Kitchener Green Housing Incentive Program

This morning I had the pleasure of listening to a great seminar put on by CREW (Community Renewable Energy Waterloo) and the City of Kitchener discussing the benefits of the KGHIP (Kitchener Green Housing Incentive Program).

It's an incentive program designed to encourage builders and consumers to build high performance green homes.

Builders may be interested as a great program they can offer consumers as a way to get paid for making greener choices. Consumers are recognizing the importance of being greener and many will chose greener choices over other choices, even when it costs more.

Basically the City of Kitchener will pay you to build your new home as a LEED home. LEED is a third party company that will assess the home you've built and give you ratings based on it's eco-friendliness. The City of Kitchener then gives you cash incentives based on those ratings.

Note that an Energy Star home is not included in the incentive program since after 2012 every home built will HAVE to be a minimum of an Energy Star Home. That's good news for our environment!

If you're thinking of building a new home in Kitchener, it's worth asking about the KGHIP.

Essentially for approximately a coffee a day you can get PAID to build an Energystar home. If you were to give that coffee a day back to the builder you could build a LEED home for free. If you were willing to give up a coffee or two a day that would be about the cost of building a LEED Platinum home.

Great job, Kitchener! Our environment thanks you for putting this as a priority! If you're building a new home in Kitchener, why WOULDN'T you take advantage of this program?

Any questions at all pop me an email! krista@jonkerteam.com

Here are a few websites you may find interesting:

LEED
CREW
CITY OF KITCHENER KGHIP