Townhouse & Condo Green Living
Shared spaces mean shared opportunities to go greener. A quick pat on the back: your shared walls are helping keep your energy bills in check. The fewer exterior walls your unit has, the lower your home’s exposure to the elements and the less your heating and cooling system has to work. There’s more good news: in addition to the changes you can make inside your home, think about how you can work with your neighbors to give your common areas an earth-friendly makeover.
End the parking wars. Lobby for a convenient and secure area for bicycles, or even a dedicated parking space for a car-share service like Zipcar. In addition to taking a few cars off the road, it may reduce the number of disputes over spaces, stickers and the like.
Cool down. Reduce the heat-island effect with strategic landscaping and hardscaping. Use light-colored paving materials, mulch flowerbeds, and plant trees to shade the building(s) and parking lot. You can even investigate installing a green roof to insulate your building from extremes of hot and cold.
Go native. Trust us, the world doesn’t need any more English ivy. Instead of filling your community’s landscape with exotic or invasive plant species, use native ones. Because native plants evolved with your area’s particular conditions in mind, they use less water, resist pests better and require less attention than their pushy, high-strung cousins.
Protect clean water and healthy streams in your community
Issue: A typical 10-acre surface parking lot will create 270,000 gallons of storm water after a one-inch rainstorm. The polluted runoff generally contains high levels of oil and grease, sediment, salt, heavy metals and bacteria.
Good news: A mature urban forested area can reduce a drainage basin's peak storm-water runoff by 10 - 20%. Source: www.AmericanRivers.org