From high-density affordable apartment buildings to high-priced luxury homes, the green housing options run the gamut – and they just continue to grow. More than 700 homes have already been certified under the LEED for Homes pilot program, and more are achieving certification every day.

When St. Petersburg-based green building consultants REAL Building set out to design and build Florida’s first LEED Gold home, their goal was to show that a home of any style could be truly green. The REAL model home in northeast St. Petersburg’s Riviera Bay neighborhood is a 2,100-square-foot “Florida-style” home built to blend in with other homes in the nearby community.

Gish Apartments is California’s first multifamily housing development to earn Gold certification under LEED for Homes. It was built to provide affordable housing to tenants earning 30-50% of the area’s median income, including 13 units devoted to tenants living with developmental disabilities.

Featured in the August 2008 issue of Southern Living magazine, the farmhouse-style Davidson Gap home with complementary outbuildings – including a detached garage, cistern “pump house” and more – showcased to millions of people the benefi ts of a green home and how to achieve one.

After the Usea family's homes were hit by Hurricane Katrina and a subsequent tornado, they were living in cramped quarters, the whole extended family sharing one small home. That's when ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" stepped in, building the family a new, hurricane-resistant, LEED-Platinum home on an episode of the popular TV show.

Mort and Evelyn Panish's dream home is as efficient as it is beautiful. The 2,250-square-foot LEED-Silver home was built on a reclaimed sand pit, and it includes a rooftop solar array to help provide power without contributing to climate change.

The Oakgrove model featured in this profile is just one of several types of homes being sold in the Carsten Crossings subdivision – and all 144 homes in the neighborhood are LEED-Certified. Their residents save on average $1,400 every year in reduced utility bills, and the homes outsell the non-green competition at a rate of 2-to-1.

All 44 of the LEED-Gold homes in this affordable-housing development come stocked with water- and energy-efficient clothes-washers, dryers and dishwashers. Pasco Family Housing, a project of Catholic Charities Spokane, knew that building the development to LEED standards would not just be good for the environment; it would also make the homes affordable not just up-front but month by month, for years to come – every time residents' low water and electricity bills arrive.

When New York City and state officials began plans for a new affordable-housing project in the South Bronx, they knew they wanted it to offer not just a place to live – but a place to thrive. The resulting LEED-Silver Morrisania Homes is just that: an innovative new living environment with a strong focus on protecting the health of its residents and of the surrounding environment, and it's the state's first affordable-housing project to achieve LEED certification.