City, State, and Community College Work Together to Build Sustainable Construction Workforce

The noise, hard hats, orange vests, and heavy machinery certainly make the 200 block of Newell Street in Waterloo, Iowa, seem like a construction zone. But a closer inspection reveals so much more: a working classroom where students learn the principles of building energy-efficient houses, and a partnership between a community college, the city council, and local businesses to increase housing and the local construction workforce.

In 2018, Waterloo City Council voted to sell vacant lots for $1 and approved allocating up to $137,500 on labor and materials per home to Hawkeye Community College’s (HCC) Sustainable Construction and Design program. The financing is intended to be self-sustaining: when a house is completed, the funds raised from its sale are reinvested into the construction of another house. Public funding is stretched further by generous local contractors willing to donate labor and materials to install plumbing, electrical systems, and HVAC equipment—work the students can’t do themselves.

The donated space is an infill lot, which formerly contained a condemned and demolished building, but now sits vacant. Such vacant properties cost the city both in terms of lost property tax revenue and lot maintenance costs.

The program is not just a win for taxpayers: houses are built with energy efficiency in mind, lowering the carbon footprint of the house and its owner’s electricity bills. Ben Strickert, one of two HCC Sustainable Construction and Design instructors, described the building approach.

“Our environment is really unique because we have to look at it from both sides of heating and cooling—if you go 100 miles north the cooling load drops off, if you go 100 miles south the heating load drops off,” Strickert said. “Using building science, we can build the structure better. The more conscious we are about what windows we're using, what doors we’re using, facing the direction of the home to not catch the prevailing winds, steeper southern-facing roof lines that would allow solar to be installed, the more we can cut down our overall energy consumption, giving the homeowner a future home that's going to use less energy, so it's more affordable.”

Students in the program are trained in energy-efficient building science. They conduct residential energy audits and measure insulation and ventilation levels so appropriate heating and cooling equipment can be selected for installation. Homes are built to the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready standard and are also solar-ready, although installing solar panels and software necessary for the homes to be net-zero is outside of HCC’s current budget.

“But if the customer, whoever it is, buys the house, and would want to take that next step, we could do that for them—these houses could be net-zero,” Strickert said.

Graduates of the program enter a high-demand field and often choose to build their careers in Cedar Valley, where HCC is located. Strickert estimates that 70 percent of his students stay local.

“In construction in general, companies are having a real hard time finding the workforce that they need, let alone a skilled workforce that they need,” Strickert continued. “But I think we're doing a good job, and the feedback I'm getting from the employers that have our students is all really positive.”

Mitch Picard, a second-year student on one of the Newell Street construction sites, described his plans after graduating.

“I’m planning on working for a company here in Cedar Valley for a couple of years to get some more experience, and then hopefully go and start on my own and remodel and build new houses,” he said.

Building this sustainable construction workforce is a priority not only for the city of Waterloo but also for the state of Iowa. Students in HCC’s Sustainable Construction and Design program can qualify for Iowa’s Future Ready Last-Dollar Scholarship, which covers up to 100 percent of a student’s tuition after other scholarships and grants are taken into account. The Future Ready Last-Dollar Scholarship was designed to promote workforce development in high-demand, technical fields.

Currently, the Sustainable Construction and Design program can only accept 20 students per year, which Strickert would like to expand in the coming years. He sees his graduates as future industry leaders.

“In my generation, we didn't really worry about energy efficiency and stuff like that,” Strickert said. “It was just, ‘I want this huge house with all these extra bedrooms and bathrooms and stuff.’ And it's just kind of silly. So, we're trying to help our next generation of builders understand and think about why we're doing what we're doing ... by bringing in more education and more of the whole systems approach. We're thinking about everything instead of just thinking about what we're working on today.”

Author: Amber Todoroff

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