Azad Lassiter patted the foot-thick walls at a home he’s building on Queen Avenue in north Minneapolis.
The walls will provide thermal insulation, a key principle of passive house construction, Lassiter explained. A builder with 17 years of experience, he serves as the Real Estate Project Manager at Urban Homeworks, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that focuses on housing justice.
Passive homes are built to specific standards to lower their carbon footprint while ensuring maximum energy efficiency and comfort. The North Side homes— completed with heat pumps, electric-powered appliances and topped with solar panels — are designed to be light on the planet and, over time, the pocketbook.
“Theoretically, you should have no energy bill,” Lassiter said of how the environmentally friendly features save homeowners money.
The Queen Avenue house is one of five passive homes that Urban Homeworks is building in north Minneapolis. The homes are the result of a partnership between Urban Homeworks and the City of Minneapolis to grow the stock of affordable housing in the city.
The passive house project is using benefits from the city’s Green Cost Share Program to help pay for energy efficiency and solar panels, according to Isaac Evans, a sustainability program coordinator with the city of Minneapolis. Urban Homeworks received $275,000 in city funding for the project, which is expected to result in 170,000 kilowatt hours of energy savings (enough to power about 18 average American homes for a year).
“Urban Homeworks are really pushing the model,” Evans said.
The Green Cost Share Program awards grants to improve energy efficiency and install solar power in residential and commercial buildings to help meet city climate goals.
Minnesota is aiming to reduce emissions from residential and commercial buildings, a stubborn source where pollution is growing. Emissions from buildings are up 14% from 2005 levels, the year the state uses as a benchmark, according to a 2023 report.
Homeowners with the fewest resources are often stuck with the largest utility bills. Lower income residents, disproportionately people of color in Minnesota, are more likely to live in old, drafty housing that burns through energy and rack up hefty power bills. Urban Homeworks tries to address energy affordability in all its work, but is taking it to the next level with the passive house project.
“Total cost of ownership is something that we’re really passionate about,” Lassiter said.
Maximizing efficiency
Passive homes apply five construction principles to maximize build quality and energy efficiency: thermal insulation from thick walls, air tight assembly, thermal bridge reduction that minimizes cold spots, highly rated triple-pane windows and quality ventilation. Together, the principles create new construction practices that are on the cutting edge of energy efficiency, a key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The result is enhanced comfort and build quality, Lassiter said. Thick walls wrapped in breathable materials prevent moisture that can lead to rotting wood and integrity problems down the line. That means fewer warranty issues for builders in the long run and reduced maintenance costs for homeowners.
The air in most homes changes over multiple times an hour, and even new construction meeting Minnesota’s latest building codes will experience three air changes per hour. Passive homes have 0.6 air changes per hour, which maximizes efficiency. Fresh air is acclimatized, cleaned and spread throughout the home using an energy recovery ventilation system.
That creates consistent temperature throughout the structure. People sitting near a window in the winter won’t be colder, Lassiter said.
Urban Homeworks is using triple-pane, European style tilt-turn windows that can be pulled inside to completely open the window, or cracked at the top. Their doors employ similar rigorous standards, and have steel framing that seals better and provides added safety.
“It’s all really high quality, top-of-the-line energy efficiency equipment,” Evans said.
Those thick walls and extra-sealed doors and windows also provide soundproofing. A crew was tearing up the sidewalk when Sahan Journal visited the Queen Avenue home in November, and the machines were barely audible when the home’s front door was shut.
Together, passive house principles can help residents save $200 to $300 on energy bills every month compared to an average home, according to Lassiter. In the summer months, the solar panels will likely generate more power than the home uses, giving future residents potential earnings on their energy bill.
Not every new building can meet all five passive principles, but Lassiter believes contractors should be using as many of the techniques as they can.
“We should be applying these to any new construction,” he said.
Passive homes need to meet strict standards throughout the construction process to ensure the structures deliver on their efficiency promises. Those standards create a challenge for builders, Lassiter said, and there can be a learning curve for those entering the field. It also adds costs to a project, which is why the city’s financial support is critical to Urban Homeworks’ new builds.
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Striving for what’s next
Urban Homeworks focused on remodeling projects until about 2017, according to Anne Ketz, the nonprofit’s real estate development director. After the late-2000s economic crash and mortgage crisis, the group could buy homes in north Minneapolis for $1, she said. But when the housing market rebounded, the group began focusing on new construction.
Urban Homeworks always tried to incorporate energy efficiency into its projects, including working with the University of Minnesota to construct net-zero homes, which use solar energy but have less stringent energy efficiency standards than passive homes.
In 2021, Minneapolis solicited bids for the passive home project. Urban Homeworks jumped at the opportunity. Passive homes cost about 20% more to build than standard new housing, Ketz said, so city funding provided a chance for the organization to try it.
“We’re always striving to do the next thing if the money is there,” Ketz said.
The nonprofit sells directly to buyers, and markets its homes towards residents of color who already live in north Minneapolis. But the homes are available to anyone meeting income criteria set by the organization. The first five passive homes are eligible to buyers who earn up to 80% of the area median income; that figure is $97,800 for a family of four in Hennepin County.
Four of the five homes are being sold in coordination with the City of Lakes Community Land Trust, which allows families to build equity in homes while controlling the underlying plot to keep the property affordable in perpetuity.
Urban Homeworks recently received an offer on its first completed home from a family in its target market, Ketz said, and is expected to close by the end of the year. A second home is currently listed for $235,000.
The homes are intended to be multi-generational, Lassiter said. They range from about 1,400 to 1,600 square feet, and have four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Each home has a bedroom on the first floor, which are all wheelchair accessible.
A second round of passive house construction is scheduled for 2025 in north Minneapolis. Urban Homeworks received $5 million in funding from the Minnesota Legislature’s 2023 housing omnibus bill to construct deeply affordable housing, and is using some of that money to fund the construction of four more passive homes that will be priced for sale under $200,000. Lassiter hopes to include new features they couldn’t budget in the first round of homes, like basements to increase storage space.
