Greening your green...

Deanwood is smack dab in the middle of a GREEN REVOLUTION, babeee!  In 2009 Deanwood was selected by national winner CarbonFreeDC to be a pilot neighborhood for green retrofitting of homes, called Extreme Green Neighborhood Makeover.  Deanwood is a neighborhood of oooold homes with ill-fitting windows, improper insulation, settling, and outdated appliances and this makeover for 10 families was welcomed.  

Deanwoodians were hopeful CarbonFreeDC would find additional funds to retrofit more houses but that's not happened yet.  Just as we were settling back in, lo and behold, Deanwood had the chance to be a site for solar passive house!  Renowned Parsons, New School was in town scoping out the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competition to prepare for its own submission in 2011.  They were also looking for a working class DC neighborhood in which to actualize its brewing thoughts.  (BAM, Deanwood got in the mix! h/t Kim Morton, Shana Mosher, and Dennis Chestnut)  A new component of the competition is affordability of the end product--a house.  Parsons wanted to do more than just design and build a house that would just be a model down on the National Mall and packed up and shipped back to New York.  Noooo, they wanted to design and build a home and leave the home in DC.  Building a home would save on their costs but more importantly it would really embody the spirit of the Solar Decathlon--building real world homes for environmental sustainability and affordability for the builder and the homeowner. 

In March Parsons and its team of students held a community meeting with overwhelming turnout and excitement for this opportunity--still a lot of neighbors wanting retrofits but also wanting to actually learn about the process and help build the home (that's Deanwoodians for ya, always learning and helping).  Parsons had already committed to build the Deanwood-Parsons Solar House regardless of its selection into the Decathlon which makes it all the more sweeter to know Parsons WILL be one of 20 collegiate teams in the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competition!

This weekend Deanwoodenizen is headed to NYC to get an update on the students' work to make the Deanwood-Parsons Solar House a reality.  I'm psyched about the opportunity to cross the intersection of affordability, quality housing, and environmental sustainability!  Stay tuned, better yet get involved!  Send a comment so you can get linked in to the GREEN REVOLUTION, babeee!