Eight affordable housing entities win 2011 Energy Star awards. Two won as New Home Builders of the Year, and six won for Excellence in Affordable Housing. The recognized organizations are:
- Community Housing Partners
- Nashville Area Habitat for Humanity
- Coachella Valley Housing Coalition
- Habitat for Humanity of Elkhart County
- Habitat for Humanity of Metro Denver
- National Housing Trust
- North Carolina Housing Finance Agency
- San Antonio Housing Authority
The criteria for each award were different. For the New Home Builder category, home builders were recognized for having demonstrated "excellence and innovation in building and promoting Energy Star qualified homes." The Affordable Housing category, meanwhile, is meant to recognizes governments, nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations, public housing authorities, or utilities that developed and administered publicly funded, affordable housing programs in 2010 that promoted "the use of Energy Star qualified products in existing homes and/or the Energy Star energy efficiency guidelines for residential new construction."
See all the full list of award winners:
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=pt_awards.showawardlist&year=2011
Green buildings / energy efficiency retrofits are a growing source of jobs. If you're interested in the space, see http://jobs.affordablehousingreport.com for the largest listing of green affordable housing jobs. Or, sign up for our daily round up of jobs and headlines.
About the bloggers:
The Affordable Housing Report ( http://affordablehousingreport.com ) is run by two people:
Emily Allison, Managing Director at the consulting and development firm Duvernay + Brooks ( http://www.duvernaybrooks.com ), and Arul Sundaram, an Internet entrepreneur.
Emily has been in the affordable housing industry since 1998, working for HR&A, Mid City Advisors and Duvernay + Brooks. Arul, meanwhile, had served on the management team for BlackPlanet.com (which was sold to Radio One), Internet Broadcasting (sold in part to Cox) and led AOL Local. In each case, Arul had seen the value of developing a compelling jobs channel. When Duvernay + Brooks needed to hire, Emily described the best solution to finding someone as "emailing all our friends". At that point, they decided a better solution was needed.