Will Sustainable Design Save Detroit?

The beleaguered city is home to a burgeoning green building culture. Sustainable developments like the Green Garage, an incubator for socially conscious entrepreneurs in midtown Detroit, are not only better for the environment but also buffered from the flooding and high heating costs that extreme weather has caused in the city in the past year. The building uses 85 percent less energy than a typical corporate office building.

Features that are helping the Green Garage maximize efficiency include: high-resistance insulation in the walls and roof, Cardinal glass windows that block UV-light, solar panels for heating water that is then circulated through a radiant floor system to provide further heat.

A historic building in in MidTown Detroit achieved one-third the energy expenditure it previously had by installing a 20 kilowatt solar system on the roof, a geothermal heating and cooling system, and foam-insulation, among others changes.

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