Insulating the Future: Reducing Embodied & Operational Carbon with Next-Generation All-Wood Insulation

Insulation products are unique among construction materials, because their essential function is to reduce the operational space heating and cooling energy demands of buildings. However, 90 percent of the insulation currently available on the market consists of plastic foam, fiberglass or mineral wool, which are non-recyclable and made from the very fossil fuel resources they are intended to conserve. Innovative, renewable and cost-effective insulation products are now entering the market.

Nature Knows: Diversity in Practice

Diversity in a natural ecosystem – plants, animals, insects, microbes – is essential for long-term systemic health. Nature’s principle of “strength through diversity” can apply to us professionally – our business practices, our colleagues and the talents they bring, and the designs we create in our work, from planning neighborhood resiliency against seawater surges all the way through to details like thermostat controls in a multifamily retrofit project.

Improving Your Project's Material Health

A project’s construction materials can have significant and enduring health effects—not only on the building's occupants, but also on the community where the products are produced and disposed of, and on the people manufacturing and installing them. Our collective experience with COVID-19 has highlighted urgent social justice issues within our supply chains. But where does one start when trying to incorporate healthier materials into a project?

Using Data to Allocate Time & Capital across a Multi-Family Real Estate Portfolio

Data-driven decision-making is the process of basing operational and investment decisions on actual data, rather than intuition or observation alone. With an 11,500-unit portfolio stretching across 14 states, we develop operational and design strategies around energy and water usage, costs, and tenant comfort for each building. Our data sources are public, invoice-derived, meter or sensor-derived, along with human observations and interactions, and range from continuous to quarterly.

A Toxic Investment? Your Building’s Health Begins with Healthy Materials

Let’s make the multifamily affordable housing synonymous with healthy building construction. Many of us already seek out healthy materials for our projects, and all of us can with the right information. This session will build skills and confidence in healthy material selection, improve our ability to talk about the potential health benefits of high performance construction, and distinguish the myth from the realities of healthy material cost, performance and availability.

Electrify Your Health! How Electrification Can Improve Human Health in Urban Buildings

This session will detail factors contributing to optimal human health, both indoors and outdoors in the built environment; study emerging data from Harvard’s Ventilation/IAQ project and its hoped-for effect on affordable housing developers, policymakers, and capital providers; advise on hazardous chemicals and healthier choices of materials specifically related to electrification; and lay out key electrification strategies for protecting health in a socially equitable and cost-effective manner.
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