:32:11 Marty Josten
Of air and the loss of heat.
00:32:13 Marty Josten
Its energy recovery as part of the ventilation strategy. So there’s just, there’s a lot of things you can do and it’s just hard to afford all of them. They can be expensive
00:32:21 Alina Michelewicz
So the energy audits using looking at the energy efficiency of the building. But the Decarb audit is looking at all of those things that we just talked about holistically.
00:32:31 Marty Josten
Yeah, I mean there is, I should say there’s a great deal of overlap in the things you’re looking at, but the difference is in how you implement them. You’re really thinking about the cost of these measures and you have to think about.
00:32:44 Marty Josten
At what point do we get off gas entirely or oil? And do we jump over to electricity? There’s just a lot that goes into those decisions.
00:32:53 Marty Josten
It could be the cost of those individual measures. It could be how old the equipment is at the point of time that you’re looking at it, how long you want to keep that running. It could be what funding is available to do what. Now you know, do you add solar early on because there’s tax credits now you know and therefore you have to do your roof early to be able to support the solar or do you?
00:33:15 Marty Josten
Do it kind of an illogical timing. Where we’ll add the solar once our you know roof reaches its end of useful life in five years, you know, so there’s just all of those kinds of decisions that an owner needs to make and.
00:33:29 Marty Josten
Then we try to help them navigate based on their own goals.
00:33:34 Alina Michelewicz
That’s cool.
00:33:35 Michelle Moran
Pat, could you please tell us what is affordable housing? What are the different types and what exactly we mean by NOAH? You had mentioned this NOAH term earlier and you had promised us more information on.
00:33:46 Pat Coleman
I will do my best, I mean. There are shelves of books written about what affordable housing is. But you know, we’re talking about housing that is affordable to lower moderate income households. And so when you look at kind of the federal programs to support housing affordability.
00:34:06 Pat Coleman
There’s going to be very simplistic, but there’s kind of two main categories right there is the public housing where we’re talking about housing that was.
00:34:19 Pat Coleman
Built and is operated by a public Housing Authority, a public entity, and then there is a large portion of housing that is privately owned but is subsidized or financed in some way through some sort of government housing program.
00:34:38 Pat Coleman
And so we’ll often refer to that as privately owned and subsidized housing, both of those kinds of housing are oftentimes categorized as affordable multifamily housing.
00:34:50 Pat Coleman
Most of the projects that New Ecology serves are in that privately owned and subsidized affordable housing category, so those would be properties with project based Section 8 contracts or a HUD assisted or insured mortgage or low income housing tax credit project.
00:35:07 Pat Coleman
The naturally occurring affordable housing. You know, it’s not really the best term for it, but it’s the term that Is often used as the go to define housing that lower moderate income people live in, but is not regulated or subsidized in any way.
00:35:27 Pat Coleman
You know, if you look at affordable housing nationally, you know, the unregulated stock is about 80% of affordable housing and that stat came from our friends Elevate in Chicago and they combined a couple of different data sets and ran some analysis trying to look at the housing units and census tracks
00:35:47 Pat Coleman
Where the housing costs are no more than 30%.
00:35:52 Pat Coleman
Of 80% of the Area Median Income as a metric of kind of a cut off of housing affordability, there are differences, you know, within different regions of the country. So whereas you know this unregulated affordable housing stock may be 30% nationwide, if you look at Mid-Atlantic cities.
00:36:13 Pat Coleman
Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore. You know, it’s more like 80 to 90% of the housing stock in those cities.
00:36:21 Pat Coleman
Nationally, those properties would tend to be smaller multifamily properties.
00:36:26 Pat Coleman
But again, in a Mid-Atlantic region, they tend to be single family attached row homes.
00:36:34 Alina Michelewicz
I do have a follow up question. You mentioned in the Mid-Atlantic, a lot of them are single family attached. Can you just talk a little bit about the difference between multifamily and single family we’ve we talked a lot about multifamily earlier in the episode but I don’t know that we’ve defined sort of what that might look like housing stock wise.
00:36:54 Pat Coleman
Sure. Again, they’re often not really firm definitions other than like it’s more than multifamily, be more than one unit, right. So you could categorize a two-unit home as multifamily in the world of energy efficiency programs. Usually properties that have five or more units would be considered multifamily, but it’s kind of hard to understand.
00:37:15 Pat Coleman
How units or properties with 2-3 or four units or not multifamily but anyway you know anybody that’s visited the Mid-Atlantic region is seeing just the blocks and blocks and blocks of single family attached to row homes that we have. Our cities were largely built out in the late 19th and early 20th century with that very common housing typology is worker housing to work in the manufactories you know, it’s not that other cities don’t have it.
00:37:42 Pat Coleman
Right. I mean, Boston, New York, you know there are Brownstones but kind of the single family attached typology if you look at the public data sets just dominates here and you know comparing it to Boston, if you look at the proportion of Boston’s housing stock that are triple deckers, which is like the quintessential Boston housing stock.
00:38:03 Pat Coleman
And you look at the proportion of housing units in Mid-Atlantic cities that are single family row homes like that single family row home typology is double what triple deckers are in Boston. So it’s just it’s just what we have. You know it’s not the only thing we have, but it’s what we have in terms of housing density.
00:38:22 Pat Coleman
But there’s some differences between these regions, so Boston tends to have more multi like there’s greater density of multifamily properties in Boston than there are say in Philadelphia. So it’s just there’s just regional differences.
00:38:41 Michelle Moran
Speaking on those regional differences, are there maybe more challenges or different challenges to decarbonizing this affordable housing in the Mid-Atlantic?
00:38:52 Pat Coleman
Yeah. Well, I mean, first and foremost, the thing that comes to mind if you just think about the building typologies and I’m sure Marty has a bunch of thoughts on this too, because it’s most of what her team thinks about day in and day out.
00:39:03 Pat Coleman
Is, you know, in terms of cost per unit, it’s a lot more affordable to implement energy efficiency or decarbonization measures where we’ve got more units in a building and there’s the associated challenges that just kind of come with it, right? I mean, you can look at a block of 20.
00:39:24 Pat Coleman
Row homes that are all independently owned and so the transaction costs.
00:39:29 Pat Coleman
Of dealing with each individual property are just so much higher than if you’re going into a property that has 50 units, all owned by 1 entity. That’s a lot more challenging to deal with than if you’re working with one owner or one manager that is making decisions for a 50-unit building
00:39:49 Alina Michelewicz
How do the energy savings compare?
00:39:52 Pat Coleman
It’s complicated, right? So I think one of the things that kind of surprised New Ecology when we moved down and started doing more work in the Mid-Atlantic was the longer payback terms of the mechanical system replacements, right?
00:40:06 Pat Coleman
How long does it take to pay back replacement of a very costly heating system?
00:40:11 Alina Michelewicz
Oh, because they’re using less for years, yeah.
00:40:13 Pat Coleman
Because we use less because it’s not as cold here. Now. On the other hand, our utility costs are different.
00:40:21 Pat Coleman
And particularly around the decarbonization and electrification in the electrification space, right. The real critical difference between Massachusetts and a lot of the states down here are how costly electricity is.
00:40:38 Pat Coleman
So our electric rates are 12 to 14 cents per kWh compared to Massachusetts at I’m not sure anymore 25 30 cents.
00:40:47 Marty Josten
It’s still. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. It’s much more expensive here.
00:40:48 Alina Michelewicz
Wow, I didn’t know that. Oh my goodness
00:40:51 Pat Coleman
So those are kind of like some of the factors that make things different in terms of just how do you put together a package of a project, but then zooming out further, I mean there are just really different policy and programmatic environments here.
00:41:08 Pat Coleman
And, you know, Massachusetts has 30 years of programming on energy efficiency for large scale energy efficiency.
00:41:16 Pat Coleman
Programming and again, I live in Pennsylvania and it’s just different, right? Like at the end of the month is Memorial Day. I’m going camping in Carbon County. We are the second or third largest gas producing state in the country, you know from Massachusetts. You know, I I worked for the state Energy Office for a couple of years and.
00:41:36 Pat Coleman
A lot of the energy efficiency drive towards energy efficiency was a economic development goal for the state, right to not send resources. Purchasing fossil fuels across the state border.
00:41:50 Pat Coleman
That’s different in a state like Pennsylvania. That’s not to say that there aren’t good programs and you know, good opportunities in the Mid-Atlantic. Marty already talked about some of the programs in, in Maryland and DC. And as I mentioned briefly earlier, we manage a program, couple programs actually for the Delaware sustainable energy utility and their Energize Delaware program that offer really great incentives and technical assistance services to help people implement ambitious energy efficiency projects.
00:42:24 Alina Michelewicz
That’s really interesting. I’ve worked here two years and this is the first time I’m understanding that there’s a huge savings difference, right? So the driver in the Mid-Atlantic is not dollars saving as much as it is in Mass cause the energy costs less there. So then the driver has to be something else.
00:42:44 Alina Michelewicz
That’s very interesting.
00:42:45 Pat Coleman
All of this work, whether we’re talking, decarbonization or passive house new construction. I mean it is hyper local, these projects happen and succeed and fail based upon the local circumstances and the partners and.
00:42:58 Alina Michelewicz
Hmm.
00:42:58 Pat Coleman
You really have to have boots on the ground.
00:43:00 Pat Coleman
People they can navigate and work well with partners.
00:43:05 Marty Josten
Yeah, that’s why a lot of the talk and the push, push, push about, we need to be able to do this stuff at scale at scale at scale. It’s like yeah, but you know, there’s just so much devil in the details as they say there’s a lot to figure out in each and every place that we operate before we can become a trusted partner to provide that technical assistance.
00:43:26 Marty Josten
That, you know, there’s just a lot of that kind of work that has to get done as well.
00:43:30 Michelle Moran
Pat do you see any differences or things that might be more challenging for NOAH versus traditional multifamily housing?
00:43:38 Pat Coleman
You know, by definition what we’re working on here when we’re talking about housing that is occupied by low or moderate income households is there’s not a lot of money available to pay for.
00:43:49 Pat Coleman
Capital upgrades, just by definition, right, like the revenue streams associated with these properties, whether they’re owner occupied or rental properties are limited and so an owners ability to invest in more energy efficient mechanical equipment or doing comprehensive air sealing and insulation work, even if it’s very cost effective is just limited by definition whereas.
00:44:20 Pat Coleman
There are many. I wouldn’t say enough, right, there’s a lot of low income households that do not have any affordable housing, but there are a number of.
00:44:30 Pat Coleman
Programs and financing products that are available to serve the affordable multifamily housing space that create kind of systems and structures and cycles to be able to serve those properties and they create processes like people going in and doing inspections to make sure that properties are meeting certain conditions.
00:44:52 Pat Coleman
And they create opportunities for people to come back in, to resending, take their tax credits every 20 or 30 years and get a new infusion of capital to upgrade their properties. And those realities just don’t exist in the world of, you know, naturally occurring affordable housing.
00:45:13 Pat Coleman
So oftentimes you know, if you’re going into an occupied home, you will find very serious problems
00:45:21 Pat Coleman
That, and nobody’s inspecting for. Nobody’s. No Inspector is coming and making sure that you know there’s not a leak in the roof. They just happen and people can’t pay for them.
00:45:31 Pat Coleman
And before we can get to the energy efficiency or the decarbonization measures, we need to deal with those first and we don’t have, you know, by and large, the same level of funding and financing products to enable people to pay for those kinds of upgrates
00:45:54 Pat Coleman
So you know what it really calls for is we need an all hands on deck approach, right? There’s a need to kind of wed together the energy efficiency or building performance programs with home repair programs. And there’s some successful models that are emerging, you know, Philadelphia.
00:46:14 Pat Coleman
Their energy authority has a built to last program in the state of Pennsylvania. Couple of years ago passed a statewide home repair program that is getting off the ground now, and so there’s some really great opportunities on the horizon, but.
00:46:27 Pat Coleman
Doing this work at scale in housing that doesn’t have the structures and programmatic framework to enable investment makes it really challenging and calls for greater attention and investment from the public and philanthropic sectors.
00:46:46 Michelle Moran
On that line, Pat, you can start, but I’d like to hear from both of you. You’ve touched on this, but we haven’t really gotten into it. What are the workforce development needs that you’re seeing in, in your area in either NOAH or multifamily affordable housing? Is there enough workforce to get this work done that we are wanting to get done?
00:47:05 Pat Coleman
Not right now.
00:47:09 Marty Josten
There’s needs everywhere. Yeah. I mean, I would say that trades over the past decade or more had just been declining in general, right? The electricians and plumbers and.
00:47:21 Marty Josten
Construction folks, you know, I’m happy to see that that’s less the case now. It’s growing in strength and there’s.
00:47:28 Marty Josten
A lot of trade schools that are really embracing the need for that kind of education again, so that’s all positive and the really positive part about that is that I’m starting to learn of places that are really embracing building into their programs, the needs of the decarbonization future, right, to make sure they’ve got.
00:47:49 Marty Josten
Some of those skills and that building Science Foundation.
00:47:54 Marty Josten
So that’s where we like to work is like really helping to find what that is, what are what are the things they need to know. Just making sure that young engineers have some of this foundational information, the comparison I always draw is that, you know, people graduate from Med school and they just really don’t know that.
00:48:13 Marty Josten
Much they don’t. They don’t understand functional medicine, for instance.
00:48:16
So.
00:48:18 Marty Josten
You know what we do is really functional medicine for building. It’s really looking at the root cause, comprehensive look, etcetera and people aren’t really trained that way so much. So that’s what the need is to really understand how all the pieces fit together. You know, we can do training, there’s lots of programs on training, specific tasks and functions within the industry.
00:48:38 Marty Josten
But there needs to be this kind of higher level of understanding and pulling all those pieces together. But you’re right Pat that there’s needs at every level right now.
00:48:51 Michelle Moran
Somebody should start a podcast about this.
00:48:58 Alina Michelewicz
I really like that term functional medicine for buildings.
00:49:03 Alina Michelewicz
That’s very good.
00:49:06 Pat Coleman
I guess that another point I would just emphasize and.
00:49:09 Pat Coleman
You know, from the perspective of the kinds of projects.
00:49:11 Pat Coleman
That.
00:49:12 Pat Coleman
You know our team is working on and smaller projects is the need to provide more accessible training to the general public around building performance and energy efficiency and decarbonization.
00:49:32 Pat Coleman
Again, the bigger projects have a lot of requirements associated with them and that tends to mean that there are larger.
00:49:42 Pat Coleman
Contractors that are working on those projects that have the experience have the training have seen this before in one place or another. Seen something like it.
00:49:55 Pat Coleman
But outside of that environments you know smaller projects or home repair projects. You know you tend to get smaller contractors, smaller subcontractors, smaller trades, people that are working on those projects and they may never have been asked to do the kinds of things that we’re asking them to do.
00:50:16 Pat Coleman
And you know, say a project that is trying to meet.
00:50:20 Pat Coleman
Near Passive House level standards or super insulated wall assembly and existing masonry structure in a vacant building that’s been abandoned for 20 years. You know there’s a lot of people that make their living.
00:50:34 Pat Coleman
Doing smaller projects and you know if we’re going to have wide scale adoption of high performance building practices and decarbonization projects like the education and the outreach effort really needs to be broad and wide to engage folks like that.
00:50:55 Marty Josten
And just one other element I’ve mentioned before is making sure people know how to operate and maintain things going forward. So our data collection days we learned over and over and over again how many things can go wrong.
00:51:13 Marty Josten
In a building, you know, rule of thumb, kind of old school thinking that didn’t necessarily serve the building well long term and may have solved an immediate problem, but it didn’t solve.
00:51:24 Marty Josten
Didn’t get at the cause back to the functional medicine thing. It didn’t get it. Didn’t determine the root cause of something, it just stuck a Band-Aid on it so.
00:51:27 Alina Michelewicz
Mm-hmm.
00:51:32 Marty Josten
Making sure that people really know how to operate buildings has long been a need and even more so now as we’re introducing new kinds of technologies and more sensor driven things. In some cases, you know, just a level of complexity in some cases and even some new services, you know, ventilation systems that weren’t there before.
00:51:53 Marty Josten
And all of that. So just trying to make sure people know what to do with all that equipment to keep it operating properly and maintaining it.
00:52:00 Marty Josten
So we don’t end up back in this, you know, spot of these poorly maintained buildings that are providing a really vital function of healthy housing.
00:52:09 Pat Coleman
And an anecdote on that one just one or two weeks ago, we had one of the engineers.
00:52:14 Pat Coleman
Come back from doing an audit and talking with a site maintenance person who shared that he was planning to go through this property and rewire the exhaust fans in all of the units.
00:52:28 Pat Coleman
Because they were running continuously, which he thought was wrong.
00:52:34 Pat Coleman
And that’s actually what they were intended to do. But you know this, this individual has just never been given the training on. No, this is actually what the design is. And it’s critically important to maintain that level of ventilation so that you don’t have some bigger problems down the road when you’re not able to get that hot, humid air out of that unit as intended.
00:53:01 Alina Michelewicz
I know we’re short on time. I think there’s so much here. I’m really.
00:53:07 Alina Michelewicz
I’d be interested to have a whole another episode on workforce development.
00:53:11 Alina Michelewicz
I think I’m also really interested in this statewide home repair programs or just home repair and as a concept as it relates to building capital and underserved communities.
00:53:23 Michelle Moran
Well, thank you both for joining us today. I think we’re about at the end of our time.
00:53:29 Michelle Moran
Just as a closeout, if you either of you have any closing thoughts or takeaways or any information about how an owner or an occupant can go about beginning decarbonization in their buildings.
00:53:40 Marty Josten
Not the last one I’m going to say call us because that’s all we have time for. But you know, there are a lot of resources coming out now. There’s a lot of regulatory drivers emerging and with the federal resources in particular coming out, there’s a real kind of headlong rush to get on this, get on this, get on this and I guess a bit of caution is that we are moving.
00:54:01 Marty Josten
So quickly in some cases that we really need to be thinking ahead, thinking about what we’re doing that might be causing harm in these buildings, the decisions we’re making now quickly and what that impact is and just a couple super quick examples you know.
00:54:16 Marty Josten
On refrigerants that we’re installing in buildings now that are being phased out by the EPA because of their own global warming potential, there’s reason to take a breath on that in some cases.
00:54:30 Marty Josten
Anyway, Pat, I’ll let you answer.
00:54:32 Pat Coleman
And just echoing some of Marty’s comments there, I think that taking a moment to just pause and come up with a plan.
00:54:41 Pat Coleman
Is critically important and thinking about, you know, say you’re the one that gets to call the shots in this building which.
00:54:48 Pat Coleman
You know, as an unfortunate reality of many of the rental properties that we serve, the tenants have very limited ability to determine what happens to the.
00:54:59 Pat Coleman
Homes in which they live. But you know, if you are in the position of being able to determine what happens in a building just.
00:55:06 Pat Coleman
Think a little bit about your own goals for that property over the next 10, 20 years is not that far.
00:55:15 Pat Coleman
And you know what the building needs? So Marty was bringing up before like the.
00:55:22 Pat Coleman
Linkage between installing the solar system at the point of putting a new roof on, right, like you don’t want to really get those things out of sequence because it can be a lot more costly and complicated and frustrating if you get it wrong.
00:55:38 Pat Coleman
Every building is a special snowflake, so everyone needs a distinct plan, but. Yeah, they all need a plan If we’re to hit our climate objectives.
00:55:50 Michelle Moran
Excellent.
00:55:53 Michelle Moran
Thank you for joining us for this episode of building well from New Ecology. I’d like to thank my co-host Alina Michelewicz and our guests, Pat Coleman and Marty Josten, For more information on New Ecology, please see our website newecology.org. You can also find us on social media, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter at New Ecology Inc.
00:56:13 Michelle Moran
Information for this episode will be shared in the show notes on your player or on our New Ecology website, newecology.org/buildingwell-podcast. Thank you.
00:56:27 Molly Craft
This episode was made possible by the Mass Save Community Education Grant.
00:56:45 Music plays