A new study out by the ITT Corporation ranks voters and businesses top infrastructure concerns – and the top issues in which voters/businesses want government to invest.  The top 3?

Water, Electricity, Heat.

If these are the top services in which voters want government to invest, we can infer voters are willing to pay to see an improvement in these services.  Considering the overwhelming likelihood that the next Congress will be defined by infighting, gridlock, and partisan antics and will result in very little legislative directives, what does this study indicate about our country?

People care about their resources!  They want efficiency, they want reliability, they want (I would argue) a greater degree of security in how these services are delivered.  The ITT Corporation study focuses on water infrastructure improvements (they are a water/wastewater systems provider), and you can read about their conclusions here.  But for those of us who are not competing for lucrative government contracts, it is impossible to ignore what this implies for our built environments – homes, places of business, and such – energy, water, and heat are the areas where Americans want to invest upfront.  This tells me it is not a far stretch to imagine the changes that would be welcomed within our building culture – increasing focus on minimizing a building’s water, electricity, and heating loads.

Low resource loads and low resource use in buildings can either be the product of expensive-but-technologically-advanced building components (super-insulated windows, efficient HVAC, geothermal heat, double envelope facades, efficient appliances, to name a few) or they can be the result of inexpensive, low-tech design solutions (orienting the building to maximize south exposure, properly shading the building, appropriate window to wall ratios based on climate, smaller building footprint, and so on).

I’d hope that any study showing an overwhelming majority of Americans overtly supporting investment in water, electricity, and heat infrastructure will come as a wake-up call to the big business building industry and the big monied interests that finance construction loans.  We don’t need to wait for the government to throw money at infrastructure projects in order to improve how American’s use these services.  We need a building culture that actually responds to the big issues of our day, not just one that repeats the same old pattern of development and building because it turned a profit in the past.

Does anyone really think that we can deliver a 21st century infrastructure when this is the majority of what gets built?