Dream House Gone Wrong

Today's highlighted home in the Sunday Star Tribune Variety section made me frown. The homeowners rented and saved for 10 years to build their eco-friendly dream house, designed by a locally famous architecture firm.

The house has a geothermal heat pump, solar panels, great insulation and triple-pane windows. It's two stories, which makes it more energy efficient, vs. the sprawling one-story the owners originally envisioned. Of course, all the appliances are electric; no natural gas.

So why did it make me frown?


It sits on a 1.38 acre lot somewhere in west Bloomington, the suburb south of Minneapolis. The owners like how secluded it is, which means they have to drive everywhere. Check out that curving, impermeable asphalt driveway to their two-car garage.

The owners of the house are part of the problem when it comes to realizing what makes the most difference in mitigating climate change. From the story, I can't tell if they have anyone else sharing the house with them (kids, other family). It appears they've built this entire edifice, with all its embodied carbon, for two people. It's on more than an acre, nowhere near anything they need on a daily basis so they have to drive all the time.

The house is energy-saving, sure, great, but sharing walls with other housing units is automatically more energy-saving than a single building, and not building a single-family house on a big piece of untouched land so you personally can have woods on two sides and a view of a pond is even better.

Theirs is the same environmentalist mentality that results in people thinking single-family-home neighborhoods with individual lawns are good and denser areas with multifamily housing are bad — the kinds of people who sued to stop the Minneapolis 2040 plan. The idea that they're setting an example with a net-zero house for two people on 1+ acres is absurd.

We're all part of the non-climate-change-adapted world we live in, and we can't be blamed for choices we made about our lives before we realized what we're up against. But when people seem to be aware and still go way out of their way to make a decision like this, just because they can afford to and for their own indulgence, it's disheartening to say the least.