The passive house trend is booming
On the morning of June 7, 2023, New York City woke to a sky of orange haze as the smoke from Canadian wildfires blew in from hundreds of miles away. It was a health hazard – city authorities said the air quality had not been as bad since the 1960s. That day, Chad Dickerson, a former CEO of Etsy, put up a number of air quality monitors around his Brooklyn townhouse. “It was pretty much 100 percent pure the whole time,” he says.
Dickerson’s house escaped the intense wildfire smoke because of one crucial decision he and his partner made when renovating their home from late 2018 through 2021: to make it a passive house. Passive houses are designed to be as energy efficient as possible, typically with top-notch insulation and a perfect seal that prevents outside air from penetrating the home; air flows in and out through filtration and exhaust systems only. Their benefits include protection from pollution and pollen, noise insulation and a stable indoor temperature that minimizes energy needs. That translates to long-term savings on heating and cooling.
While the concept has been around for about 50 years, experts say that the United States is on the cusp of a passive house boom, driven by lowered costs, state-level energy code changes and a general greater awareness of – and desire for – more sustainable housing.
In terms of the growth of passive house building rates, “what we’re experiencing right now is absolutely bonkers,” says Zack Semke, the director of the Passive House Accelerator, a group of industry professionals who aim to spread lessons in passive house building. He points to data from Phius, a passive house certifying organization, which certified 1.82 million square feet of passive house projects in 2021. The square footage of passive house projects they have certified in 2024 so far has surpassed 3 million square feet. Meanwhile Massachusetts – which alongside New York and Pennsylvania is one of the leading states in passive house adoption – has 272 passive house projects underway thanks to an incentive program, Semke says. That’s 20,661 housing units totaling 22.6 million square feet.
Consumer demand for passive houses is also increasing, says Michael Ingui, an architect in New York City and the founder of the Passive House Accelerator. When Ingui started working on them 12 years ago, most people didn’t know what a passive house was. Now, at least half of clients come to him specifically requesting one, he says. He attributes this change to two factors: climate change and the pandemic. The need to lower our energy footprint is so much more top-of-mind today than it was 10 years ago, Ingui says, and covid taught us about the importance of good ventilation and filtered fresh air. “People are searching for the healthiest house,” he says, “and that’s a passive house.”
The first wave of passive houses in the United States, which began about 15 years ago, was driven largely by people building or renovating single-family homes, Ingui says. These early projects tended to be expensive. For one, they typically were more high-end, luxury houses. Plus, there were fewer builders who knew how to construct passive houses, putting a premium on that knowledge, he says.