Full Title: Expert Meeting Report: Retrofit Implementation – A Neighborhood at a Time
Author(s):
Publisher(s): U.S. Department of Energy
Publication Date: April 1, 2012
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Residential construction booms over the decades have produced large tracts of homes of similar technical characteristics, i.e. age, style, size, and construction specifications. For example, row houses are a prevalent urban housing type characterized by shared walls and one to four apartments. There are more than 680,000 one- to four- family homes in New York City alone. Likewise, Levittown, Pennsylvania is comprised of 17,000 homes constructed in the 1950s using only six house plans. Thousands of ranch style homes were built in the Southwest in the 1960s.
A common hypothesis is that packages of retrofit measures can be defined and then applied on a broad scale across entire neighborhoods of similar homes. CARB has been involved in several initiatives including Block by Block in New York City, a scoping study in Levittown, Pennsylvania, neighborhood stabilization in Clark County, Nevada, and SmartRegs in Boulder, Colorado. PARR, together with team member Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), are characterizing the existing housing market in Illinois’ Cook County and developing appropriate retrofit packages. ARBI is administering and providing technical support to three targeted large-scale retrofit programs in California.