A Zero-Energy Community: Part 8

zHome has always really been two things in one—an on the ground, for sale, speculative development, and a market transformation and education process. With the completion of the community in September of last year, we rolled directly into my main raison d’etre on zHome, which is using the community to redefine the paradigm for green housing regionally. This last Fall, zHome came full circle to its original vision, which was to change how of a number of audiences—builders, architects, designers, homebuyers, and the general public—understand the ecological footprint homes have, and how that footprint can be radically reduced.

During construction, we had a monthly walkthrough, where people could get a behind-the-sheetrock view of what we were doing. These tours proved greatly successful, typically running 20-30 folks each month. In addition, we did regular construction blogs and videos on our website.

But the main event was from September 14th through October 31st, when we ran tours and programs at zHome 7 days a week. During weekends, we held continuous tours for the general public, with a group of fantastic guides drawn from the local green building and architectural community. On weekdays, we held dozens of tours for companies, schools, and organizations—lots of architecture firms, but also contractors, cities, and developers. The pace was steady, and by the end of October nearly 10,000 people had toured the site. I was ably assisted in managing it all by Elizabeth Coe, a former elementary school teacher and recent graduate of the Sustainable Building Advisor course at Olympic College.

In addition to onsite education, we worked hard to get regional and national media coverage of the project, which we were quite successful with. Things got off to a bang on September 2 with live video coverage from the Wall Street Journal. By the end of the open houses, we had great coverage by the New York Times, NPR, a front page Sunday Seattle Times story, Global Post (a terrific video piece), Treehugger, Mother Nature Network, Jetson Green, and TV coverage by several local stations. To get this level of national recognition felt great of course, but more importantly helped spread the word that radically green homes with zero need for fossil fuels are possible today.

We spent a ton of time making sure our tours were top caliber, and I think we achieved that goal. Tours started with an introductory video featuring Denis Hayes, founder of Earth Day, president of the Bullitt Foundation, and zHome friend. The video was filmed and produced by Sheila Mullen and Valerie Vozza, the dynamic duo behind Nancy Guppy’s ArtZone show. We then labored for hundreds of hours to produce a fantastic set of signs which graphically described the technologies and specifications of the community. Erin Gehle of SoftFirm Studios did a wonderful job with the graphics on the signs. With this base of support our tour guides provided superb, in-depth education about zHome.

In addition to our live tours, we also put together a number of in-depth educational videos running off of our website. These have proved popular and provide folks with more background of a number of technologies.

It was an enormous amount of work, but at the end of the day I’m thrilled with how we’ve done in changing the thought landscape in our area. I was recently at Salmon Safe’s annual award ceremony and the MC asked how many in the room knew about zHome. About 2/3rds of the hands went up. That’s pretty good brand recognition. Ichijo USA is already planning future developments which feature many of the technologies in zHome, and I know other builders are looking to follow suit. I think in ten years we are going to be amazed by the pace of change in the home building world.