On September 15 the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) issued a news release titled, "Home Buyers Want to Save Energy—But Only at the Right Price, NAHB Survey Shows."
The release claims that according to a "recent member survey" builders report—among other things—that "even though prospective home buyers want the benefits of new, more efficient homes, they are unwilling to pay much more for a 'green' home."
The news piece also states: "Builders said that among buyers who are willing to pay more for green features, more than half—57 per cent – are unlikely to pay more than an additional two per cent," and that "only 11 percent of builders nationwide indicated that their customers ask about environmentally friendly features, according to the survey."
It is easy to understand why these numbers would grab my attention since surveys of builders that we have conducted on this subject have yielded significantly different results, as have numerous similar surveys by fellow media groups, green building organizations, and other interested parties. In fact, in a survey of builders that we conducted in 2008 respondents indicated that confusion with different green programs and standards posed a greater obstacle to implementing green building techniques than cost increases.
Since I found the NAHB numbers curiously inconsistent with ours I requested the survey data that the results were based on, but my request was immediately denied. The reason given was that surveys such as this are considered "internal documents," and the information in them is not shared with either the press or association members.
I found the second category particularly disconcerting since I am not only a member of NAHB but a Life Director on their Board. I believe that I (and/or any other member making such a request) should have access to survey material and results that are gathered on behalf of the members. I always thought that member-based organizations exist to serve the members. Perhaps I am missing something?
I have continued to press for the information, I am exploring whether their refusal raises legal issues but as of this of this writing I have been told again that it has been the longstanding policy of the organization to never release the raw data from surveys, and in the absence of any additional information I am left to wonder about a few of the survey details …
For example, how many builders were offered an opportunity to participate in the survey? How many actually responded and therefore how large is the base pool that the survey cites (11% of builders nationwide would imply a rather large sampling, it seems to me) in these results? What other related questions and potentially contradictory results were not revealed in the news release? Were there builders who tried to take part but were excluded?
I ask this last question because I have attempted to participate in certain industry surveys only to be shut out because my number of housing starts was below a pre-determined minimum threshold. By only selecting certain categories of responses for inclusion in the results it is amazingly easy to skew them. It is no secret that statistical information can be manipulated in a multitude of ways.
Is it possible that this "recent" survey (NAHB says it is from August, and I assume the year to be 2009 but have no confirmation of this) captured results from targeted builder categories, certain sized companies, specific market locations, and/or any number of various qualifiers while excluding others in order to arrive at a pre-determined set of conclusions designed to satisfy a particular message objective?
Without access to the background data one can only suppose. Keeping the information secret obviously fosters suspicion and mistrust since it makes questionable sense otherwise.
The news article concludes: "Whenever Congress considers how to encourage more energy-efficient construction, it must keep affordability involved …" Call me cynical but whenever I hear trade associations, including NAHB, invoke the all too familiar "affordability" refrain coupled with a call for Congress to behave in a certain way—does anyone suppose the timing of the release is an accident?—my experience has consistently been that the status quo is being shielded on behalf of one or more special interest groups.
You have to wonder, though, how much longer will this worn-out strategy survive? Is it possible that the poor old dead horse of "affordability" has been beaten for so long that nobody listens any more, and when they do hear that tired mantra, do they actually interpret it as protecting "profitability?"
The numbers cited in the aforementioned NAHB survey would appear to serve the needs of particular subsets of the Association's membership— perhaps production builders, especially certain high-production building corporations who predicate their market shares on competitive sales price more than any other factor, and who therefore oppose practically any increase in energy-efficiency since it may result in additional cost of entry, regardless how positively it may affect the ability of the homeowner to occupy and operate the home long-term.
Ironically, the same organization that so proudly points to a few hundred housing units that have been "verified" under its national program as evidence that it is the reigning champion of residential sustainability throughout the land, and trumpets the importance of having "designated" more than 4,000 of its members as "Certified Green Professionals" (an embarrassing number, which amounts to less than 3% of its total membership) can't seem to decide which side of the sustainability fence it wants to call home.
This looks to me like just another attempt to have it both ways.
If that is what has happened in this case, it would be hard to say which represents the greater transgression: the manipulative messaging of survey results to serve the profit motives of selected members, the perpetuation of myths and misinformation that discourages the uninformed from attempting to reach higher levels of performance and thus deliver a better end product, or the organizational breach of faith with the rest of us … especially those who send in an annual dues check and hope for balanced advocacy, honest information, and transparency in return.
Thirty-five years ago I stumbled across a just-released work by a then-unknown author named Robert M. Pirsig at a makeshift library on a military base in Korea. There were only four or five books on the rack, and since I was just passing through on temporary assignment and had no book of my own to exchange, I pondered the situation for a while before deciding to leave it there and come back when I had something to swap. I returned an hour later after scrounging up a copy of some forgettable novel only to discover that the book I wanted was no longer there, and that whoever had taken it had not bothered to leave another volume in its place.
The book was Pirsig's masterwork Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I'm not sure why but somehow I knew that it would be an important part of my education and help to shape my thinking and my values going forward for the remainder of my life.
A few weeks later, a brand-new copy of the book appeared in the mail, sent to me by a fellow serviceman, with a note saying that he had felt an unexplained need to get the book to me.
It was many years later when I learned that Pirsig's manuscript had been rejected by 122 publishers before it was finally accepted. I still have that gift copy today, although it shows the wear of all the handling it has endured through the several readings I have given it. And of all the memorable passages it contains, there is an especially meaningful one that I have marked and that I have returned to many times for a variety of reasons, which reads:
"I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature. … or with programs full of things for other people to do. Programs of a political nature are important 'end products' of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think what I have to say has more lasting value."
For more than a decade I have been actively involved in a variety of projects all around the country that are intended to create programs designed to serve as templates for green building and sustainable development. Some of these are proprietary, one-size-fits-all rating systems belonging to and administered by national organizations and others are more local or regional in scope, most commonly initiatives created by, and for, members of particular home building groups and associations as well as other stakeholders, responding to the needs of building professionals who are attempting to address their specific set of circumstances and the political, cultural, economic, and environmental realities peculiar to their own markets.
In most cases, the content of these programs is organized around a predictably familiar set of criteria … energy use, water management, indoor environment/air quality, material selection, construction waste management, and, to varying degrees, land development, operations and maintenance, and global impact.
More recently, I have had the opportunity to participate in the standards development process, namely in the creation of the National Green Building Standard (ICC-700) which earned approval from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in January. That effort directly led to my current involvement in the code development arena as a member of the Sustainable Building Technology Committee (SBTC) seated by the International Code Council to draft the International Green Construction Code, which is expected to be ready for adoption in 2012.
Along the way, I have continually been haunted by a concern that these efforts can potentially result in little more than a "point chase" in which the design team, building professional, and the project owner focus on making sure they aggregate enough points on the chosen program score sheet to attain certification at a desired, pre-determined target level rather than self-evaluating the intent of building the project in the first place and then truly measuring the larger set of outcomes.
Sure, these programs have value. They provide a foundation of collective experience and knowledge that would be very difficult, perhaps virtually impossible, for us to generate individually. They build on one another over time and provide a basis for learning what works as well as what doesn't. They give us a common platform to operate from and benchmarks by which to measure our successes and failures, and perhaps most important, they give us a framework in which we can engage new technologies and products so that the risk of innovation is spread across a wider, more forgiving playing field than if we had to go it alone.
Programs also serve as models for ordinance and regulation, giving the public sector sorely needed guidance in how to deal with the built environment as it relates to all other aspects of society. They describe a set of parameters in which we can comfortably operate, and measurable performance standards that we can aspire to achieve. And they provide the vehicles for reliable communication and verifiable marketing that facilitates penetration into the world of consumers. Programs do have a place in the world, even if they are "full of things for other people to do."
But by themselves they don't teach us how to "fix a motorcycle," not in the sense that Pirsig talks about it anyway, which is to be interested and thus be involved in one's work, which ultimately comes down to caring about it. He suggests that is where "right values" result in "right actions," which then produce "right work," something we could certainly use more of in the world.
In a brief "author's note" at the beginning of his book, Pirsig asserts that it "should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice" and also that it is "not very factual on motorcycles, either." In general, I feel the same way about programs. As useful as they may be, they ultimately have very little relation to who we are truly hoping to be or to the world we should really be attempting to build.