Philadelphia, PA

Sustainable Homes for the Rest of Us

Green Building Visionaries Break Ground on the 100k House

What do you get when you multiply 1,000 square feet by $100?

If Chad Ludeman and Nic Darling are doing the calculations, you get a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house within walking distance of the grocery store, less than two blocks from the subway (known as the “L”) and three stops from downtown Philadelphia.

Last year, Ludeman quit his corporate job, and together with Darling, started Postgreen, a real estate development firm specializing in modern, affordable, green housing. Neither of them had previous experience in the industry.

“But the one thing we both have is a passion for learning, and so over the past couple years, it’s been an ongoing learning process,” says Darling.

Postgreen’s first project is, “The 100k House,” a modern, 1100 square foot, LEED Platinum home. That’s the highest rating possible on the U.S. Green Building Council’s scale. Postgreen is aiming for a total construction price tag of $100,000 including the builder’s fee, but not the cost of the land, taxes, architect, or permit.

Plans for the 100k House are laid out for all to see on Postgreen’s 100k House blog. Ludeman and Darling have recorded the entire process, from the initial idea and design phase, to finding a bank to finance the project, to the painful task of trading out the custom “urban kitchen” for a more affordable, Ikea-provisioned one.

“One of the things that this project is trying to prove is that you can build a greener house without investing a lot of money in high tech solutions,” says Ludeman. “By building more modestly and building smarter and designing smarter.”

The two have worked with architects, designers, and builders to design a home that optimizes both affordability and sustainability.

This means they have had to leave out some greenie favorites like photovoltaic solar panels (for electricity) and a green roof (essentially a forest on your roof). But the house does include, among other eco-amenities, all Energy Star appliances and windows, an instant hot water heater, radiant heat, and structurally insulated panels (called “SIPs”), which give the home a tight seal and keep it from getting hot. All of these things significantly reduce typical energy consumption.

And as Ludeman and Darling learned, SIPs are actually cheaper than more traditional building materials.

Plus, thanks to a solar rebate program and a federal tax builder’s credit, the 100k House’s five-thousand dollar solar thermal system, used for heat, was nearly free.

While Ludeman and Darling have the final say on the house’s specs, the 100k House blog has made the project an open-source endeavor. Readers’ input has been crucial.

“We’ve gone through four different major designs based on that criticism,” says Ludeman.

His post about removing the closet in the master bedroom in order to cut costs, for example, set off a firestorm of commentary. Some blog readers scolded Postgreen for even thinking of building a master bedroom without a closet. Others offered urban-chic alternatives for storing clothes. One poster suggested that Americans are due for an update to their long-standing cultural notions of built-in closets.

“Framed and plastered closets are cultural baggage just like SUVs,” wrote one reader.

The 100k House will stand on a vacant lot between already-existing homes. In the sustainable city-planning world, this is known as “infill” development, where you “fill in” an area by building on a vacant or abandoned city site.

Philadelphia has an estimated 60,000 abandoned properties, according to Joyce Sacco, coordinator of southeastern Pennsylvania affairs for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Turning vacant lots into clean, green community assets is part of a ten-point environmental action agenda, released in January 2007 by Next Great City, a Philadelphia coalition.

One idea behind the 100K House is to create a bare-bones, LEED-Platinum model that can be replicated and improved upon in future projects. Plans for Postgreen’s second house may include more costly green features; still, construction costs will remain at or below $120,000.

According to Postgreen’s website, the 100K House is expected to be the first LEED Platinum, single-family home not only in Philadelphia, but in the entire state of Pennsylvania. In fact, the U.S. Green Building Council says only 138 LEED Platinum homes exist in the country.

“I could see ourselves, in the future, doing… commercial scale [projects],” said Ludeman. “But it’s exciting to serve a market for people like us who have been waiting for something like this.”