The greening of America has been going on for a long time and recently arrived to the Memphis area in the form of the Vesta Home Show.  For $12 you could visit eight homes ranging in size from 2,800 to 4,600 heated square feet.  The show was at The Villages of White Oak in Arlington, Tennessee.  Homes were relatively affordable – priced at an average of $100 per square foot. 

Best of all, the home show was themed “Building Green.” 

All eight homes were built to exacting National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) & American National Standards Institute (ANSI) – National Green Building Standards.  To both ANSI and NAHB this means a builder must incorporate a minimum number of features in the following areas: energy, water, and resource efficiency, lot and site development, indoor environmental quality, and homeowner education.  These accomplishments inspired Vesta organizers to claim “The Greenest Home Show in America!”

This might be considered wonderful to some… if it weren’t a load of bull.  Some people like fast cars, big houses and long swaths of publicly funded pavement making the two useful if not entirely practical.  But when has it been okay to market things as something they aren’t just to make people feel good?

Okay, forever

Soothing health benefits of a cigarette, getting rich stuffing envelops from home and teaching the world to smile one soft drink at a time all quickly pop to mind.

Today, one of the chief offenders is the green-theme that is quickly being overcome by sustainability.  BP may have the greenest identity for an oil company with a truly beautiful, flowering logo and an entire sustainability section on their website.  Fiji bottled water now claims “every drop is green”.  Dow Jones has a Sustainability Index that tracks “the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide”… Chevron is on the top-ten holdings list.

 Shelby County is at risk of losing a positive societal movement completely to greenwashing before it ever really gets started.  In development terms sustainability and green building actually benefit the local environment and quality of life in the area.  In addition to energy efficient design, to be green or sustainable relies on connectivity to other neighborhoods, proximity to jobs and convenience of shopping.  Walkable neighborhoods are benefited by close schools and reduced overall vehicular use.  While all of these can be used to market a lifestyle of comfort and ease or neighborly civility or village center excitement, none of these factors can be ignored in a truly green project.

The greenest home show in America? 

The problem with the Vesta Home Show first lies in the product in itself.  These may be the best built 3,170 square foot homes in town… a town with an average home size 26% smaller according to Trulia Real Estate.  Arlington averages 2.8 people per home.  At 1,132 square feet per person, Vesta homes are big. 

Next, they’re being built in a county with an estimated 24,500 vacant houses on the market.  The Vesta homes are unnecessary. 

Downtown is 31 miles away, the Navy Base 18, FedEx Headquarters 22, Clark Tower 18, and the Airport 25.  Wolfchase Galleria is 10 miles away, Kroger 3, the nearest restaurant 2 and Walgreen’s 6 miles away.  The Vesta homes are not close to jobs and shopping. 

The nearest schools are 2 miles away and the nearest parks are 2 to 4 miles away. 

For the die-hard sustainability advocates, note that the closest bus stop is 10 miles to the west. 

These homes may be nice, big and cheap.  They are not green.  They don’t rebuild a core, expand from an edge or even celebrate a rural lifestyle.  They are unneeded, inconveniently placed replications of other replications that we have already forgotten. 

Missing the green-sell opportunity 

Most people have heard of the University of Memphis Terra House initiative.  This home incorporates all of the things that would qualify it for the NAHB/ANSI standard.  On top that, it reuses a vacant lot in an existing neighborhood with complementary design, has soy-based insulation, rainwater harvesting and a greywater recovery system.  This is a green house and everyone knows it. 

Down the street and around the corner are rows of houses in the Uptown neighborhood.  Built to MLGW’s EcoBuild Standard, each of these new infill homes are 30% more energy efficient than most in Shelby County.  Plus you can walk to major employment centers, restaurants, schools and a trolley stop.  This should be marketed as The Greenest Home Show in America.

For that matter, Midtown houses near grocery stores and bus stops, East Memphis houses near shopping centers and office buildings, Fox Meadows houses near schools and parks all should be marketed as green homes for sale.  No brick has to be fired, tree cut or nail driven to produce them.  No farm paved, creek filled or hunting land lost in the process.  No off ramp designed, street light installed or sewer dug for these neighborhoods. 

Please don’t misunderstand.  When I win the lottery, I promise to pull up next to you in my Camaro, rev the engine then embarrass you (and myself) by burning rubber and belching fumes all the way down the street.  I am not offended that people aren’t greenies.  I am offended that some people think I am stupid.  I am insulted that some might really want me to believe living farther away on a patch of ground made accessible only by my tax dollars, served by police and firemen already spread way too thin, and leaving behind an older community seen as disposable is any part of a sustainable or environmental or green movement. 

I may never completely understand the suburban lifestyle but that does not necessarily make it wrong.  Asking me to pretend it’s green is wrong. There are plenty of homes available that already connect sidewalk to sidewalk with each other and the community as a whole.  This may be the true embodiment of green and all we have to do is start telling each other.  Or better yet, let’s have a home show.