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Sunday, December 1, 2013

Help Wanted

Happy Holidays. As you read this, are you somewhere warm, maybe at home. Are you healthy and looking forward to the exchange of presents during your celebration of the holidays? Would you consider adding one more request to your list?

DGH 929 Edmund Credit Board
DGH 929 Edmund Credit Board     © harrington
During the next few days you have a chance to help give a Twin Cities family a healthy, affordable home where they can enjoy their holidays. For a few hours of your time or a few dollars of your money, you can help us "green up" our first Dynamic Green Home.

Let's try to put some perspective on why this is really important. There have been numerous studies on the benefits of (and need for) healthy housing. The United States Green Building Council, in a 2012 brief, found:
"An unhealthy home with high operating costs due to inefficiency in energy and water consumption is not affordable....

"Currently, high utility bills are pervasive in the affordable housing. Indeed, low - income households spend on average 19.5% of annual income on home energy costs, while the average for median - income households is just 4.6%.1 ... high utility bills are a serious problem, but asthma, allergies, and other chronic problems that can be exacerbated by exposure to toxins in the built environment can be matters of life and death..."

1"The Cold Facts: The First Annual Report on the Effect of Home Energy Costs on Low - income Americans. " National Fuel Funds Network , National Low - income Energy Consortium , National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association . 2002.  http://www.nliec.org/facts.pdf 
The Minnesota Chapter of the USGBC, working with Greater Frogtown Community Development Corporation and our community partners, is taking care of two major healthy home factors in the green rehabilitation of 929 Edmund Street. First, this coming weekend (December 7), with help from Hirshfield's, we're painting the interior with low VOC paints. Join us if you can and donate some time. Give yourself a chance to feel really good this season. Second, and here's where we could use both your money and your time, we're fundraising for our Fundamentals of Flooring work the following weekend (December 14).

Dynamic Green Home 929 Edmund St. before
929 Edmund St. (before)        © harrington
Why are we making such a deal of this? Why do we think this is not only important, but critical? Hardwood floors provide fewer places for dust mites and other asthma triggers to hide than does wall to wall carpeting. They also make it easy to see when it's time to vacuum or sweep. Have you ever seen the costs of treating asthma, just for our children in Minnesota? They're astounding.

According to the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 
"The best estimate of total costs of environmentally attributable childhood diseases in the state of Minnesota is $1.569 billion per year, with a range of $1.393 to $1.890 billion. Cost estimates for specific diseases are: 
Childhood asthma: $30.6 million  Childhood cancers: $8.2 million
 Lead poisoning: $1.223 billion  Birth defects: $4.5 million
 Neurobehavioral disorders (excluding lead): $303 million"
So, we know that childhood asthma costs Minnesota more than $30 million a year. It costs the families of these children much more than money. There's lost time from school for acute attacks. Lost learning when children don't feel well. Anxiety and stress for parents. Let's speculate for a minute that substantially reducing asthma triggers in a green, healthy home doesn't eliminate asthma, but reduces the frequency and severity of asthma attacks by 40%. Simple math tells me we could save more than $12 million dollars every year on our health bills under such a scenario.

929 Edmund St. Dynamic Green Home (work in progress)
Dynamic Green Home (work in progress)        © harrington
We're working to make our Dynamic Green Homes strategy replicable. Helping us now will let us help many more families in the future. Join us. Make this holiday season a merry, happy, healthy one for your family and at least one other family in the Twin Cities. Thanks!

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