There is a difference between a house and a home.
A home shelters a family. It is where we raise our children, celebrate Thanksgiving and live our lives. In most cases a home also represents the lion’s share of our net financial worth: the equity we leave to our children. For young families, a home is a toehold on the ladder of the American Dream.
A house is sold as a commodity. It is brokered as collateral for a mortgage. In most cases, a house is the product of an industry controlled by financial interests outside of our community: a cog in a machine greased by the incentive of short-term profit. For most young families today, a house is a linchpin of what has turned out to be a false economy.
For the past 50 years house builders have operated on the assumption that abundant supplies of inexpensive energy make it easier to pump vast amounts of cold air into houses in the summer and hot air into houses in the winter than to build energy-efficient homes. And it is easier for them. For the sake of a more competitive initial purchase price, house builders prefer not to have to account for wasteful energy use over the life of the house.
To put it another way, the contemporary American house buyer favors the short-term advantage of a low down payment on a smaller mortgage over the long-term advantage of energy efficiency resulting from responsible design and construction. Rather than pay for overhangs to shade windows from the sun, higher insulation values or heat-reflecting roofs, the contemporary American house buyer favors larger houses with more space to heat and cool.
The prevailing attitude is to postpone until the future what you don’t have to pay for today.
According to the National Association of Home Builders and the U.S. Census, the average new house floor area increased from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,266 square feet in 2000. During this same period the number of family members per household decreased. This resulted in an increase in the floor area per capita from 286 square feet per capita in 1950 to 847 square feet per capita in 2000.
As modern Americans we have grown fat from our indulgences at the expense of creating a legacy of well-designed and well-built, energy-efficient homes for our children.
For the past 50 years the marketplace has ignored the long-term costs of building poorly designed and poorly constructed homes. It has ignored the long-term costs of energy consumption that can burden a family’s annual budget. And it has ignored the consequences to a family that finally pays off the 30-year mortgage, only to find that their equity in home ownership has evaporated due to poor design and construction and the depreciation of their house’s value because of higher costs to heat and cool it.
Two facts lead to a critical question.
First, house builders are not rewarded financially by the appreciation of long-term value; they are only rewarded by the profit margin at the time of the initial sale. Second, the enhanced value of well-designed and well-built, energy-efficient homes contributes positively both to the individual property owner’s equity and to the local government that depends on appraised value as the basis for property tax revenue. The critical question is this: How can the short-term profit that motivates the house builder be harnessed to the creation of long-term property value?
The answer to this question has to do with the building regulations we – as a community – choose to adopt to ensure that the long-term interests of our children and our community are protected. The city of Albuquerque’s Energy Conservation Code provides this protection. This is why it is so important for the residents of Albuquerque to let our mayor and our city councilors know that we do not want Albuquerque’s Energy Conservation Code repealed.
