“Anytime we step boldly to make changes, we take a chance that we might fail. But the only way to get better is to try. -Joyce Meyer How do you define sustainable home building? What will sustainable home building look like in 2022? Where can you get a handle on data to help drive your decisions in this area? What are the bold steps you can take? RESTalk is pleased to welcome back Sara Gutterman, co-founder, and CEO of Green Builder Media to give us insights about the state of sustainable building for 2022. Sara highlights how over nearly two years, the pandemic has acted as a surprise jolt upon the building industry. She reflects on how this has changed the landscape. She helps us understand that to create a meaningful impact on runaway Climate Change, we need to set our sights on the full-scale decarbonization of our economy, reaching net zero emissions across all sectors as boldly and quickly as possible. She highlights this “perfect storm” of limited housing inventory, high material costs, and labor shortages which have pushed competent building companies into high demand. Sara also notes analysts expect the storm to continue in 2022—at first. Economic experts are forecasting early in the year growth in single-family home construction, sales and pricing at a pace that is about 40 percent to 50 percent of the levels seen in 2021. Look toward Green Builder Media’s COGNITION smart data (www.greenbuildermedia.com/cognition-smart-data) for more depth of detail on the forecasts we discuss. Sara has also published a blog post on this topic that can be found here: https://www.greenbuildermedia.com/blog/the-state-of-sustainable-building-2022 While the Sustainability Symposium 2022: Roadmap to Decarbonization happened last month, you can still learn more at the comprehensive Housing 2.0 Program found here: https://www.greenbuildermedia.com/housing-2.0 Listen to the full episode here.