Mark Price and Cynthia Langlykke are two of the judges for the design competition.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — With the day-to-day rise of the costs of living, affordable housing is no longer just an issue of securing a low purchase price. The costs of maintaining, heating and cooling a home can be enough to strain families’ finances.

To combat those rising costs, the city is turning to the green movement: the wing of modern architectural design that emphasizes environmentally friendly and sustainable practices in building materials and methods. Green homes use less energy and thus are cheaper to run, advocates say.

But Providence lacks truly green homes and few developers are lining up to build them.

So the city is trying to encourage them to build green homes by sponsoring a sustainable housing design competition to create a “pattern book” of cookie cutter home designs that developers can build, with possible incentives from the city if they do.

“The competition will allow us to demonstrate that going green and building affordable housing are not mutually exclusive concepts,” Mayor David N. Cicilline said yesterday.

“We’ve worked hard over the last five years to increase the supply of affordable homes in Providence. However, we also have the responsibility to ensure that we are producing environmentally sustainable homes that are not only good for the environment, but are more affordable for low-income families because they use less energy than conventional homes,” Cicilline said.

Developers would be given incentives to use the ready-to-build designs. For nonprofit community development corporations, the amount of city money their projects receive could depend on their meeting certain green benchmarks.

For-profit developers would have usable designs readily available, thus saving on design costs, and know that the city would likely approve projects quickly that use the pre-screened designs.

The city could also put stipulations on certain land purchases, compelling developers to use green designs if, for instance, they plan to build on a lot bought from the Providence Redevelopment Agency, said city Planning Director Thomas E. Deller.

The design competition is awarding $2,500 prizes for designs for one-family affordable homes, one-family market-rate homes, two-family market-rate homes and three-family affordable homes. The winning designers would be paid a royalty of $500 by developers each time a design is used.

The designs should fit the character of Providence, Deller said, using design characteristics and materials at least somewhat consistent with the city’s housing stock.

The city is asking that the houses be built to adhere generally to the guidelines set by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Homes program, which awards its coveted certification to buildings constructed with environmentally friendly green practices and materials.

LEED is run by the U.S. Green Building Council, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that promotes environmentally friendly building practices.

The homes must also be designed to be affordable, defined as having a maximum sale price of $182,600 for a single-family home and $264,250 for a three-family home.

The city also set restrictions for the size of the lots, with 40-foot by 80-foot lots for the single-family houses and up to 50-foot by 120-foot lots for the three-family homes.

The registration deadline for the contest is next Friday. The designs must be submitted by May 1. Cicilline will announce the winner at the city’s Celebration of Housing Breakfast later in May.

The five-member panel that will decide the winner includes Cynthia Langlykke of Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services, Lynette Widder of the Rhode Island School of Design, Roger Warren of the Rhode Island Builder’s Association, Andrew Cortes of YouthBuild Providence and Mark Price, Northeast region LEED for Homes provider.

Cicilline announced the competition in one of Providence’s greenest buildings, 17 Gordon Ave. Once an abandoned factory, the building was transformed in 2004 into a business incubator complete with solar panels, a “living” roof planted with sedum, natural lighting throughout and a porous parking lot that feeds rainwater back into the water table instead of shunting it into sewers.

The project was the work of the South Providence Development Corporation, then headed by former state Rep. Joseph E. Newsome, a Democrat. Newsome said that with energy costs spiking the way they are, advocates for affordable housing can’t afford not to go green.

“There’s no such thing as affordable housing that’s not maximally energy efficient, because if it’s not maximally energy efficient, it’s not going to be affordable,” Newsome said.

dbarbari@projo.com