New York's NYSERDA Buildings of Excellence program has quietly become one of the most powerful forcing functions for high-performance construction in the country — by round three, 80% of awarded projects were Passive House, and the lessons learned are now shaping a proposed all-electric building code for the entire state. In this lightning round from Reimagine Buildings '24, four project teams show what that progress looks like on the ground: a senior affordable housing building in Harlem reaching for net-zero operational carbon with ground-source heat pumps and building-integrated photovoltaics; a supportive housing project in Brownsville for formerly incarcerated women that pairs Passive House airtightness and filtered fresh air with rooftop urban farming and wraparound services; three Hudson Yards-area residential buildings proving that Passive House performance is achievable on some of Manhattan's most heavily trafficked, contextually constrained sites; and a 60-unit modular senior housing project in Brooklyn where fully finished apartments were stacked four stories in two weeks — at Passive House performance levels and within affordable housing budgets. What ties all four together is the same conviction Patrick O'Shei of NYSERDA puts plainly at the outset: these buildings shouldn't just perform well, they should be beautiful, healthy, and profitable — and increasingly, they are.
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