Download or read book Enabling More Sustainable Affordable Housing written by Ethan Koesters Heil and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Residential building structures contribute significantly to social, environmental, and economic impacts throughout their life cycle. Sustainability, is broadly concerned with these impacts and how they relate to complex social, environmental, and economic systems such as those that drive the residential built environment. This thesis presents a methodology for promoting more sustainable housing development by introducing environmental and economic impact feedback into the early design stage. The social dimension is addressed by focusing this research on affordable housing for low-income households. The environmental and economic impacts are addressed by integrating life cycle assessment and life cycle costing techniques into an automated, parametric analysis framework. This framework is applied to two low-income, affordable housing design spaces in the contrasting environments of San Francisco, California and Las Vegas, Nevada. The thesis illustrates how this methodology can aid design stakeholders in reducing the long-term environmental impacts and costs of low-income, affordable housing developments. The results are also compared to industry design preferences, collected through a survey of low-income, affordable housing practitioners. This comparison reveals potential gains in life cycle environmental impact and cost reductions that are not currently realized by prevailing industry design preferences. This thesis concludes by offering direction for future work and by highlighting the potential for this framework to inform housing development trends and regulatory decision-making.