Existing Buildings & The Most Important Un-Asked Question
“What is my existing building’s performance potential?”
In the built environment, this is the most consequential question. Every owner of multiple buildings has a subset of buildings that will require significant investment over a one-to-three-year period. The pent-up investments become imminent due to the historic lack of preventative maintenance: affordable housing, office towers, university dormitories, municipal buildings and countless other examples of poor and inconsistent investments in buildings.
A consequence of climate change awareness is a large and growing recognition that existing buildings offer the opportunity to simultaneously tackle the greatest challenges of current generations: fuel poverty, healthy indoor air quality and resiliency. To unpack this idea, let’s define these challenges:
Fuel poverty – the financial reality that low-income households pay a meaningful percentage of their take home pay to fund the heating and cooling of their residences.
Healthy indoor air quality – humans spend 90% of their time indoors and research proves that there is a meaningful relationship between a building’s environment and human health – physical, mental and emotional well-being.
Resiliency — buildings have a role to play in the safety, health and security of occupants. As we’ve seen from recent natural and man-made event (fires, hurricanes, terrorism), we continue to demand more from buildings to keep people, healthy and safe.
Those trends require that we look at the Power of Existing Buildings holistically, not incrementally. When existing buildings are faced with life cycle triggers like the replacement of roofs, windows, mechanical systems, those systems are usually replaced “in kind”, meaning old windows are replaced with new, more efficient windows. These “incremental” improvements fail to consider the seminal question, “What is my building’s full performance potential?”
The process of revealing a building’s optimum performance potential is the only way to simultaneously attack fuel poverty, healthy indoor air quality and resiliency. How much does it cost to create a better building? The answer is, not one dollar more than investing incrementally and can often cost less.
Key takeaway: Attacking existing building renovations holistically costs nothing more but reduces energy consumption and operational carbon by up to 90% per building, frees up energy capacity to be used for purposes other than buildings, eliminates fuel poverty, ensures healthy indoor air quality and increases the resiliency of buildings to better protect occupants and investors.
Until we start asking this important question, owners and developers of multiple buildings will continue to miss the chance to access meaningful value without increasing investments
The straightforward solution is to find experienced architecture and engineering teams or sustainability consultants with Passive House certification(s) for large multi-family or commercial buildings.
Prescriptive solutions and incremental approaches to building renovations don’t work. Change the paradigm by starting every conversation with the right question: “What is my existing building’s full performance potential?” That will immediately flush out the experts from the imposters.
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