Building Truly Resilient Rural Housing: Reflections from the Groundswell Rural Renaissance Conference
- paulshahriari
- Dec 2
- 3 min read
Last week, I had the honor of joining an extraordinary group of practitioners, policymakers, and community leaders at the Groundswell Rural Renaissance Conference in Vermont. If you’ve never experienced a Groundswell event, picture this: a barn packed with people who refuse to accept rural decline as inevitable, all trading ideas about how to turn demographic and economic headwinds into tailwinds. The energy was contagious.
I spoke on a panel titled “Community-Rooted Resilient Housing” alongside some of the sharpest minds working at the intersection of rural development, health, and sustainability. Our core question was provocative:
How do we make rural housing resilient—not just to hurricanes, wildfires, and multi-day power outages, but to the deeper, slower-moving storms of economic dislocation, aging in place, healthcare access, and social isolation?
We didn’t spend much time rehashing familiar stats (though they’re grim: rural America loses ~40,000 housing units a year to deterioration, energy costs in older rural homes are 30-50% higher than urban averages, and material health issues disproportionately affect lower-income and senior households). Instead, we jumped straight into what’s actually working on the ground:
Modular and panelized systems that can be manufactured in rural factories and deployed rapidly
Deep-energy retrofits financed through on-bill tariffs and PACE programs
Community land trusts paired with permanently affordable, net-zero-ready homes
Designs that intentionally foster multi-generational living and telehealth-ready spaces
Local material loops (hempcrete, mass timber, reclaimed barn wood) that keep dollars circulating in the county
The common thread? Resilience today is measured in triple-bottom-line outcomes: lower lifecycle costs and higher asset values (profit), dramatically reduced carbon and healthier indoor environments (planet), and homes that strengthen rather than strain social fabric (people).
The Hidden Friction That Slows Rural Progress
Here’s the part that keeps me up at night: even when rural developers, architects, housing authorities, and community development corporations know the high-performance solutions exist, actually finding, comparing, and specifying them is painfully slow.
A rural affordable-housing nonprofit might spend weeks chasing down third-party verified HPDs, EPDs, and cost data for low-VOC insulation alternatives. A county facilities director trying to use IRA direct-pay incentives discovers - too late - that the product they selected doesn’t actually meet the domestic-content thresholds. A small architecture firm loses a bid because they couldn’t generate a complete LEED v4.1 materials schedule fast enough.
That friction isn’t trivial. It translates directly into delayed projects, higher soft costs, missed funding windows, and - most damaging - cynicism that “sustainable just costs more.”
This Is Exactly Why We Built Ecomedes
Ecomedes is the operating system for high-performance product decisions. We’ve aggregated over 1.2 million products from more than 10,000 manufacturers—all with structured, verified data on embodied carbon, Red List chemicals, VOC emissions, recycled content, domestic manufacturing, cost benchmarks, and 40+ certification programs (LEED, WELL, LBC, ILFI Declare, Cradle to Cradle, HPD, EPD, etc.).
For rural project teams, that means:
Instant discovery: Type “low-carbon insulation R-30 Zone 6 domestic content” and surface only products that actually qualify for the 10% IRA bonus
Side-by-side intelligence: Compare real installed-cost ranges, embodied carbon (kg CO₂e/ft²), and health attributes across competing products in seconds
One-click documentation: Generate complete specification sections, LEED/ILFI credit summaries, HPD/EPD libraries, and buy-American compliance reports that used to take days
Portfolio-level analytics: Track scope-3 emissions and health impacts across an entire housing authority’s portfolio or a developer’s pipeline
The result? Rural teams—whether a 3-person housing authority in Appalachia or a regional CDFI in the Great Plains—can make urban-caliber sustainable decisions without urban-caliber staff or budgets.
The Rural Renaissance Is Already Underway
The Groundswell conference reminded me that rural America isn’t waiting for permission or pity. From Vermont to Oklahoma to Alaska, communities are rewriting the script—building housing that doesn’t just shelter people but actively regenerates economies, ecosystems, and social bonds.
Tools like Ecomedes exist to remove the last excuses. High-performance, healthy, cost-effective, and incentivized products aren’t scarce—they’re just hard to navigate. We’re fixing that.
If you’re working on rural housing, community facilities, work-force development projects, or Main Street revitalization anywhere in the U.S., let’s talk. The next wave of rural prosperity will be built one specification, one purchase order, one resilient home at a time.
Grateful to Groundswell, Rural Renaissance, and my brilliant co-panelists for an unforgettable few days. The future of rural America looks bright—and it’s being built with healthier, smarter, more regenerative materials.
Who’s with us?
#RuralRenaissance #ResilientHousing #SustainableBuilding #RuralDevelopment #HealthyMaterials #TripleBottomLine #RuralAmerica #NetZero
The Groundswell conference reminded me that rural America isn’t waiting for permission or pity. From Vermont to BasketBros to Alaska, communities are rewriting the script—building housing that doesn’t just shelter people but actively regenerates economies, ecosystems, and social bonds.
At first, Dinosaur Game is manageable, giving you time to adjust.