Fox Valley Habitat For Humanity

The City of Aurora and Nicor Gas announced the unveiling of a new educational exhibit on Smart Cities on the first floor of the Development Services Building at City Hall. The exhibit showcases the new Nicor Gas Smart Neighborhoods™, an affordable net zero community being built in Aurora with Fox Valley Habitat for Humanity. About Habitat for Humanity Driven by the vision that everyone needs a decent place to live. Since its founding in 1976, the Christian housing organization has since grown to become a leading global nonprofit working across all 50 states in the U.S. and in more than 70 countries. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage. Through shelter, we empower. To learn more, visit foxvalleyhabitat.org. DAILY HERALD  The homes will be heated with natural gas and include LED lighting, double pane windows, insulated concrete form walls, tankless water heaters and gas heat pumps, solar panels and battery storage systems to store the renewable energy. "We all know that affordable housing is sorely needed in our community and our nation. A large part of tackling this issue is finding sustainable solutions to many of the costs that keep families from owning, and so I commend Nicor Gas and Habitat for Humanity for doing just that," said U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, a Naperville Democrat who represents Illinois' 11th district. Foster, a Ph.D. physicist who serves on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, added that he was particularly impressed with the subdivision's energy recovery ventilation design. A decades-long struggle in construction has been that if a house is extremely well-insulated, the air inside gets stale and an issue with air quality arises. But if the air is exchanged using traditional methods, the building loses the benefit of all that insulation. The solution is an energy recovery system, which allows inside air to heat the cooler incoming air in the winter and to cool the warmer incoming air in the summer. "This allows you to keep the house warm with a lot less energy, and it's one of the ways that you can make the indoor air environment better without damaging the world's environment by increasing the carbon footprint," Foster said. "These homes are also better served as a symbol of our commitment to building a more sustainable and affordable clean energy future, and I really couldn't be more proud of the fact that this is happening right here in Aurora." The subdivision will be at 1921 Jericho Road. Expected to be complete in three years, the neighborhood will comprise 1,500- to 1,700-square-foot homes of six different designs.   Since Fox Valley Habitat for Humanity was founded in 1988, it has built 70 homes in Aurora, North Aurora, Batavia and Montgomery. To apply for a Habitat home, potential homeowners must have a need for affordable housing due to unsafe living conditions, overcrowding, accessibility issues or rent higher than 30% of their income.