The most sustainable house is the one that’s never built, but the next best thing to ease the burden on finite resources is to retrofit existing homes to consume less and perform better. The AIA Show How You Re-Green Housing Awards will recognize designs that take the existing residential building stock into new green frontiers, through complete gut renovations to more subtle alterations. Sponsored by the AIA Housing and Custom Residential Knowledge Community, the competition is open to market-rate, affordable, single-family, and multi-family housing. Adaptive re-use and mixed use projects (where housing is the project's primary use) are also welcome. The submission deadline is September 3, 2009.