Mississippi State Brings Sustainability Down Home
Architecture professor champions green mobile homes

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

How do you . . . encourage and provide sustainable living to persons living in depressed rural conditions?

Summary: For Michael Berk, the F.L. Crane Endowed Professor of Architecture at Mississippi State University, sustainable living truly is a matter for the masses. The architect is the creator of GreenMobile®, an affordable and sustainable mobile home that can be used on- or off-the-grid for disaster relief housing or for permanent residence. A winner of last year’s EPA Lifecycle Building Challenge, GreenMobile also was awarded $5.8 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Alternative Housing Pilot Program (AHPP) for the construction of 100 units on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in December 2006, though, as of yet, no units have been constructed.

According to Berk, the project was first conceived in the 1990s, when Viking Range CEO Fred Carl provided Berk with seed funding to have his design studio students research and design experimental, low-cost, factory-built housing for the Delta regions of Mississippi. This work was additionally developed with significant grant funding from a HUD award to the School of Architecture’s Small Town Center in 2002. In 2005, the USDA further awarded the GreenMobile project a competitive Rural Business Enterprise Grant (RBEG). The $5.8 million FEMA award in 2006 under the AHPP program was given to expand the types of housing provided to disaster-affected communities by identifying, developing, and evaluating alternatives to traditional FEMA travel trailers and mobile homes.

Part of the difficulty in getting GreenMobile to production, says Berk, is that it is a largely untested idea for an untested market, and the potential vendors aren’t interested in assuming risk. “This is so different than anything else that the industry has ever dealt with, and the prototyping stage and value engineering stage of this process is a fairly expensive part of this thing, if done correctly,” he explains. When the project was still nascent, Berk and his team calculated the cost of a GreenMobile home to be approximately $50,000, or nearly double the cost of a traditional single-wide mobile home. Although the GreenMobile would cost significantly more than the average single-wide, Berk says that with the energy savings and the potential for assuming a 40-year mortgage, the cost of ownership could conceivably be lower. However, with rising materials costs across the building trade, he now believes that a GreenMobile home would run approximately $75,000.

A greener path
So what is it that makes GreenMobile so green? For starters, the building envelope would be constructed entirely of SIPs [structural insulated panels], ensuring excellent and affordable insulation. To keep energy use low and low-maintenance, Berk paid careful attention to passive design. “There’s a clerestory that’s continuous on both sides that obviously works for lighting really well, but more importantly works for ventilation incredibly well, particularly if the thing is oriented in the way that’s recommended.” Windows are well placed to reduce reliance on air conditioning and encourage natural cross-ventilation in the hot and humid climate. To help achieve maximum energy efficiency, each GreenMobile would come with information on correct site orientation; a kit of specific tree plantings, using appropriate species for the geographic location; and a planting diagram.

Because Mississippi is a wood-producing state, GreenMobile would employ locally grown and harvested FSC-certified woods and veneers for the interior and SIPs, says Berk. For the exterior, Berk expects a fiber-cement siding to be used. Energy Star® appliances will include tankless water heaters and ceiling fans.

Finally, Berk is hoping to reach an agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide photovoltaic panels on each home. “TVA has already given their verbal agreement a couple of years ago,” Berk says. “They liked the concept, and a certain percentage of their power is supposed to be in these Green Power Switch® programs, so they thought it was a pretty good idea. If we got enough arrays on this thing, somebody actually could get a check at the end of the month if they really do open and close their windows and really use the efficiencies that are embedded in this.”

Next steps
Mississippi State is now interested in bringing GreenMobile to the marketplace. “I probably get 10 e-mail messages a day from people who want to buy one,” exclaims Berk. “Right after Katrina, the Baton Rouge Housing Authority called me up and placed an order because they thought these things were in production, so the university’s goal is absolutely to get it into production and hopefully continue to refine it and make it greener and greener.” The ultimate goal, he says, would be to get GreenMobile to a zero carbon footprint. For now, Berk says: “If we can make one with this FEMA project and at least demonstrate that it can be done as economically as we think it can, that would be huge because it would at least show that it’s in the ballpark and that the concept is extremely viable. I think it would breathe another life into it.”