Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation

Erika Zavaleta: Building an Energy Efficient Home from the Ground Up

Content Type: Featured Fellows And Collaborations 1999 Switzer Fellow Erika Zavaleta strives to bridge ecological theory and research to sound conservation and management practice in her work and personal life. Between 2008 and 2010, she and husband Bernie Tershy worked with Anni Tilt of Berkeley-based Arkin Tilt Architects and Santa Cruz builder Marc Susskind to design and build a home that did just that. The home won the Best New Home award...

[WEBINAR] Lessons for Homeowners from Green Affordable Housing (Switzer Foundation Webinar Series)

Content Type: Blog Post - Fellow Are you a homeowner, interested in finding ways to make your home or investment property more sustainable? Then listen to Beverly Craig (1994) discuss lessons learned from six years working on improving the water and energy performance of multifamily affordable housing with Homeowner's Rehab, a nonprofit that owns over 1,000 units of affordable housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They "...

Benefits of energy efficient design go beyond environmental and economic advantages

Content Type: Blog Post - Fellow Editor's Note:  1999 Switzer Fellow Erika Zavaleta strives to bridge ecological theory and research to sound conservation and management practice in her work and personal life. Between 2008 and 2010, she and husband Bernie Tershy worked with Anni Tilt of Berkeley-based Arkin Tilt Architects and Santa Cruz builder Marc Susskind to design and build a home that did just that. The home won the...

Webinar: Lessons for Homeowners from Green Affordable Housing with Switzer Fellow Bev Craig

Content Type: Events Are you a homeowner, interested in finding ways to make your home or investment property more sustainable? Then join Switzer Fellow Beverly Craig to discuss lessons learned from 6 years working on improving the water and energy performance of multifamily affordable housing with Homeowner's Rehab, a nonprofit that owns over 1,000 units of affordable housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They...

Building Healthier Hospitals

Content Type: Switzer Network News We usually think of hospitals as a beacon of health, but they can have an impact on workers and patients. Switzer Fellow Mara Baum oversees sustainability implementation, research, consulting and education across HOK’s global healthcare practice, with current projects in California, New York, Indiana, Missouri, Utah and Germany.

Making Affordable Housing Green

Content Type: Switzer Network News Housing developers are always looking to improve their bottom line. Homeowner's Rehab, a small nonprofit that owns over 1,000 units of affordable housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, goes about this in a unique and sustainable way. They "green" their portfolio by installing energy efficient devices in their properties, which helps them meet both financial and social goals.

[WEBINAR] Building a Network for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement in Conservation (Switzer Foundation Webinar Series)

Content Type: Blog Post - Fellow Leadership grantee Sarah Reed (Associate Conservation Scientist, Wildlife Conservation Society) and her colleague Lindsay Ex (Environmental Planner, City of Fort Collins) discussed their effort to build a collaborative learning network for practitioners engaged in conservation development. Conservation development (CD) is an approach to the design, construction, and stewardship of a development...

Zavaleta's environmentally friendly new home wins award

Content Type: News - Fellows It all started more than five years ago, when Tershy and his wife, Erika Zavaleta, were living in a different house on the Bethany Curve Greenbelt on the Westside. They knew they wanted to remodel their home, but they kept running into the same roadblock. “What we really wanted to do was turn our house, which was facing the street, around 180 degrees so it faced the park, but it seemed impossible...

Hall featured in Grist story on Los Angeles River

Content Type: News - Fellows Few weeks ago, Jessica Hall, a Los Angeles landscape architect who also co-authors the excellent L.A. Creek Freak blog, showed me around some of the little-known wetlands of the old Dominguez Slough, hidden in the South Bay cities of Torrance, Gardena, and Carson.We visited sites like the Gardena Willows Wetland Preserve, a nine-acre wedge of thickly grown greenery sandwiched between a shopping...

Baum highlights links between health and the environment

Content Type: News - Fellows Five years ago, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design was published after Lance Hosey and I spent 18 months interviewing hundreds of people and trying to understand why it seemed like there was a preponderance of women doing “green” in many fields. Individual stories poured out and we assembled a suggestive but hardly conclusive collective story. We had the privilege of dipping in and were...

Webinar: Building a Network for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement in Conservation with Sarah Reed (Switzer Foundation Webinar Series)

Content Type: Events Leadership grantee Sarah Reed (Associate Conservation Scientist, Wildlife Conservation Society) and her colleague Lindsay Ex (Environmental Planner, City of Fort Collins) discussed their effort to build a collaborative learning network for practitioners engaged in conservation development. Conservation development (CD) is an approach to the design, construction, and stewardship of a development...

Baum and her work with green healthcare design featured in industry publication

Content Type: News - Fellows On the surface, it would seem that keeping built healthcare facilities as environmentally friendly and healthy as possible would be a no-brainer; after all, if the first rule of medicine is to first, do no harm, the building itself should be free from harmful materials, and as “green” and sustainable as possible. Doesn’t it make sense that a building you visit to get healthy would itself be...

Orenstein on interactions between green spaces and humans

Content Type: News - Fellows Not long ago, a visitor came from Israel to Milwaukee to share his perspective on that country’s environmental movement. Daniel Orenstein is a Senior lecturer, in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Orenstein met WUWM Environmental reporter Susan Bence next to one of Milwaukee’s “greening spaces” – the Milwaukee River, and explained his...

Steiner quoted about Community Redevelopment Act districts in Florida

Content Type: News - Fellows "It's an incentive program for the private sector, to get them to invest in an area when it's probably cheaper to go somewhere else," said Ruth Steiner, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Florida and director of the school's Center for Health and the Built Environment.Read the story

GreenTRIP's plan for provisional parking and creating new models for carshare system expansion

Content Type: Blog Post - Fellow Editor's Note: Stuart Cohen and Ann Cheng presented TransForm's GreenTRIP program during a webinar on January 11, 2012. This blog post follows up on several points and questions made during that presentation. You can find out more about Stuart Cohen and Transform, as well as sign up for updates about the program, at our Switzer Network News report page.Thanks so much to the Switzer Foundation...

[WEBINAR] GreenTRIP: Great Access, Deep Affordability with Switzer Fellow Stuart Cohen (Switzer Foundation Webinar Series)

Content Type: Blog Post - Fellow Walkable, transit-oriented communities are seen as an antidote to unfettered sprawl.  But outdated city codes vastly overestimate how much people drive and require excessive parking in these transit areas, especially for low-income families and seniors.  This leads to oversize parking lots, fewer and more expensive homes, bad design and community opposition.  ...

Stuart Cohen of TransForm: Advocating for World-class Transportation and Walkable Communities

Content Type: Featured Fellows And Collaborations Stuart Cohen co-founded TransForm in 1997 to promote world class transit and walkable, affordable communities. Since then TransForm has united diverse coalitions and developed effective, implementable proposals that advance an environmental, social equity and public health agenda in the Bay Area -- and increasingly throughout California. Stuart spearheaded the successful campaign for the...

GreenTRIP: Creating great, low-carbon, affordable communities with Fellow Stuart Cohen (Switzer Foundation Webinar Series)

Content Type: Events Walkable, transit-oriented communities are seen as an antidote to unfettered sprawl.  But outdated city codes vastly overestimate how much people drive and require excessive parking in these transit areas, especially for low-income families and seniors.  This leads to oversize parking lots, fewer and more expensive homes, bad design and community opposition.  ...