Massachusetts is in the middle of a high-performance building boom. More than 34,000 Passive House residential units are in development across the state, building on the more than 2,400 units already completed.
The map below shows the geographic diversity of Passive House projects in development (marked in green). Each dot represents a single unit of housing. Projects have been manually geolocated to ensure correct locations, and then dots have been randomly jittered around their true locations both to improve clarity and protect project confidentiality.
Passive House data are based on internal project tracking by Passive House Massachusetts, drawing on data from Mass Save, Phius, and PHI. Data on projects receiving funding from the DOER Affordable Housing Decarbonization Grant and the LEAN Multifamily programs are provided by LISC Massachusetts.
Even these numbers only tell part of the story, since they don’t include the significant amount of non-residential passive building going on across the state. Combining residential and non-residential projects, more than 43 million square feet of building area is being developed to meet Passive House standards. Massachusetts is already home to the world’s largest Passive House office building: The Offices at Winthrop Center.
Every new or retrofitted passive building not only improves affordability, health, comfort, safety, and durability for owners and occupants: they also bring down utility costs for everyone by reducing the need to invest in unnecessary electrical infrastructure. This nation-leading growth has been supported by a combination of voluntary codes, robust incentives, and a thriving community of Passive House practitioners that PHMass is proud to serve.
About the Author
Alexander Gard-Murray is the Executive Director of Passive House Massachusetts. He holds a DPhil in Politics and an MSc in Politics Research from Oxford. Before joining PHMass, he taught and researched energy and environmental policy at Harvard and Brown, and led policy research at the Greenhouse Institute. He can be reached at alexander@phmass.org.
Leave a Reply