Walton at at glance
Age: 31
Job: Executive director of Green|Spaces
Education: A native of Greeneville, Tennessee, he earned a degree in architecture from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and spent a semester studying at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.
Career: He was architect in Washington D.C. for Envision Design, which was bought in 2012 by Perkins+Will. He became head of Green|Spaces in March 2014.
Personal: He and his wife, Bailey, have two sons.
Walton leads city to a greener future
Green|Spaces director builds future using less energy, more sustainability
Michael Walton has a North Chattanooga home that he'd like to sell you. The asking price is $420,000 - but the power bill can't be beat. It should be right around $0.
"It'll produce as much energy as it consumes over the course of a year," says Walton, who in March 2014 took over as executive director of Green|Spaces, a nonprofit organization headquartered on Chattanooga's Southside.
Green|Spaces' mission is to promote "sustainable living, working, and building in Chattanooga and the surrounding region."
With that in mind, Walton launched Green|Spaces' NextGen Homes, a four-house development to be built on Hamilton Avenue on a hillside overlooking busy North Market Street a few blocks north of the Publix supermarket.
Green|Spaces listed the first house for $420,000 in late July. Construction will start after a buyer is under contract. The house will be open for educational tours throughout construction and for about a month before the owner moves in.
All four of the three-bedroom, 2.5-bath, 2,225-square-foot houses will be showcases for green living. They'll be designed to be energy-efficient with a 9-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array mounted on the roof. Bathrooms will be equipped with low-flow toilets and plumbing fixtures designed to save water. Kitchens will have built-in space for recycling and composting. The homes' building materials won't have any volatile organic compounds that "off-gas." And the home will have "smart" ventilation systems that pull fresh air into each room.
Ventilation is important in today's well-insulated houses with "tight envelopes," Walton says. The ventilation system will even sense how much carbon dioxide is exhaled by people inside the house, so it can provide fresh air to a room that is packed with people who get together to watch football on TV, he said.
"The company that makes these, they haven't really marketed [them]," Walton says. "So they have 90 or 100 installations all over the country."
Green|Spaces' board member Irene Hillman, who works as manager for career services at the College of Business University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, praised Walton for the NexGen homes project.
"I wish I could buy that house, myself," she says. "I feel like it's a very tangible proof of the impact he's making on the community."
"He lives what he preaches," Hillman says. "Every time I see him, he's on his bike. He makes you feel like [sustainability] can really happen."
Walton, who grew up in Greeneville in eastern Tennessee, has a degree in architecture from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He spent a semester studying at ETH-Zurich, or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. It's ranked as one of the world's best math, science and technology universities. Albert Einstein attended school and later taught there.
Walton worked in Washington D.C. as an architect at Envision Design, a 15-person firm that specialized in sustainability. Every professional was accredited in LEED, or leadership in energy and environmental design, a green building certification program. Envision Design was purchased in 2012 by Perkins+Will, a 1,500-person firm that prides itself on employing what is says are more LEED-accredited professionals than any other North American design firm.
Walton could bike to work every day from the 600-square-foot apartment near Logan Circle that he shared with his wife, Bailey, an interior and graphic designer from Cincinnati, Ohio. They met in Washington, D.C., at a design awards post-event celebration.
The couple, who have two sons, Finn, 4, and Henry, 11 months, began looking for a new place to live about a year after Finn's birth.
"[D.C.] is a rather expensive place to raise a family," Walton says.
His wife's first visit to Chattanooga was in October 2013 for the 3 Sisters Bluegrass Festival held downtown near Ross' Landing. Another factor in Chattanooga's favor is that Walton's brother, Chip Walton, got a job here as a biologist working for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. He and his wife have two daughters the same age as the Walton's two sons.
The couple fell for the Scenic City.
"We really just saw an amazing potential future here in terms of the architectural palette," Walton says. "You really feel that industrial heritage, but there's this future of sustainability that's layered on top of that."
"There's just a massive amount of potential for really high-quality sustainable development without displacing the people that live in these neighborhoods" Walton says, referring to such established neighborhoods as St. Elmo and Highland Park.
Empower Chattanooga is a green|spaces program meant to help low-income residents in East Chattanooga, Highland Park, and East Lake. These three neighborhoods, which have a number of poorly-insulated older homes with inefficient heating systems, use 43 percent more electricity per square foot than the average Chattanooga house, according to Green|Spaces, which has partnered with EPB, the city of Chattanooga, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and more than 30 other organizations are coordinating our efforts to reduce per-capita energy use and improve quality of life.
"We offer basic energy efficiency workshops regularly in those three neighborhoods," Walton says. "We bring weatherstripping, we bring dryer vent brushes and show people how to use all that stuff."
Walton also launched Green|Light, a certification program like LEED through which Green|Spaces helps businesses and organization put together a step-by-step sustainability plan. The price for the certification depends on the size of the business or organization. It can be as little as $250, Walton said. But the practical advice that participants get can save more than that, Walton said.
"Put in a water cooler, so that people can fill up reusable bottles," Walton says. "That saves money. You buy the water cooler once, you buy the reusable bottle once and that's it."
The Hunter Museum of American Art saved $75,000 over five years after the audit, Walton says.
Businesses and organizations who complete the Green|Light program get window stickers to let people know of the certification, and Green|Spaces promotes the participants' stories through such avenues as social media, blogs and ribbon-cuttings.
Lupi's Pizza Pies is another participant. It composts food scraps that get used on the restaurant owner's farm that grows food used to make the pizzas.
"That's pretty amazing," Walton says. "That's a cool story."