March 26, 2008
Apollo's Fire
Harlem's new affordable green efficiency

By Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks
Special to the Apollo News Service

First in a series

	Carlton A. Brown
	Credit: Full Spectrum New York

In the heart of New York City’s historic Harlem neighborhood, Carlton A. Brown is the private-sector developer of a multi-family, mixed-income housing development, 1400 on 5th. It was the first of what is now a string of energy-efficient, affordable, and neighborhood-scale developments that Brown has undertaken, using renewable energy and good design to uplift communities from Trenton, New Jersey, to Jackson, Mississippi, and soon New Orleans and Baltimore.

Guiding Brown’s work is a simple if ambitious set of goals designed to bring green affordable housing to the people who need it most. “We start out with a core set of beliefs,” he says. “Otherwise, you are just doing stuff.”

Indeed, Carlton Brown is among the legion of entrepreneurs, developers, city leaders, union workers, scientists, and farmers laying claim to a piece of the new clean energy economy unfolding across the United States. As president of Full Spectrum New York, a leader in the development of mixed use and mixed income green buildings in emerging urban markets, he has helped to rebuild Harlem as a livable, affordable, and increasingly energy-efficient community that stays within reach of long time residents, helping them gain home ownership, while restoring strong and healthy neighborhoods.

Nor is Brown alone in building new homes in New York that are so efficient and sought after that they make developers money, even in tough economic times, and save money for renters and buyers. To the surprise of some city residents, New York has emerged in recent years as one of the major cities widely regarded as among the cleanest, greenest, safest, in the world. With those trends has come increasing population after decades of decline, and thosands of new jobs for workers at every skill level.

Less Energy, Less Cost
Brown sets clear benchmarks for his projects to make a difference, and has been doing so since he co-founded his development company in 1988. His projects use 50 percent less energy than the building code dictates. They cost 10 percent below the index of median housing prices. They improve indoor air quality for the residents of the building, and they involve the community in setting design goals.

Brown, a steady, thoughtful housing champion in a nearly ever-present porkpie hat, is proving every day that green building can be affordable; and that modern, advanced, energy saving construction is for everyone; that clean energy can empower community and, indeed, is the future of our cities.

To make his point on radically improving the energy and resource efficiency of construction, Brown looks to other industries. Airplanes, ships, automobiles, and computers all demonstrate different models for design. “A 747 probably has as many parts as a 250,000-square-foot apartment building,” he muses, “yet you expect defects in a new building. In an airplane you expect everything to work right from the start.”

Brown has learned from these carefully modeled design processes. He proofs out his buildings before he ever breaks ground, using computerized 3-D design, to optimize energy use, reduce waste, decrease cost, and maximize efficiency. He makes the most of everything, from lumber to labor and the energy, air, and water that circulate through the structure during the life of the building. Green high-performance construction has become a staple of luxury buildings, but Full Spectrum has proven that the same tools can be applied for low-income and minority communities.

Brown believes that too much development is shaped by a politics and policy of scarcity, grounded in the belief that there isn’t enough to go around. He doesn’t buy it and worries that that way of thinking leads to gentrification and the notion that to improve a neighborhood you must move one group of people out and move another group in. Instead, he is building places that people want to live in, making it attractive for middle-class families to move in and making it possible for low income families to stay and build wealth. He is doing this using the tools of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Is this a green strategy? As Brown says, “If you don’t deal with the social construct, you will never get to the biological one.”

It Starts With Design, Manufacturing, Skilled Labor
Starting from community-based design, Brown builds all his components in a modular factory setting off site according to the community’s specifications, from the walls and building superstructure to the plumbing systems. In the process, he improves indoor air quality and creates good jobs.

In the manufacturing sector, he points out, you can train someone in six weeks for a living-wage job that it would take them five years to attain in a traditional construction context. He works as a partner with the labor unions who erect the buildings and uses community benefits agreements that connect him to local hiring and training. He has helped the modular construction industry see the potential of green building.

He works, for example, with a company in Minden, Louisiana, that manufactures precast modular units for prisons, demonstrating how to build green housing with no PVC, low volatile organic compounds, and energy-efficient design to rebuild the Gulf Coast with high-quality housing. “It is kind of strange sometimes how transformations can happen,” he says.

Brown has applied his holistic “systems thinking” to the social dynamics of the communities he works in. “Making a community green is just a piece of the sustainability puzzle. You need the human dimensions as well: jobs, indoor air quality, energy use, and honoring the culture of the community with an inclusive process,” he says.

Reduce Energy Use, Residents Save Money
Regarding his goal of cutting energy use by 50 percent, he points out that “in communities of color, often most buildings aren’t even up to code, so you are really talking about an 80 to 90 percent cut in energy and emissions.” For low- and moderate-income residents of his developments, this is serious business. You can look at it as a climate issue, but you can just as easily see it in a family’s finances. Cutting monthly energy bills by a few hundred dollars is very visible when you are living on $30,000 a year.

At 1400 on 5th, the results really add up. The average unit is typically saving $1,200 to $1,300 every year. Brown calculates that the net present value from the energy cost savings he will achieve in his four hundred units in two developments in Harlem will be $78 million over the next thirty years, all while cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 1,100 tons a year. That’s not chump change; it’s money that will be invested in local spending, savings, or family vacations, but not in wasted energy.

Applying Lessons in Mississippi
The techniques are transportable. In Jackson, Mississippi, Brown is taking this approach to scale in a 40-acre downtown redevelopment over twelve square blocks. Using $100 million in tax increment financing (TIF) and backed by the conservative Republican governor, Haley Barbour, and the mayor, it will be the largest green project in the state. The project is incorporating a whole suite of integrated strategies for efficiency and clean energy, from green roofs, to light shelves that bounce sunlight deeper into the units and cut electricity use, to building-integrated photovoltaics and the use of stationary fuel cells developed for NASA and the navy, to cut peak energy use and triple efficiency. The fuel cells will be powered by biodiesel made from local soybean and cotton growers, who would otherwise be producing subsidized crops that would flood African markets and kill local farming in the third world. Fuel will even be made from waste from catfish farming. And of course all of the units use geothermal heat pumps.

Carlton Brown is making a real impact on big issues like childhood asthma, global development, and climate change, and he’s doing it by making millions of small changes on the ground, with green, energy efficient, affordable housing. He is making homes for families and jobs for blue-collar workers, bricks and mortar you can touch and feel, investment in the heart of communities that need it. He is also proving the economics of energy-efficient and high-performance building.

When he built 1400 on 5th, financing was hard to come by. But he proved that building to the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold Standard for low-income residents made sense, and that passing a high threshold for energy-efficient and healthful building materials could improve communities, save money, and create new markets for quality housing, along with high-skill jobs. Afterward, when he built the sustainable condominium complex called the Kalahari down the street, Goldman Sachs was knocking at his door.

This article is excerpted from "Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy," by Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks. Copyright 2008. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. Jay Inslee is a Democratic Congressman from Washington state, and Bracken Hendricks is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

For more information

Apollo's Fire

Representative Jay Inslee
Member of Congress
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Bracken Hendricks
Senior Fellow
Center for American American Progress
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Carlton Brown
President
Full Spectrum of New York
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Video of 1400 on 5th