Edward Norton's $9,000,000,000 Housing Project (that's $9 Billion)

The Enterprise team: From left, Dana Bourland, who built the green database; Charlie Werhane, head of the for-profit tax-credit operation; public-policy maven Stockton Williams; CEO and longtime housing activist Doris Koo; and former CEO Bart Harvey, now a Fannie Mae board member | photograph by Martynka Wawrzyniak

The actor's "family business" has helped shelter tens of thousands of Americans. Now it is taking on the credit crunch with innovative financing and a green-building initiative.

Early on the day of the awards ceremony in May, Norton testified on Enterprise's behalf before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Well-prepared with facts, figures, and a detailed 10-point policy plan -- the Beltway equivalent of a supercharged PowerPoint presentation -- Norton politely made the case for green construction. An investment of only 2%, he told the committee, could reduce energy costs by 20%. "We can make progress on all these issues, create green jobs, and lock in long-term environmental benefits by making green affordable homes a national priority."

Norton grew up in the town his grandfather built, Columbia, Maryland. The family spent many nights gathered around Jim and Patty Rouse's kitchen counter, cooking, doing dishes, and talking relentlessly about their mission. For the Rouses, a clean and decent home was a civil right, a starting point for all citizens. "Here we are, the wealthiest country in the world," Jim once lamented in a speech, "and we let millions of our people live in these deplorable conditions." And he held no illusions about fellow real-estate developers, who were driven all too often, he said, by the "determination, at whatever cost to the community, to make a profit." Enterprise was the Rouses' vehicle to help poor and working-class people and save American cities.

"Social entrepreneurs run on rocket fuel," Norton says. "I've seen my grandfather and Patty talk through waves of younger people who would fall away and go to sleep. They never stopped. Ever." He sums up: "You might not fully appreciate how exhausting it was!"

Something about the late nights -- or perhaps it was a young man's quest for a dose of spiritual rocket fuel -- was embedded in Norton. Discussing his role at Enterprise, he told me after his congressional testimony, "The thing I've been most proactively working toward is the notion of converting our model into a green program." The son of an environmental lawyer, Norton has long been a green activist. But, he explains, "we didn't have a whole lot of data within Enterprise for how high-cost premium items like solar would impact the low-income context. I came up with Solar Neighbors as a mechanism to gather data."

The Solar Neighbors program, in concert with energy giant BP, encourages famous folks -- like actors Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt, Alicia Silverstone, and Will Ferrell -- to install a solar system on one of their homes. BP then donates a solar installation to a low-income family. Twenty-nine celebrities have participated since the program began in 2003; in return, BP has provided 41 systems, 39 of them to low-income single-family homes, mostly in south Los Angeles. The recipients have offset their electric bills by 30% to 80%.

The program has been a financial boon for the rich and famous, too. Actor Larry Hagman, who embodied housing excess as J.R. Ewing on Dallas, became one of the first Solar Neighbors in 2003. The annual electric bill for his 46-acre Ojai farm has dropped from $37,000 to $13, he says. According to the California Public Utilities Commission, Hagman and his wife, Maj, own the largest residential solar-power system in the United States; it sends 10,000 kilowatt hours a year back to the grid. Six L.A. families received solar units in Hagman's name in 2004.

For 25 years, the low-income-housing tax credit has worked as a business because it gives profitable companies from Sherwin Williams to Disney to Deutsche Bank an incentive to invest in below-market-rate housing, and make money doing it. What Enterprise got from Solar Neighbors -- beyond PR pop and solar panels for a few units -- is real-world data about the economic benefits of going green that Enterprise could use to devise new ways to fund affordable housing.

"Our priority has always been getting people into homes, not saving the environment," Williams says. Sitting in Enterprise's spare D.C. office, he and colleague Dana Bourland are trying to explain how they ended up in the climate-change game. "We were focused on the social issues related to the environment, like asthma," Bourland says. Then, around 2003, Williams recalls, "we were seeing the excitement around the Al Gore slide show on climate change that eventually became An Inconvenient Truth and realized we had a contribution to make." Because many of its not-for-profit developer partners were open to the idea of green construction, Enterprise was in a position to collect data measuring the impact of this new way of building. "If we could prove the benefit of green building," explains Bourland, "we could create new financial products and a marketplace around it."