MasterPlanning! Green As Money Gets

by Tony Chavira

There is an architect by the name of Marmol Radziner, and his buildings are amazing: high-end, modular, green design. At first glance, it would seem that his company openly invites anyone on a tight budget to have a house of their own: modular units (made in bulk) are cheap, and green building keeps the maintenance cost down. But the cheapest modular building available on his website is 660 square feet of interior space, priced at $235,500. For the house only.

Modular design is meant to be cheap and democratizing. Make 500 modular homes and the price of each individual home drops, eventually to a point that should meet the economic constraints of just about any serious homebuyer. So how exactly are architects like Michelle Kaufman, Ray Kappe, Jennifer Siegal, and Mr. Radziner able to get away with charging so much money for such a potentially affordable product?

Radziner Model 1

There is only one answer, but when you hear it you're not going to like it. I'll ease into it ...

Let me begin by saying that they're not bad people or bad business people, and are actually filling a market niche: responding to what the current market is demanding. But the target market's demographic information is pretty transparent: 1) Young, 2) Liberal, and 3) Rich. The kind of people that paid to get on the waiting list for a Toyota Prius the day it was announced. The kind of people that pay to counteract their carbon footprint. The kind of people that have already installed solar panels on their homes ($14-$30 a square foot after rebates, and they probably had no problem with re-roofing their homes in order to do it). From "green" cleaning products to "green" computers to "green" weddings, these people are sold the green lifestyle day-in and day-out. They don't need to care about affordability. They're saving the Earth.

But here is the harshest, ugliest truth of our times: Green is Hype. The current "Green Market" is not affordable, not accessible, and not democratic. The front-loaded cost to going green is completely discouraging to developers who are trying to keep the costs low and profits high. The process of learning green, modular building methods is discouraging to builders who need to re-train a massive workforce. The end cost for someone who wants a green, modular home (once site planning, laying the foundation, delivery, and detailing are also said and done) will be such a substantial amount of money that your modular home might as well be a castle in the sky. Green is a dream.

But before Mr. Neil Seldman e-mails me angrily, let me re-clarify ... the current "Green Market" is not democratic. The largest turns toward sustainability aren't going to happen through glorified acts of consumerism. Instead they're going to happen with the process of developing and steadily implementing strategic plans that everyone can adapt at every level. Zero Waste, for example, is a focused effort to eliminate all solid wastes through a process of reclamation, recycling, composting, and reducing the amount of stuff we gather at the source (like chopping down trees or developing plastics, for example). Zero Waste is a plan, and a great one. Modular communities are another great plan, and if urban planners and architects could come together to develop sustainable, modular housing communities, a family of four could probably find a modular house in that community for less than $100,000.

New efforts by large energy companies to move toward solar and wind power involve economic and space planning, not knee-jerk consumerism. These plans have been developed in order to make "going green" economically sustainable. If you can't afford sustainable power, the power companies should provide it for you. If you can't afford a green car, public transportation needs to provide cleaner alternatives. If you can't afford a million-dollar modular home, then we need to make more already and bring the price down to $100,000. You shouldn't be made to feel guilty because you can't afford a new electric car or you can't afford solar panels on the roof of your home. You've got bills to pay! Rich, liberal youths can do whatever they want with their money.

But you're still not helpless to stop global catastrophe. You never were. You'll always have at least three real green options: you can 1) vote for, 2) talk to, or 3) directly threaten your politicians into adapting these wider-scale, pro-environment, and economy-boosting plans. Plans that don't just stop pollution, but actively work to counteract it. Plans that promote sustainable jobs and provide more opportunities for sustainable jobs as the years go by. You have the opportunity to create a different green market, one where all jobs great and small naturally counteract damaging environmental effects. The democratic system can give you that.

The democratic system can make housing green, modular and affordable for everyone. It can drastically reduce your energy and water costs, it can eliminate trash on the streets, and it can do it all while repairing environmental damage. But if you don't vote, you obviously don't care.