Sustainability is one of INHS’ main values and supports its mission to provide safe and quality housing for its community.

INHS strives to implement our values in our daily operations as well as in all of our projects and housing developments.  Sustainability is one of our core values and supports INHS’s mission to provide safe and quality housing for our community.

As housing becomes more and more expensive, those with modest incomes often find that low quality housing is all they can afford. Poorly built or maintained homes commonly have inadequate insulation, old or inefficient heating systems and appliances, and a wide variety of toxic materials throughout. The rent may be low, but the actual costs can include higher energy bills, health and medical issues for residents, and environmental impacts that affect all of us.

It doesn’t have to be this way! INHS believes that affordable housing must be sustainable housing. Building sustainably extends the life cycle of homes, decreases energy consumption and costs, improves health outcomes, and reduces our community’s carbon footprint.

Sustainability in Our Community

All INHS homes and developments are designed and built to high standards by using “Smart Growth” principles to locate housing close to workplaces, services and transportation. We use known, safe construction materials and implement recycled products and green building practices whenever possible.

As a national real estate development leader in green building, INHS helped create the LEED for Homes building standards, the leading U.S. certification standard for residential green building. Our homes are among the most energy efficient in the country.  Along with LEED, our homes are also certified by

• Energy Star: For homes that are energy efficient and comfortable.
• Indoor airPLUS: For homes that are healthy to live in.
• LEED for Homes: For homes that are good for you, the community and the planet.

As of November 2025, 85 INHS housing units are certified as LEED Platinum, 103 as LEED Gold, and 77 as LEED Silver. The remainder of INHS-developed housing units are built to meet or exceed a variety of other green-building certification requirements.

Solar Panels

Two INHS developments have solar panels installed on their roofs, 210 Hancock in the City of Ithaca (54 rental units) and Glen Lake Apartments in Watkins Glen (34 rental units). The electricity is utilized by its residents living in the buildings.

As of October 2025, 210 Hancock has produced 381 MWh of electricity (that’s 381,000 KWh, the normal units you see on your electric bill) since its installation in 2018. Similarly, Glen Lake Apartments in Watkins Glen has produced 121 MWh of electricity (or 121,000 KWh) since its installation in February 2022.

At 10 cents a KWh, that’s $50,000 worth of electricity! According to EPA standard numbers, that is equivalent to:

• 562,000 Miles driven by an average passenger vehicle
• 138 homes electricity use for one year
• 1.2 railcars’ worth of coal burned

Village Grove in Trumansburg, INHS’s greenest project to date, utilizes offsite community solar to reduce utility costs for residents and save energy. A resident at Village Grove said, “I could buy lunch with how much it costs to pay my utility bill!” 

Sustainability in the Workplace

Reducing our environmental impact starts at home!  INHS tries to walk the talk, not just in our community developments, but in our workplace as well.  Our organization encourages implementing best practices to reduce, reuse, and recycle.  Our procurement policies emphasize sourcing recycled and environmentally responsible products wherever possible.