Patrick Sission’s piece, “New York’s Real Climate Challenge: Fixing Its Aging Buildings” in the New York Times points to the Casa Pasiva development by RiseBoro Community Partnership in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn as the embodiment of the opportunity to be embraced when it comes to the retrofit of New York City’s building stock.
“When it comes to solving the climate crisis in New York, the real challenge lies in the city’s decades-old structures,” he writes.
The Casa Pasiva approach featured in the article significantly changes the building envelope of older buildings by wrapping them similar to the technique of Dutch innovator Energiesprong. While literally thickening exterior walls, designers use that opportunity to run new HVAC on the outside of the building to achieve electrification. In the case of Casa Pasiva, this means routing lines air sourced heat pumps on what was the exterior of the building, then covering them for a minimally intrusive retrofit - the buildings are occupied.
Sission points out that such energy retrofits “have become the focus of many climate plans, but funding for such projects has not always followed.”
While the Casa Pasiva project did receive $1.8 million in financing from RetrofitNY, an NYSERDA program, other similar projects could tap the emerging PACE program as a source of private investment capital for such energy-saving measures.
The four-story 46-unit building is 90 years old and is projected to reduce energy use by 60-80 percent through the improvements, per RetrofitNY’s article on the property.
