Is it really possible for a neighborhood to be green? Absolutely! Our neighborhood was designed as a street-car suburb before the automobile era. The basic design and location of our neighborhood that made sense almost a hundred years ago makes it conducive to reducing energy consumption and the impact on our environment today.

A medium density mixed-use neighborhood near downtown may not be the first thing you thought of when you saw the term “green neighborhood”. It may seem counterintuitive— but if you imagined a suburban neighborhood with large lots and big lawns between the homes as a more likely candidate you would be exactly wrong. Spread-out development gobbles up huge amounts of land. What’s more, suburban residents consume more fuel for transportation just doing basic tasks such as driving to work, the grocery and school. In addition, the design of such neighborhoods precludes most alternatives such as walking or public transportation.

We take our neighborhood for granted, but it’s important to contrast suburban development with the basic layout of our neighborhood, starting with the fact that we are just a few minutes to downtown, shopping, entertainment, parks, churches, schools, etc. Many of us enjoy a very short commute to work—saving time, aggravation and energy. Having the essential destinations close-by is important, especially when gasoline is $3.40 a gallon.

Living in a neighborhood that is walkable, with sidewalks, compact lots and destinations to which we can walk or bicycle is also important. The mixed use design, with commercial areas on the outside edges within walking distance, was part of the original design of our neighborhood. The street-cars are gone, but public transportation is still a viable option that saves fuel and money for parking- particularly if you work downtown. And although transportation options won’t eliminate the need for a car entirely, they do open up the possibility of having one less car in the family.

In addition, while our homes come in a variety of sizes, many of them are more compact than what is being built today. It potentially takes much less energy to heat, cool and light a smaller home than a large home. Living in an existing home, even if you do significant improvements to it, saves energy and materials over building a new home. Fully one-third of the cost of building a home is in the energy used to manufacture the materials and build the home – not to mention the demand for raw materials such as lumber.

However, many of our homes are nearing 100 years old and were built without much concern for energy efficiency. It will be important to reposition our homes for a future where energy is more expensive and less available. In future articles, we will talk about ways we can make our individual homes more energy efficient, save money, and reduce the impact on the environment— and do so without diminishing the architectural design that makes our homes unique. For now, it’s good to know that the basic design of our entire neighborhood reduces the impact on the environment.

Emerson Heights was designed and developed as a transit-oriented, walkable community before New Urbanism was cool. Recent improvements— such as street trees, the Emerson Avenue project and changing IPS boundaries so that our children can attend neighborhood schools – complement and enhance our walkable neighborhood. We should be flattered that the basic design of our neighborhood is something that new communities, such as Carmel and The Village of West Clay, are trying to emulate.


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