Improving Sustainable Housing in Queensland

Last month (August 2008) the Deputy Premier Paul Lucas released a discussion paper on “Improving sustainable housing in Queensland“.

It consists of a 50 page brochure that explains a range of sustainability features that can be implemented in new homes or retrofitted in old homes.

Water and Energy are the two main components. Safety, security and access also rate a mention. It is a great starting point as it looks not only at the reduced environemental impacts of the actions, but also the financial impact to the individual.

In addition, there are a range of new rules coming into play in the coming years:

Phase out of electric hot water systems in 2010

From 2010 electric hot water systems that break down have to be replaced by solar hot water or gas systems.

Great step forward. Unfortunately it is watered down by a first stage that allows areas that do not have access to reticulated gas to continue buying electric hot water systems.

Sustainability Declaration at point-of-sale and point-of-lease

Whenever a house is sold or rented out, all sustainability features have to be disclosed. On the left you can see a sample of the forms to be used for that.

As this increases the visibility and awareness of sustainable features it is likely that valuations will take them into account. So capital returns migth even increase for sustainable housing.

Note: Greenhouse-efficient hot water (solar, heat pump, gas) is the first on the list.

All new houses need to be built to a 5-star rating

This could start to come into force as soon as January 2009. During the release there was a bit of discussion on how to rate homes without increasing the administration costs for that. Orientation using natural airflows and shading for heating and cooling impacts the strongest on this rating. But it might go into as much details as which building materials are being used.

Lack of Interest

The most surprising thing was that only 20 or 30 people actually came to the release of this paper. There are hundreds of developers and builders on the Sunshine Coast alone that might be impacted by these changes. Are they not interested, because it comes from government? Or because they do not understand sustainability?

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 1:40 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.