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Originally Posted by bilbao58
I love that I, a native and long time resident of Houston, (i.e., it's my hometown), am being told what Houston is notorious for by someone who's never been there.
Houston is actually on the Gulf Coast...near the Gulf of Mexico. Farther west than Minneapolis so it's definitely not on the eastern coast. Tropical storms have zero effect on the miserable day-to-day climate from mid-May to mid-October in Houston. In fact, if anything, a tropical storm would cool things down a bit. It's the loss of electricity, and thus a/c, that follows large storms that gives a clue of what life in Houston would be like without cheap energy.
The idea that every home and office and place of business in an area of 7 million people could be retrofitted or replaced during the lifetimes of anyone on this forum is almost as laughable as my being told what Houston is notorious for.
I suggest you spend a week in Houston in mid-August and get back to us.
And this doesn't even consider that Houston's highest elevation is 40 feet above sea level and, although the city is generally considered to be 50 miles from the Gulf, Galveston Bay and the Houston Ship Channel are actually contiguous to, and/or enter into the city itself..in other words, sea level rise will back up into the city. And it'll do it right where all the petrochemical refinery and storage facilities are located.
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Thank you for your insights into Houston, as it can help me craft my response with more info in mind. I appreciate that, though I wish you were less combative in your responses. Not everybody knows everything, you and I included.
By east coast, I mean any land that has a large unconfined body of saltwater (Ocean or gulf) on its east coast. I don't mean "the East Coast". As we have seen in both east and west hemispheres, land on the eastern coast tends to have lots of storms and humid sticky climates. That includes Houston.
It's the buildup to the storm, which pushes warm moist ocean air along its path, that helps lead to the sticky humid climate. And the fact that storms are constantly building up off of the African coast during the tropical storm season means that the air is probably constantly being pushed towards the southeastern US coasts.
As for retrofitting as much as possible in Houston in the coming decades, I say that comes down to political will. NYC, for example, has enacted a local law (Local Law 97) that will compel most privately-owned buildings 25,000 square feet and bigger to meet a strict annual carbon emissions limit starting in 2025, with an absolute date in 2035. This will affect an estimated 60% buildings in NYC as measured by square feet.
IMO, the best method to achieving such a lofty goal is through reducing operational energy use. And one of the best ways to achieve this reduction is through Passive House-type measures.
I think that you lack a bit of imagination here. If Houston were to legally compel most of its building owners to do the same, you would see some action as well. And this action will lead to a boom in construction due to the increased demand for retrofitting. You are here on a forum dedicated to charting skyscraper and building construction, yet you are somehow against the increase in construction activity? Weird.
I advocate for Passive House not just as a certified Passive House Consultant (via PHI), but also as someone who has seen it as a design standard that "just makes sense" since 10 years ago, when the standard barely existed in the US. It is making steady progress into the market for developers and retrofitters who want a comfortable building with low operating costs.
In the past, the initial building and material costs was around 20% more than for building a code-standard building. Nowadays, with material costs lowering, more domestic products being developed, better and standardized building techniques being developed, and more and more architects, engineers, and building contractors & workers being well versed in how to design and construct Passive House-standard buildings, the initial cost delta is anywhere from less than zero (negative) to 10%, and lowering by the year.
To illustrate the point of low operating cost, consider the example of a single family house on a cold winter day. Anecdotes from homeowners have stated that cooking a single baked potato is enough to warm up the entire house for several hours, if not the whole day.
To illustrate the point of indoor comfort, consider the same single family house during a cold winter morning. Frost and condensation will often form on the outside, and never on the inside. This is because the indoor window surfaces remain warm enough, and the whole window assembly is well-insulated enough to prevent heat from inside the house to transfer through the windows. Thus, the outside window surfaces remain cold enough to form condensation even in the cold dry winter air. There is no need for baseboard heating along the exterior perimeters or radiators under windows. In fact, occupants can sit directly next to an unheated window on a winter day because it is warm and comfortable enough.
As for the low elevation above sea level, that will require some flood resiliency planning and design. You probably shouldn't empty the city or move everyone inland, as it not only eliminates Houston's advantages near the water, but also increases the embodied carbon by needing to build a entire new city with buildings, roads, and other infrastructure. It is much more carbon-friendly to simply keep the existing embodied carbon (existing buildings and infrastructure) and redesign them to cope with the flood threats.
I'm not saying these solutions are easy, but what else can you do? People have been used to building cheaply and dealing with the consequences later. In terms of quality assurance/control, this is foolhardy. One of the key tenets of cost control in QA/QC is "do it right the first time, every time", and "re-doing steps costs money". The costs may be high for Houston to retrofit everything. But if they design and build everything to meet the flood resiliency measures as well as low-energy and comfort criteria (Passive House standard or similar, Houstonians (and anyone else, really) will only need to retrofit once and never have to worry about rebuilding again for many decades down the line.
One final point that is somewhat related. I believe that most humans tend to wince at making the big down payment on an automobile lease, but tend not to think much about the monthly payments. All they see is a big number up front, versus a much smaller and "friendlier" number for each month. In other words, humans tend to by myopic and short-sighted. Thus, they will think twice about plunking down a big payment for the initial retrofit costs, but will often think of their substantial monthly a/c and heating costs as "normal". They can't even imagine a world with little or no monthly HVAC costs.
Humans tend to be unimaginative creatures, especially as they get older. They won't believe a new normal until they see and experience it themselves. Once they experience the new normal and its advantages, they will wonder why they couldn't see the advantages before. And the cycle will repeat.