How Six Affordable Housing Projects Got to Green

Over the past fifteen years, an emerging trend in affordable housing is better and better design. “The most thoughtful, private nonprofit developers out there have been paying attention both to ‘green’ and the quality of how the building looks and sits on the site,” says Sunshine Mathon, who served for the past decade as the development and design director at Foundation Communities in Austin, Texas.

Mathon, who is now the CEO of Piedmont Housing Alliance in Charlottesville, Virginia, helped manage and design the construction of nearly one thousand sustainable and healthy apartments for low-income individuals and families in Texas. “The people who don’t live there drive by and never know it is affordable housing,” says Mathon. And the people who do live there “have a sense of pride when they come home.”