The passive house trend is booming
On the morning of June 7, 2023, New York City woke to a sky of orange haze as the smoke from Canadian wildfires blew in from hundreds of miles away. It was a health hazard - city authorities said the air quality had not been as bad since the 1960s. That day, Chad Dickerson, a former CEO of Etsy, put up a number of air quality monitors around his Brooklyn townhouse. “It was pretty much 100 percent pure the whole time,” he says.
Dickerson’s house escaped the intense wildfire smoke because of one crucial decision he and his partner made when renovating their home from late 2018 through 2021: to make it a passive house. Passive houses are designed to be as energy efficient as possible, typically with top-notch insulation and a perfect seal that prevents outside air from penetrating the home; air flows in and out through filtration and exhaust systems only. Their benefits include protection from pollution and pollen, noise insulation and a stable indoor temperature that minimizes energy needs. That translates to long-term savings on heating and cooling.
While the concept has been around for about 50 years, experts say that the United States is on the cusp of a passive house boom, driven by lowered costs, state-level energy code changes and a general greater awareness of - and desire for - more sustainable housing.
In terms of the growth of passive house building rates, “what we’re experiencing right now is absolutely bonkers,” says Zack Semke, the director of the Passive House Accelerator, a group of industry professionals who aim to spread lessons in passive house building. He points to data from Phius, a passive house certifying organization, which certified 1.82 million square feet of passive house projects in 2021. The square footage of passive house projects they have certified in 2024 so far has surpassed 3 million square feet. Meanwhile Massachusetts - which alongside New York and Pennsylvania is one of the leading states in passive house adoption - has 272 passive house projects underway thanks to an incentive program, Semke says. That’s 20,661 housing units totaling 22.6 million square feet.
Consumer demand for passive houses is also increasing, says Michael Ingui, an architect in New York City and the founder of the Passive House Accelerator. When Ingui started working on them 12 years ago, most people didn’t know what a passive house was. Now, at least half of clients come to him specifically requesting one, he says. He attributes this change to two factors: climate change and the pandemic. The need to lower our energy footprint is so much more top-of-mind today than it was 10 years ago, Ingui says, and covid taught us about the importance of good ventilation and filtered fresh air. “People are searching for the healthiest house,” he says, “and that’s a passive house.”
The first wave of passive houses in the United States, which began about 15 years ago, was driven largely by people building or renovating single-family homes, Ingui says. These early projects tended to be expensive. For one, they typically were more high-end, luxury houses. Plus, there were fewer builders who knew how to construct passive houses, putting a premium on that knowledge, he says.
A second wave began in the mid-2010s, as developers of apartment complexes and affordable housing projects started to embrace the idea, Semke says. A prime example is the Sendero Verde building in New York City, which has 709 units of affordable housing and is the largest passive house residential building in the world. Policies and incentive programs, including one in Massachusetts that encourages and mandates higher energy efficiency standards, have boosted this sector of passive house building, Semke says. California, Colorado, Connecticut, Washington and other states are following suit.
These days, new passive houses are usually large, multifamily apartment buildings or high-end single-family homes. But that leaves out a large swath of homeowners in the middle. To widen passive house accessibility to include all types of people and their housing needs, we need better energy codes and even more policies and incentives, says In Cho, a sustainability architect, educator and a co-founder of the nonprofit Passive House for Everyone! Passive houses “can and should serve folks from all socioeconomic backgrounds,” she says. Using a one-two punch of mandates for energy efficient buildings and greater awareness to the public, that increased demand for passive houses will lead to more supply, Cho says. And we’re already seeing those changes in the market.
Take triple-pane windows, for example, which are higher performing and more insulating than their double-pane counterparts. Even just 10 to 20 years ago, the difference in price between the two was high enough to make triple-pane windows cost-prohibitive for a lot of people, Cho says. Over the years, as the benefits of higher performing windows became more well-known, and as cities and states changed their energy codes, more companies began producing better windows. Now they’re basically at price parity, she says. If we keep pushing for greater awareness and further policy changes, it’s possible that all of the components of passive house buildings could follow that trend.
For large multifamily projects, we’re already seeing price parity in some cases, Semke says. Data from Pittsburgh on the costs of affordable housing developments, for example, show that in some years the average cost per square foot of a passive house project was lower than that for conventional construction projects. But as it stands, single-family passive houses are still likely to cost a margin more than non-passive houses, he says. This is because price parity is easier to achieve when working at larger scales, but also because many of the housing policies and incentives encouraging passive house buildings are geared toward these larger projects.
Kara Li and her partner learned about passive houses from Ingui, whom they hired to renovate their Brooklyn carriage house during the early years of the pandemic. They knew it would stretch their budget, but Li says they were already running over budget because they were building during the pandemic, facing supply chain issues and inefficiencies in the construction process.
“And since with construction time is money, delays meant budget increases,” she says. “The passive house surcharge was one of many things that ended up costing more than expected.”
She doubts they will recoup all of those costs through any long-term savings on energy. Still, she says she would do it all again. There are so many benefits that are marked by what you don’t notice: smells or pollution from wildfires, wild temperature swings and excessive dust buildup. And that’s because they’re inside the envelope, protected from outside forces. That has made the expense a worthwhile investment it for them. After all, she says, “we mean for this to be our forever home.”
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Hannah Seo is a science journalist and writer based in Brooklyn.
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