Charleston, Fayetteville Chosen for Home Depot Sustainable Cities Program

Charleston, South Carolina and Fayetteville, Arkansas have been selected as the pilot cities for a Home Depot-sponsored program that will attempt to implement lasting sustainability programs at the local level.

The Home Depot Foundation’s Sustainable Cities Institute (SCI) announced the three-year, $1 million initiative, designed to provide immediate cost savings for these cities and their
residents and also to be easily replicable in other communities.

“The term ‘sustainability plan’ often leads to skepticism or indifference because people don’t know what it means for them. We want to demonstrate through these pilot cities that real efficiencies and budget savings can be achieved by proactive planning in areas like energy use, waste and recycling, and building maintenance,” said Kelly Caffarelli, president, The Home Depot Foundation.

The Sustainable Cities Institute will support each pilot city with $500,000 in funding from The Home Depot Foundation plus a full-time local coordinator. In addition, SCI will provide ongoing technical assistance from sustainability experts, such as the Urban Land Institute and the Center for Neighborhood Technology.

City of Charleston in partnership with The Sustainability Institute of South Carolina set the following goals:  

• Achieve significant utility savings by conducting energy assessments and retrofits on 200 single-family residential homes within the City of Charleston, including historic, low- to moderate-income households, and affordable housing units.
• Provide substantial and verifiable data on the current condition of Charleston’s residential building stocks, best practices for energy efficiency retrofits, and savings potential.
• Create a specialized curriculum to teach energy efficient renovations for historic structures in hot humid climates; and enhance the City’s Green Collar Workforce and energy efficiency services industry through industry growth and sustainable jobs.
• Provide data needed to reduce the environmental impact of Charleston’s built environment, as well as arm Charleston’s building industry with the skilled labor force and resources it needs to integrate energy efficiency as a standard of building practices.

City of Fayetteville in partnership with the National Center for Appropriate Technology set these goals:

• Build approximately 40 ENERGY STAR-certified homes for low- to-moderate-income families in the Walker Park neighborhood, which will advance goals for healthy, affordable housing, improve access to alternative transportation corridors and increase economic opportunity in the area.
• Design and build the new neighborhood to meet LEED for Neighborhood Development Standards, ensuring the principles of smart growth and energy efficient design are included. For instance, due to the existing urban forest on the site, the neighborhood will serve as a model design for maximized tree canopy conservation and urban cooling eco-services. A community garden is also included in the site design.
• Develop a Low Impact Development (LID) Drainage and Engineering Specifications Manual to provide technical guidance for developers as the city works to reduce non-point source pollution through storm water run-off into its 100 miles of streams, which drain into local drinking water reservoirs. This manual will be field tested immediately in the Walker Park neighborhood. This manual will serve as a national model for how to implement LID specifications into mainstream site design standards. In addition, a teaching/ demonstration area will be implemented in the Walker Park neighborhood development.
• Extend a section of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Multi-Trail system to the Walker Park neighborhood, providing residents with inexpensive transportation options and opportunities to further reduce overall vehicle traffic in Fayetteville.

Charleston and Fayetteville were chosen through a competitive selection process, including a site visit and extensive review by SCI partners, including experts from Southface and the Center for Neighborhood Technology.