rescind it. so they actually had a fourth well. yes, man? [inaudible] >> talking about a constitution from the top down, we are waiting for our government to tell us how to do it. why not make it a more bottom up grassroots movement? >> that is a good point. >> i put out there that occupy and make sure voices are heard and listened to women's voices and you hear all ethnicities and all genders and from what you are describing it seems if we have an oligarchy now they are in power and they will tell us how to do things and that might not engender a true reinvention. ..

once it's called it opens up what some would consider a pandora's box where you can propose and consider any amendment that you want. basically having a new prostitution convention. we have that right today. it is just never been exercised. a lot of people don't know that, we can call an amendment to today that would fit in effect be a new constitutional convention. the better thing is usually have

to convince your state legislatures tend to be more responsive to the desires of the people. so that is something to think about. well, thank you very much, everybody. [applause] thank you all very much for coming, and we do have books for sale. i'm sure chris will be happy to sign them for you. >> that was christopher phillips from the 2012 virginia festival of the books. a couple of minutes we will be back with more from this annual event. >> here is a look at some upcoming book fares and festivals. this weekend book tv brings to our coverage from the virginia festival of the book. visit booktv.org for a complete schedule. on april 14th the university of california irvine will host the sixth annual literary orange , the festival will feature keynote speakers paul mclean and lisa c.

the sixth annual philadelphia book festival will be held april 16th to the 21st, and the annapolis boat festival in maryland is also on the 21st. book tv will be live from los angeles times festival books at the university of southern california of the 21st and 22nd. follow us on twitter at twitter.com/booktv for scheduling updates as we get closer to the event. and for a complete list of upcoming book fairs and festivals visit book tv and click on the the tab at the top of the page. also please let us know about but fares and festivals in your area and we will add them to our list. e-mail us at book tv c-span.org. >> no more from the 2012 virginia festival of the book. john quayle talks about creating affordable prefab housing and discusses have to be used to improve the housing in burma to problems in the u.s. this is a little over an hour.

>> to get started, i m&m from habitat have attacked. really at the core of our mission. we call families that research partner families rather than plants because the relationship of reinsurer with them is a true partnership. we don't give away homes. but rather we bring community members together to volunteer side-by-side with hard-working local families as they take homebuyer education courses, work on their credit, perform sweat equity, helping build their neighbors' homes and finally select a lot and begin to build the home of their own dreams. we also stand side-by-side with them throughout the term of their mortgage as the chief house stability, economic independence, and ultimately a better future for themselves and their children to read it was our strong belief that home is more than just a roof over someone's head. in fact it is a center of health, spiritual, physical,

emotional, and financial that brought us together for a very special partnership with today's featured speaker. the remarkable friend and a host of other housing profits in this community in others. as we have all done our part to combat housing poverty and create sustainable templates are making an healthy if unaffordable housing a thing of the past. as a director of the graduate architecture program at the university of virginia john initiated and continues to serve as the project director for the economic program and a sister initiative. as a result of the perseverance we have created six affordable homes locally with habitat and the piedmont housing alliance. renovated three homes in partnership with the city of shows will end heritage renewal. if this year end, it will complete four units for sell side of reach in south boston.

that is part of this state that is in desperate need of some attention to its aging housing stock. what john's team does is remarkable. the case of the partnership with us john over soccer but architecture students to design and build modular zero energy affordable home powered by a solar array and heated and cooled by geothermal heat pump. even more impressive is that built the home of sight in the hangar at the airport in milton and transported it in three modules and along with volunteers put it on -- assembled on-site in one remarkable september date. as a result of his efforts the family which of the bill that eventually purchased a home is on a new and more hopeful path. not only did they pay less in monthly mortgage payments than they used to pay to live in slum rental conditions, but they have virtually no utility expenses. money that used to evaporate through the walls of the leaky

rental and find its way ultimately to the coffers of the virginia power is now being set aside into their children's college savings account. i could go on and on about john and his many accomplishments and words. i could talk about a finalist for the 2009 un habitat award or how the initiative was a recipient of the u.s. green building council excellence in green building curriculum. i could also listed as many teaching and scholarly accolades if such as winning the 2008 you viejo alumni. a fulbright scholar at the university of tokyo. instead, however, i would rather end this introduction by boiling down into a sentence with i think is just driving motivation , his real passion. in his work in his teaching job has been forceful in his belief that for something to be sustainable it must also be attainable. so please join me in welcoming to the microphone my friend. [applause]

>> a very odd experience to hear yourself introduced that think -- take you very much. it is an honor to be here and that are to have been introduced me. it is an honor to see one of my best to answer in the audience and to be able to speak with you this afternoon. what of going to try to do today is talk a little bit about the book and inherently therefore talk about the project that is behind it and what our intentions are, how we do what we do and why we do will be due. i think it is really important to kind of a village that ha the effort is a complex one and the interest as a very good. the results are always to be determined and measured to the actual occupation of the buildings. i come from a place in a

discipline where i love what discipline, but i know that there is a lot of architects out there who are very good at self-promotion and very good at talking about how whenever brilliant idea they've come up with the store to chase the world and everything is going to be perfect. i think it is much more important that what i teach to my students and all the disciplines that i teach, that they speak with confidence but also with humility. because they're is a lot of stuff that gets published in nuys looking books with beautiful pictures taken by professional photographers that maybe don't quite work in the way that they were intended to where maybe don't work for the people who may be were not even aware of those intentions. so i want to make sure that that spirit of what i believe and what i think the students and faculty that are involved in this project believe that this is a process where we are always

aiming as high as we can go. we are definitely trying to make it attainable and sustainable at the same time. we are not -- we don't get everything right. and so i'm going to try to put that out there, some of those things as well. i think that is important to talk about. and some of that is also found in the book itself. we believe that -- and we have increasingly come to realize that one of the -- there we go. we have come to believe that it is really not only about three fabrication, but also about rehabilitation of buildings and the environment. that is something that goes back in our project to 2007 when we first were approached to do a project here in the city with piedmont housing alliance, another partner where we were going to take on the rehabilitation of historic structure, very interesting historic structure. all talk about that later. that was our first dive in, but

so what was initially just that a, a project focusing on sustainable and affordable and prefabricated housing has really become to projects that have the same people involved. and we are moving more and more in the direction. there are advantages and disadvantages to both these things, and i will try to lay that out more as we go through this. the book does that actually represent that. the first half was done before we actually came up with even the name. this kind of silly little name parallel to the ecomod project. we began to realize if you were going to do more of this we need technology. so that is one of the reasons why the book is kind of branded the way that it is. i think it is also important to ignore is that, i don't know if you can read this or not, but this is truly a collaborative project. i happen to be the leader of the project will but i don't feel like this is by any means

something that i am solely responsible for. it is a huge steel people. we have had over the years since he started the project, over 350 students involved, which is extraordinary because i don't think i met 350 students of the last eight years or whenever it is. that is roughly half in the school of architecture and half in the school of engineering and applied science. my colleague, my lead colleague in engineering is a fantastic person who is not with us today, but he is a driving force in this project. we have had a series of other advisers -- advises that have been involved. and then discipline's across the whole range of students at the university of virginia. our primary focus is to work with affordable housing organizations such as habitat and gauge what their needs are

and see what we can provide for them. we do that in a way that is trying as much as possible to listen to those needs and also stress the organization, maybe provide something that they had not expected to do something that might make them think about doing things that differ way. at the for every partnership we have had we have had some things that we feel like there has been an impact on the organization and hopefully a positive one. and so that is a big part of this. i firmly believe in that form of education. so leading into that let me explain how the book is broken down. basically two parts. one is more text based, the principal section where i kind of laid out what the primary themes of the book are. obviously the title of the book gives some of that away, "sustainable, affordable, prefab." we have -- prefab does that

appear as an actual chapter name but is missing then threaded end. in addition to that date issue of design and build and evaluate. out talk about that more in the second as an educational model, but that is an important team that i try to address. the relationship between architects of engineers is -- i don't know if there are architects or engineers in the room, but those of you that might fall into one of those two camps, it is really an interrelated set of themes and concerns. yet they address the very same issues in very different ways. that is part of the power of the relationship. architects tend to come into the process, and of speaking from landscape architects who are involved in the project and also from some of the planning students and architectural history students. they come into the projects much from the point of view of asking a series of questions.

we don't need to know what all the actors are tinder never necessarily going to come up with a very precise answer, but we want to know, a challenge ourselves, the guts of the box, but solutions in response to constrain the hands. engineers from an educational point of view tend to come up with a much more strict formal process of, here are the things you need to learn, theoretical knowledge, the kind of practical way to apply that, and there are questions, but there are answers to those questions. so kind of a traditional point of view. what we are finding in both the discipline of architecture and the discipline of engineering is that these disciplines are beginning to emerge in terms of how they teach. so, you know, in engineering students still are pretty used to being told, okay, do this and give me an answer. that is their habit. they want to do that. increasingly they are being challenged for projects like this to think outside that box

and realize that they're not going to have a final answer. you can't just get out the top killer or the spread sheets and determine what the right answer to any one particular question is. yet the strength and focus on quantitative knowledge is essential to actually be able to accomplish what we want to accomplish. same for the architecture point of view. architects in the past have been somewhat fuzzy sometimes, a little bit aspirational and inspirational and not so much like what does this really mean, what is this going to cost, hell is this actually going to perform. it is really important that the architecture discipline move direction of the engineers and recognize that there is a strength in these disciplines working together and trying to solve problems together. the best educational moments for me, i am giving away something was going to say later, but a moral. i love the moment when the engineering student pauses and says, no, you can't do that

because of the proportions of the rule you talked about will rotate. or we have the architect justin secondly, we can change that. that is absolutely wrong. you know, going to go down. performance will not be what it should. the moment when they have used enough of the language of the other discipline to understand each other and talk to each other and try to solve problems of the moments i get excited. so another important theme in the book is hands on education and the value of people getting out there and taking on with their real hands what it is that they want to do. it is especially true for students involved in this kind of project. architecture students love to design something, but often they decide days that either are not affordable, cannot be built the way that they -- have this before rendering the looks fantastic, but the bill that can be either expensive or difficult to do which is in a related. in terms of engineering

students, you know, they love -- some of them would love to stay in that xl spreadsheet world, really the numbers and the quantitative analysis, but when it comes to applying that and putting it in the real world, some of the love that end is where they really take on the project. others just don't want to have anything to do with that. so the idea of having this opportunity to work with real materials and the real budget and they're real side and client is a fantastic opportunity. i go into that in the history of how that happened. other institutions and architectural education overtime then in the practice section the basic breakdown of the projects we have done and it becomes more of a narrative about the projects, what we did, why we did it, what problems we had, what we did not solve the you know, what the sides are spending a bit more about the materials are used in the design and why they're reduced in the process we went through. that is more of the straight narrative, and it ends with the work we're doing now. this presentation will be

somewhat related. obviously much shorter than the book, but i will lay of a few of these things. i won't go into great depth of several of those topics. the issue of design build evaluate, i believe that this process of taking something, going through the process of collaborating, working across the discipline and using both qualitative and quantitative methods to assess what you're doing is essential. and the best way to do that i would say is by getting a mixed group of people together and actually physically do something. that is where the bill comes in. we go through this process where the students get trained, safety training, professionals who work with them. they actually build the vast majority of these units except for the rehab units. rehab units, we always have a general contractor. it is simply too complicated but to many unknowns at things that you cannot control. students will sometimes

participate in aspects of that, but most have been designed projects. the one part we don't do is roofing. i like to sleep at night, and that think it is important to have a warranty of a roof. i think it is also important to have a warranty and a mechanical system. the engineering students ought to participate in the installation of it. they are not responsible for. we have a professional team. they hire people directly. then the plumbing and electrical and, inevitably we need a licensed plumber an electrician to take on the scope of work. but beyond that we try to do as much of that as we can. the way we work is a little bit odd because we are not a licensed contractor. and so we work with the partner under their process so that it is technically volunteer labor.

but they take on a lot of it, and the parties to a, you know, be engaged in knows. and so actually a really good educational experience because they are testing the boundaries of what they can actually do from a legal point of view, but by doing that they are learning a lot more. and then the evaluation phase, with humility comes in, where we really try to figure what we have done well and we have not. we do post document evaluations, assessments of the materials and the environmental impact of the vote for various metrics. we also do that as a design process, but sometimes more information becomes available. always more information becomes available after compared to what we knew going in. we try to take those desired positions very seriously, but in every single project we have heard about some material we should not have used for some reason. that actually happened within a month of the project being done.

we heard about a couple of things we do differently. and we also do monitoring. this is where the engineering team really gets excited. they really want to learn how these things perform. how they perform compared to the simulation that might have been done by the previous team. and you know so far they have performed pretty well. our very first test we had the most information on. it is performing in terms of energy use between it 60 and 65 percent better than a comparable house of the same size. that's good. it's a strong, solid house. we are very pleased. always aiming higher. we aspire to zero net energy and the most recent house we did, the one that is on the cover of the book. i don't think we're quite there. it interest of true honesty it is not quite there yet. i think one of the most important things to remember with anybody making any promises about something like that is

that it all really on some level and, no matter how much you do depends upon the occupant and what their habits are, preferences. so unless you have a huge over a that way oversize any kind of love that a person could bring to it, it isn't always possible to get the zeroth energy. and so that is just something that i want to put out there. we have spoken. all of our homeowners and renters that live in these spaces, we speak with them about that. how their habits contribute to the reduction in the bottom line on the utility bills. it's an important thing for them to understand. and so that is part of the educational process for the homeowners. as dan said, we have been a series of projects. also quick example, one slight each, talk a little bit about them and see if you can get a better sense of them and then talk about some of the projects we are doing in the future. we have done a total of nine

housing units so far, but some of them are duplexes. the very first house is a two unit condominium here in charlottesville. and then the unit that we did of the fourth street is also a duplex unit in the sense that there is a test to start drilling yet. so anyway, the very first project was with fewer housing let's. ..

>> it's such a fantastic place to live. the partnership we mentioned with dan, this was a project that came about where, you know, a tighter budget, typically a tighter budget, and that comes from having a demographic that is a lower area medium income demographic, and the complexities of working with habitat. they have certain constraints, processes to work through, that i think is very important and

exciting process, but something the students had to learn about, how do we work with this organization? it was a different agenda. the experience with habitat previously was a different one. we had, i think, a really productive relationship, and we were able to achieve our budget for just the building, and dan knows the story well of us discovering in the ex-- excavation that it was a very complicated process for the excavation and discovered there were tons, literally tons of huge tons of concrete buried just below the surface on this site and had been a dumping ground to be years. it's a classic affordable housing lot, and classic affordable housing organizations end up with these lots.

the city donated the property to habitat, and they didn't realize it at the time, and so it ended up being a very complicated process. it's fair to say it cost as much to excavate and putt in utilities as it did to do the house itself. you're closer on the numbers than myself, and so it was a big deal. it really was a painful experience for everybody concerned. the students had to figure out the best way to respond to this. all we can do really is the excavation. we were at the stage where there was not a design change that would be possible, but there was a single design change that made it better, less expensive to respond to that, and that's the students moved the unit and turned it 90 degrees. those of you who know the house

over on elliot, it was supposed to face the street and be further away from the house next to it, but by moving and rotating it, we minimized the amount of excavation necessary that would send the cost up higher. in the end, it's better that way. that's just my opinion. here's the images. the very tight house. we had square footage guidelines we had to stick to, and it's 900 square feet in the main part of the building, and then because it had to be two story, it's in the historic district, had to be two story, had to have stories, tried to squeeze storage and a powder room in the stair, so it came from the requirement of habitat and additional square footage was allowed to us to get up to the second floor. when you have such tight square

footage, an increase in the ceiling height and connection of windows going all the way through in both direction make a house feel larger. the response we great is the house feels so much larger than what it is. it's a design trick. it's not a fancy architecture thing, but a smart design thing that if you think it through and do it carefully, it can be successful. that design we have now are adapting that design and turning it into a 4-bedroom town home project in southwestern virginia with the tobacco identification commission, a commission where they take the tobacco settlement money that came to the state of virginia and put it in economic development in the tobacco footprint of virginia. i share a grant with the colleague of mine who does a similar project focus the on transitional post disaster relief housing, and we are

working with partners down there, my part of it is we work with southside outregion and people incorporated to do two units in each place for a total of four units. they'll be exactly the same, and they're going to be monitored so that we can really see the difference that the occupant makes based on the performance. it's an interesting opportunity for us to be able to do that. the challenge is that it's totally different demographics. people incorporated is like a housing alliance, slightly higher, you know, area median income target they want to achieve for the project. they have a full range, but a slightly higher target, and southside outreach has a slightly lower demographic they are trying to reach, and the differences at people incorporated is it's a home ownership experience for them, and they -- people from southside outreach do it as

rentals, and transition rentals, people getting experience with how to be a home owner, get a credit rating to become a home owner. it's a transitional type of housing, not transitional in the traditional term of transitional, but transitioning into home ownership. it's thickening now, and it's complicated. once you try to take our fantastic design, pleased with it, there's all little things that when you work with a modular builder, and i don't know if you can see the floor plans, but we adapted them to be four bedrooms now. the cardinal homes build the units, and we're commercializing the units. they will be commercially available as of september of this year, it's a big transition. the other thing we tried to do is aim forñr the passive house standard which is essentially a zero net energy house standard where you really improve the

building envelope. we always tried to do it, but never progressively pursued it, and through this grant, we're aiming towards that. i don't know that we're going to get there to be perfectly honest because the difficultly we're having in trying to work with the -- it's not the problem with the design, but a problem of the cost associated with certain aspects of making the right building envelope, and in particular, the windows is extensive now. the prices are coming down. we hope a year from now, we can afford to get them in affordable housing units. it's the challenge we face with the unit. it's a great challenge. we have a productivity relationship with the partners and cardinal homes people. it's been such a great learning experience for everybody involved. that's the lot in south boston. i just learned on saturday in the most recent visit there the partner in boston and southside outreach are interested in

pieing the apartment houses object left. we hope that will begin to happen because it's, boy, that's ripe for any kind of improvement. they are in really bad shape, and they are fully occupied. there's people who the housing market is very depressed down there, lot a lot of jobs in south boston, and it's not section aid housing, but it was until somewhat recently, and it may become section aid housing again after the rehab if that happens. the first project we did was here in the city of char charlottesville. is that the way to say it? the backyard of this house. the remod is in the side yard, i guess, is the way to say it, and this was a really interesting project. it's now a home for local energy alliance program, a non-profit focused on doing presentations and educational programs for

students and homeowners and contractors, and sub contractors to learn about sustainable building. it's right directly in alignment with our goals; however, it's not affordable housing. there is a dwelling unit in the basement there that's not legally considered affordable housing, but it is an affordable rental down there. it was a complicated process, but the reality is now it's a great opportunity for them to run their programs and that program, if you have not heard about it, look into it. we, over the years, we talked about maybe doing something down in jamaica, the most recent project we did. this is a long term relationship that the school of architecture has with the renewal on the north coast of jamaica. if you think of jamaica, you think of resorts, but this is a low income city, but a fascinating city in that it was colonial, british colonial built, center of the slave trade

and sugar trade, of course, which is related in jamaica's history. they are tightly related, and lot of interesting old houses in this community that are not necessarily very well respected by the jamaicans. they want new concrete structures because they have the perception it's better in the hurricane, but that makes them less comfort l in the heat and humidity of the climate, and we make the case with structures that are lighter, breathable, allow, you know, but also have earthquake and hurricane resistant structures to them, it may be a better solution for them. we are trying to reintroduce the wood structure. we learned not to select a house before you've done a really careful assessment of the number of turmites that made it a home. you could have maybe guessed that from the pond in the

backyard, but we actually had to tear it down. it got rebuilt as it was. this is a weir fake old house, new house thing. it's a very nice house. there's an addition still going on behind it to the old new house or new old house, however you refer to it. it was a fantastic experience for the students to see the reality of that and really understand how these things deeply impact their lives. what we learned is if we do this again, when we may do in the next couple years, we'll be careful about the house selection and careful about the review process. our partners said, oh, it's fine, we don't need approvals. you know, we're the most stin gent on these -- stringent on these things in the whole country. they are a group that have structures, and people in the organization sit on the national board. well, they didn't quite have

that guess right. there was a six month's delay in finishing that house. it's finishing this week in fact. back to it, one last project to talk about, just starting a partnership with ahip. habitat of humanity with greater charlottesville and leap, the local energy alliance program, and that try trifecta, we'll work with them to look at the neighbor to see if there's a logic to either rehab, probably mostly rehab, maybe one or two build depending how things go and what money's available, but doing a series of rehabs of homes on their list. amazing organizations that are extraordinarily creative rethinking the business model with funding they used to get is drying up, so they want other funding and have creative ways

of responding to the situation and moving into a strong fundraising mode as well, and so we're working with them on helping them assess what the needs are, basically, my students working now with their staff to help their staff, and starting to come up with ideas and financial models and various things to figure out what the real solution will be there. now i think it's time for questions and answers. right there. >> if you don't mind waiting until the microphone gets to you. >> oh, yeah. >> there's an as thetic quality to curves opposed to right angles. >> yeah. >> these structures look boxy, is there any way or have you

done houses that have less of right angles, you know, and more of a quality on the outside. is that possible in both of your endeavors? >> i would say, yeah, modular, you can build anything. with modular, any perception you have that it has to be boxes and rectangle, that's not true. it can be anything. anything can cost money, and so there's two answers to that. one is the as thetic question and the other is technical question about shapes and all of that. one of the challenges is that this is a community that has a lot of beautiful older homes, and i personally live in one, and i love old homes. mine's an old country store, and it's a slightly different model,

and i believe in the importance of them. i truly believe they have to be saved and protectedñi and not ruined. i feel that very deeply, and i feel that more strongly over the last few projects we've been doing, and i've been educated a lot by the preservation community and by louis nelson and daniel bluestone about these issues. i also wear another hat in the school of architecture, we're a school, and we generally don't design things like they were designed 100 years ago or 200 years ago depending on which funder of what university you're thinking of, and so the issue nor us is, if jefferson were alive today, he actually wouldn't design what we think of as jefer --

jeffersonian because he was cutting edge. we can't afford to be on the cutting edge. there's more extreme formal, meaning shapes, materials, and design strategies that are happening in the world of architecture today we can't do on the project because we just can't afford them, and so that is a tempering for the architecture students coming in kind of realizing, you know, i want to do this and that, and i'm like, you know, we have real budget, real clients, and the more money you spend on your ego for that shape, there's less for habitat. it tempers it quickly. it is possible to do simple things outside of that, kind of relatively boxy look that came out of this, absolutely.

they can, in some cases, be done affordably. we have not done it yet. we almost did on one of these projects, and cost-wise it would have been 3w0*u9 the same, and it just -- about the same, and it just didn't happen. this is the process i go through in a collaborative process where i try to empower the team of students to make these decisions, and i have an influence on it. i certainly do, and i recognize that, but i also drive students crazy sometimes because they'll ask me to do this or that, and i say, well, you got to decide. think about this, this, and, this, but you got to decide. they like that, but they are also frustrated because they just want to be told, do this or don't do this, and i think they learn far more from going through the critical thinking of reaching decisions themselves. does that answer your question? i mean, i've done more of that stuff in my own personal work, but you're right, it's become

relatively angular. >> in the interest of disclosure, have -- i'm the building code official of the county -- [laughter] john, we talked to you weeks ago, i think, with the decathlon project. >> exactly. >> anyway, do you have any particular building code related experiences or antedotes to share? you were going into the architect and engineer thing, but there's code guys out there, too. >> the odd thing about what we do is if we were a modular company, and you are probably familiar with it, modular companies have a regulatory process that they go through of inspections and a variety of thing, and because we're not a modular company, we don't go through that. what we end up doing is the projects that have been in charlottesville, we actually had the charlottesville building

officials go out to the county where our hanger is, and we have them do inspections out there, and the thing that's really been extraordinary is they really like doing that. you know, they really like the kind of odd because it changes their kind of normal habit with what they are thinking about, what they have to consider when they look at it, and they have to look at it as if it was built, but they look at it away from the site, so we have a lot of, actually, you know, interesting experiences from that. leslie might be able to share more directly those experiences because she was a student leader involved in making that actual experience happen. the code issues, the thing i noticed in general is i'm pleased to see the energy codes tightening up. i think that helps us within our projects because it allows us to get to a bias line now where we were aiming for earlier, and as things get more rigorous, hopefully that will continue to

evolve, and the other thing that i would say about code issues is that it's a fantastic learning experience for students because to be perfectly honest in architecture school, they get a sense there is a code and they have to do a quick code review in a class, but when they actually have to look at where, you know, an electrical outlet needs to go to be able to make a building official happy or what structural analysis needs to happen to get past a code official and i don't say that in a negative way, but to get pass the the official, the next step, you actually have to run the numbers and think it through. there's been weird anomalies we notice in the code, but nothing painful to deal with. code is our friend. i mean, i really believe that.

>> i spent on two different occasions, three weeks with habitat in new orleans in the lower 9th ward, and totally understand your concerns that it was an experience, i'll put it that way. i'm a professional george, -- professional engineer, working 40 # years for retailers. we talked knocking down cost z -- costs as the number one thing. you have to have something that looks like something otherwise people won't go there, but you need affordable. you talked about that. what in your terms define affordability? >> well, there's many ways to define it. in the terms of the broadest sense, federal government uses the definition that if a family or an individual is not spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs, meaning rent or,

you know, mortgage or insurance and all of that, then they're in affordable in that sense, housing, and so, there's a lot of interesting research out there that looks at how stressed people have become about affordability and how much more 30% people spend on their housing, and it's the other way to look at it is in terms of area median income, and every non-profit that i worked with has had their and target market within their -- and maybe i'll turn it to you in a second to talk habitat -- those targets, i don't think it's fair to say they moved, but expanded. more people qualify for affordable housing today than there were five years ago, and there is a sense that there are some below certain percentage of area median income that it's very, very difficult to get them

into anything other than rental housing. in terms of home ownership, it requires, you know, people who've got a good credit history and a regular job and at an income they can afford whatever payments necessary, and so this sounds like a cop out, but we also define affordability by however our partner defines affordability, and that's probably the best way for us to do it. i'll give you another quick answer on costs, though, because i think that's embedded in the question as well. we have had per square foot costs at 5 relatively wide range, the habitat project in the gulf coast was $65 per square foot best as we could track it, and that's soup to nuts, but a lot of donated material like any has habitat project has. the habitat project we did here was more than that per square foot, but in line with the target that we were given to

complete the project at except for all that site work that busted our budget. the renovation prompt, the first historic house project i talked about, that was well over $200 per square foot, i believe, and we didn't see the numbers because way that dealing directly with the contractor on that, but it was not close to being affordable in terms of what a normal pha budget would be, but the dwelling unit, we met that target. affordable housing, especially for some of these partners, the cost is not necessarily that different from market rate housing. sometimes only a little bit lower. sometimes right in the same range. the other thing that's interesting is that i have found that some affordable housing is actually better quality, just standard affordable housing, not talking our stuff, but standard affordable housing is better

quality than what you find in the market rate, and that's to do with the lack of a profit motive, and the good intentions of the people involved in affordable housing organization who really believe that they want to do the best that they can do for those homeowners. now, that's very different for section 8 housing and very different for very low rental income housing, of course, that's a more subtle answer. maybe dan can -- >> it's a question i could talk on for three hours, but i won't. [laughter] the city defines affordable as affordable as someone making less than 80% of the median income. we define it as 25% to 60% of the median income. that depends on family size. that could be anyone making $13,000 to a family of four that makes in the mid-40s. those are the families we select in the program. we're very, very count

conscious. we count nails. more importantly, the mat. we look to maximize them, and there's a difference between post closing and pre-closing. if we can save a family, $25 to $100 a month on energy costs, they can afford to take on a bigger mortgage, and we recapture money quicker to serve more families. we know the up front costs of making a home function better from an efficiency perspective is better for the bottom line long term. ..

get that becomes something that we adopt standards, so, for example, we're building to a minimal earth craft standard now, and we've completed five lead homes. we build now, we're moving to energystar 3.0 because the standards are a little stricter, but where we get our points is not through solar panels or geothermal, it's through another thousand dollars of caulk per building because what do we have? fingers of volunteers, and they love caulking because it's something they can do. so we'll caulk the heck out of a

home, we'll make it super tight. we actually have to go back into our homes these days and find ways to get air back into buildings because they're so tight. so that's how we take advantage of what we have to make a home more affordable long term for our families while keeping costs down up front as well. it's a great question, thank you. >> can you say a little bit about the southwood, the mobile home unit? i don't know if that's under you or under piedmont. >> yeah, habitat for humanity in greater char lotsville owns the southwood mobile home park. one of the largest drivers toward home housing unaffordability is land costs and escalating land costs. and in the early part of this decade, the very beginning of last decade you could buy a

buildable lot in the city of charlottesville for about 10-$130,000. by 2004 that was $80,000. you can't put an affordable home on that kind of land without massive subsidy. happen at the went out looking -- habitat went out looking for development opportunities to take advantage of accelerated land costs because we think that's more sustainable. habitat had an opportunity in 2005 to purchase the sunrise mobile home, sunrise trailer court it was called in belmont. it had been under contract with a private developer who was going to do what builders do, give residents the minimal amount of time legally required, kick 'em out and build luxury condos there. we purchased that contract from that developer, and we promised the residents who lived there that they could stay for the rest of their lives in affordable housing if they chose to. we are just now, i'm incredibly

proud of this at sunrise, we're halfway through building now after many, many years of planning, and keeping our promise to those residents, we're building 22 new habitat homes, and we're selling 30 market-rate lots. so at the end of the day what had been atydilapidated 16-unit trailer park is now for the first time going to be a mixed-income development without displacing residents. it's going to be a green neighborhood in the heart of charlottesville. in 2007 because we had a rep talking as the trailer -- reputation as the trailer park people, we were given the opportunity to purchase thewood mobile home park just south of town. that's a question of scale that we're, what we're in the planning for now is to figure out how we can do the same thing, redevelopment without displacing residents, but we're talking 350 trailers now on 100 acres of land. we think this is the single greatest opportunity to take a bite out of the local affordable housing crisis, the single

greatest land opportunity that there is, and, um, the challenges are enormous, but the opportunity is great, and the reality is we have a moral obligation to take care of the residents who live there. and so we're going to live up to that. >> and i had a follow up on that question? when you're talking about that, are they going to be in -- are they getting into a building as opposed to a trailer? is that what -- in the sunset that you were talking about, they're actually in a building? >> yes, ma'am. >> yeah. fantastic building that they've worked many years to create. it's an amazing story. it's a story that is, dan's being a little bit modest. it's actually impacting people in other communities, it's becoming well known as this kind of national model of how habitat affiliates can have a much deeper impact rather than an individual unit, but multiple units. i'm going to jump on the southwood thing and say one of the reasons why we're doing the grant was the tobacco commission tried to commercialize and work closely with the modular builder

and make our units commercially available is that if we can then get them out there into the marketplace for affordable housing organizations where they won't have to pay, you know, anything other than a token fee for the licensing and just pay for the building costs f we can get that in a per-square-foot cost range that makes sense and it it can be a high performance house, that's like the gold standard. i don't know that we're going to quite get there in this first year, but we've got our costs coming back, and the costs are looking good, but right now we're between 65 and $80 per square foot for just the modulars. that's not site work and all that kind of stuff. and, you know, that's in a range where, you know, depending on the performance standard we can achieve with that, that does, actually, put it into the marketplace for affordable housing organizations. >> we have time for maybe two more questions.

>> hi. i want to introduce myself as one of the residents of the ecomod one. >> ah -- >> in the lower level. >> i haven't met you yet. i just saw kristin and corey last week. >> yeah, i see them all the time. [laughter] but i love it -- >> we didn't actually design that part. >> yeah. and that's one of my questions -- >> yeah. >> it's very different from the upstairs. so i assume that it was left to the buyer to finish off -- >> no, it was actually done by pha. when they decided to convert it to a unit condo, my team was gone already, and pha said, don't worry about it, we'll take it on. and they did the finish-off work. it was an empty basement when we were done. >> that's one-oi questions -- own -- one of my questions. the gentleman that purchased it died, and it went into foreclosure, and it had no

appliance manual or anything in it, so i know nothing about it, how it was finished off, and i have lots of questions now because i want to do things to it. >> yeah. >> and my, one of my big questions is who do i contact to find out, you know, where this came from, what material was used -- >> i can give you the name after this. >> oh, that will be wonderful. and i'll buy your book. [laughter] >> you don't have to do that. [laughter] thank you. >> one last question in the back. >> i was just wondering what are the green materials of the future, and how will you incorporate those into the home? >> i have a, i have some strong opinions about this. um, and i'm going to share some of them real briefly. i think we should be avoiding vinyl in everything. i think we should avoid it in wiring, i think we should avoid it in siding, i think we should avoid it in every way we can. the impacts are very substantial

and not well recognized in the u.s. but well recognized in other parts of the world. so alternative versions, anything that replaces vinyl, i think, is a good thing as long as it's reducing environmental impact. i write a little bit about this in here. i kind of look to michael pollard and the whole kind of food movement when i try to think about what good material should be. my feeling is they ought to be as simple as possible and as close to nature as possible and as little processing as possible. um, and we haven't always done that, to be perfectly honest. we have used insulations that we now know we shouldn't have used. i'll give an example, blue board. and closed-cell foam insulation. a study came out about a year and a half ago that shows those kinds of foam insulations which are perceived to be high performance that people want to do green buildings in the u.s., they're aiming towards using those.

those insulations and when you look at the energy impact of creating them, they don't pay for themselves in a reasonable amount of time in terms of the additional performance that they add to a project. um, you know, more natural materials generally is a good way to go, sometimes it's hard to get good performance out of them. but, so i'll tell you a kind of weird one right now. there's a new insulation out there. we haven't used it, it's too risky to use with an affordable housing organization from if my point of view. i think we feel we stretch some of our partners. there's certain things we don't do, but one that i'm interested in is a type of i insulation tht is, essentially, mushrooms that grow in the wall. it sounds crazy, like isn't that the thing you want to avoid? [laughter] you actually can grow a type of fungi in the wall that doesn't degrade the building materials and will grow in there, and it takes about a week to expand and fill the space, and you have something comparable to foam

insulation. there needs to be some more testing on that. [laughter] so we'll have to wrap, we'll have to wrap up. >> i do have to say one thing just to add to that. my favorite alternative product that we've used has been blue jean insulation. these are recycled blue jeans that they get reused, otherwise they'd be in landfill, but they actually have a high value, and it's very cheap to produce. so, um, with that oddity, um, i want to thank everybody for coming, um, and ask you one more time to give professor quale a round of applause for his work. [applause] >> this talk was part of the 2012 virginia festival of the book held annually in charlottesville. in a few minutes, we'll be back with a panel on world war ii's hidden heroes. >> laura ingraham, a big conservative author, what is the

message to the c pack folks here? >> don't be so anxious, it's all going to work out. we'll all unite. and if you're a republican nominee and you become president, we're going to hold you accountable at that point. people have been burned before, they don't want to be burned again. so it's a gut check for a lot of people here, but i don't get this sense that people are afraid and fretful. i think people are really excited, and i think from what i've seen so far, all the candidates have done a great job. i think we're going to hear a lot more in the coming days, and this is all good. this is not a bad thing, this is a very good thing that happened today. >> how do you effect the race? >> santorum's, obviously, experiencing the surge that a lot of other candidates have experienced. the question is, is he going to be able to take the heat now? romney's going to turn it up, and he has the organization to do it. you can fly by the seat of your pants for a while, so he's going to have to step it up. >> thank you, good luck saturday. >> all right. we love grip. how are ya?

>> good, how are you? >> great. here you go. thank you. take care of yourself. hi, how are ya? >> hello. >> sorry, my head was down. >> hi. >> hi, how you doing? >> good, how are you? >> good. having fun? >> nice to meet you. >> they'll do it for you. >> they said they won't. >> sorry. >> that's okay. >> great, thank you so much. >> take care. all right, bye-bye. hi, how are you? [inaudible conversations] >> thank you, take care. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. have a good one. how are ya? how's it going? >> good. how are you? >> enjoy it. you'll laugh, promise. how are you? >> good, how are you? >> great. enjoy. laugh. how you doing? >> glad you got here. >> oh, i know. sorr