With successful green building programs like EarthCraft House, Metro Atlanta is slowly defining what it means to be green in the Southeast US. The city now has over 5,500 EarthCraft certified homes and condos and six EarthCraft communities. The standards have proven to be so successful at producing homes that Georgians want to live in that they’ve been adopted in Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
The EarthCraft standards were developed for Metro Atlanta in 1999 as way to measure and encourage energy efficient building practices in the booming Metro Atlanta region. In order to be certified by the EarthCraft program, homes have to meet standards for environmental impact, pollution prevention, energy efficiency, comfort and conservation.
The real estate market in Metro Atlanta is now full of homes with the EarthCraft seal of approval. The program offers training and technical assistance to builders interested in building green homes. After just eight years, hundreds of builders in Georgia specialize in building certified Earthcraft houses.
Though it may feel good to live in a green home, the popularity of the EarthCraft standards and...