Minnesota Housing
The Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR) is providing technical assistance to Minnesota Housing (formerly Minnesota Housing Finance Agency) and its funding partners as they move to further integrate sustainable criteria and strategies into their multi-family and single family affordable housing finance programs.
During the first year of this relationship, CSBR, along with Greater Minnesota Housing Fund (GMHF) and Family Housing Fund (FHF), assisted Minnesota Housing with the assessment and feasibility evaluation of adding sustainable building criteria to the multifamily Super-RFP program. The work built on the Minnesota Green Communities Initiative (a program of the GMHF and FHF) and resulted in the adoption of the Green Communities mandatory criteria with a Minnesota Overlay. The overlay allowed the regional funders to tailor the national criteria to address the state's needs and interests.
Second year work will focus on implementation of Green Communities criteria in the single family new construction program. In addition, CSBR will work on assistance with the evaluation of green projects and the development of protocols for the assessment of project objectives, feasibility, and outcomes. This work will result in tools to help developers, designers, and builder of projects implement cost effective sustainable strategies. The tools will strive to be user friendly and utilize information already being gathered by the agency as part of the funding application process.
Future work with Minnesota Housing will include development of education tools to assist developers and architects regarding integration of sustainable criteria and encourage expanded participation.
Project: Minnesota Housing Technical Assistance
Project Partners: Minnesota Housing
Sponsors: The McKnight Foundation
Status: on going
