Binghamton Sustainability

Four root vegetables sit in a row of soil, each with a face: a carrot, a radish, a beet, an onion. Their roots hang below them like loose threads. Around them, in a ring of capital letters, the shirt reads LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The artwork is a closed loop—the words circle the vegetables, and the vegetables sit inside the words. Nothing points outward. The whole design is a small, self-contained garden bed.

That closed loop is the first thing worth noticing. The phrase is an invitation, but the layout makes it a boundary too. The four vegetables are not reaching toward anything. They are already rooted, already smiling, already in the soil together. The shirt does not show a harvest. It shows a moment of standing still in the same dirt.

I keep coming back to the double meaning of root. To root for someone is to cheer them on. To put down roots is to stay. The design uses both at once, and the pun is not just cute—it is the argument. You cannot cheer for someone you have not stayed with. The smiling carrot is not a motivational poster. It is a neighbor.

What the two meanings of rooting actually ask

Most gardening puns on shirts are decorative. They rely on the reader to smile at the wordplay and move on. This one has a second layer that is harder to dismiss: the phrase watch each other grow is not the same as make each other grow. Watching is passive. It requires presence, not intervention. The shirt does not say help each other grow or push each other to grow. It says watch. That is a quieter request, and a more honest one.

The four vegetables are drawn with visible roots in soil, which is the visual equivalent of that quietness. Roots are not the showy part of a plant. They are underground, slow, and mostly invisible. The design puts them on display anyway, which is a small act of attention. The carrot’s root is as long as its body. The beet’s root tapers to a point. The onion’s roots are a little fringe. Each one is different, and each one is doing the same work.

That is the part of the shirt I find genuinely useful as an idea, separate from the garment: mutual support is not a group project with a deadline. It is a row of plants in the same bed, each one growing at its own rate, each one visible to the others. The phrase let’s root for each other is a commitment to stay in the bed. The phrase and watch each other grow is a commitment not to pull anyone up by the stem.

The smiling faces are doing more than decorating

All four vegetables are smiling. That is not a neutral choice. A carrot with a face is a cartoon, and cartoons soften things. But the smiles also do something specific: they make the vegetables look like they are already fine. They are not struggling. They are not reaching. They are content in the soil, and they are content together. The shirt is not about rescue. It is about company.

I read the smiles as a corrective to the way mutual support often gets talked about—as a transaction, a favor, a ladder. The vegetables are not on a ladder. They are in the ground. The design refuses the vertical metaphor. There is no up in this image, only down and across. The roots go down. The row goes across. The words go around. That is a different geometry of help than most motivational language uses, and it is the reason the shirt works as an object rather than just a slogan.

The colors are worth a sentence too. The carrot is orange, the radish is red-pink, the beet is deep magenta, the onion is pale. They are not matching. They are not a set. They are four different vegetables that happen to be in the same row, and the design does not try to make them uniform. The phrase each other is doing the work of holding them together, not the palette.

Where the shirt sits in the wider language of growth

There is a version of this phrase that is easy to misuse. Watch each other grow can slide into watch each other grow on schedule, which is a different and less generous idea. The shirt does not say that. The visible roots are the guard against it. Roots do not grow on a schedule you can see from above. They grow in the dark, at their own pace, and the only way to know they are there is to look at the soil. The design puts the soil in the frame, which is a way of saying: the growth you are watching is mostly underground.

That is the argument I would make for this shirt as a piece of everyday language rather than a gardening novelty. It is a small, closed image that asks the wearer to hold two ideas at once: cheer for the people around you, and do not confuse cheering with pulling. The smiling carrot does not ask you to grow forever. It asks you to stay in the row.

The shirt itself is a standard t-shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective, listed as Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden. The design is the thing worth reading; the garment is the surface it is printed on.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

On a dark shirt, the word meh. is printed in large, bold, white lowercase letters. That is the whole design. No animal, no secondary slogan, no decorative frame. Just four characters and a period, set at a scale that would be legible from across a parking lot.

The visual joke is not the word. It is the volume. Meh is the sound of a shrug, a noncommittal hum, a decision deferred. Set in heavy white type on a dark ground, it becomes a shout of indifference—a contradiction you can read from twenty feet away. The shirt does not whisper that the wearer has no strong feelings. It announces it.

That mismatch is the argument of the garment, and it is worth taking seriously as a piece of visual rhetoric. The meh shirt is sold by Quirky Cotton Collective under a title that stacks funny, sarcastic, introvert, and dry humor—retail language that points toward a mood, not a manifesto. But the design itself is simpler and more interesting than that keyword pile suggests. It is a study in how typography can reverse a word’s meaning without changing a letter.

What the letters actually do

Lowercase matters here. MEH in all caps would read as a command or a brand. meh in lowercase, even at bold weight, keeps the word in the register of conversation—the sound you make when someone asks where you want to eat. The period is the second decision. A bare meh floats, open to interpretation. meh. closes the sentence. It is a full stop on the topic, a small typographic door clicking shut.

Then there is the scale. Large type on a dark shirt creates high contrast and a kind of visual insistence. The word is not tucked into a corner or set in a thin script. It occupies the chest like a headline. That is the tension: the content says I have no opinion, while the form says look at me. The shirt is not actually introverted. It is performing introversion at stadium volume.

I read that as deliberate. Dry humor usually works by understatement, and understatement depends on a straight face. A small meh on a light shirt would be a private joke. A large meh. on a dark shirt is a public one—a deadpan delivered in a voice loud enough to carry. The wearer does not have to explain it. The typography does the work.

The social function of a visible shrug

Clothing that says almost nothing can still do something in a room. A shirt like this functions as a low-stakes boundary marker. It signals a temperament without naming a politics, a team, or a cause. It does not ask you to agree with anything. It asks you to accept that the person wearing it may not have a strong take on the next question.

That is a useful thing to be able to signal, especially in workplaces and social settings where enthusiasm is treated as the default setting. The shirt is not hostile. It is not even particularly introverted, despite the retail title. It is a preemptive shrug—a way of saying I am here, I am participating, and I am not going to pretend to be thrilled about it. The period makes it final without making it rude.

There is a limit to how much any shirt can carry, and it is worth being plain about that. The design does not establish a movement, a generation, or a local identity. It is a piece of printed apparel with a word on it. But as a piece of visual communication, it is unusually efficient: four letters and a dot doing the work of a whole conversational register.

Why the dark ground matters

White type on a dark shirt is the highest-contrast combination available in ordinary garment printing, and it changes how the word reads. On a light shirt, meh. might look like a doodle or a label. On a dark ground, the white letters glow. The word becomes an object rather than a note. That is why the design works as a shirt and not just as a phrase: it depends on the visual weight of the type, not on the cleverness of the wording alone.

The absence of an illustration is also a choice, even if it reads as a default. No cartoon sloth, no coffee cup, no tired animal. The restraint keeps the joke in the typography. Add an image and the shirt becomes a meme about a mood. Leave it as type and the shirt becomes a statement about statements—a loud, white, lowercase refusal to make a big deal of things, made in the biggest way the medium allows.

What to take from it

The next time you see a word printed at that scale, look at what the size is doing to the meaning. meh. is a small word. The shirt makes it large. That gap between content and form is the whole design, and it is a good reminder that typography is never neutral. A period can close a conversation. A lowercase letter can keep one open. And a bold white word on a dark ground can turn a shrug into a headline.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

If you own a house in Binghamton’s First Ward and you are planning a kitchen renovation, the question that should come before the tile samples is whether the project will be treated as a substantial improvement. Under the city’s adopted flood damage prevention law, Chapter 240, that term means any repair, reconstruction, or improvement whose cost equals or exceeds 50% of the market value of the structure, measured before the improvement starts—or, if the building was damaged, before the damage occurred. The threshold is a ratio, not a dollar figure, and it is applied to the structure’s value, not the land’s.

That single definition is why a modest kitchen can matter more than its price tag suggests. A $40,000 scope against a structure valued at $90,000 is already at 44% before anyone adds a permit fee or a contingency line. Cross the line and the project is no longer just a kitchen: under the state’s reading of the standard, a pre-FIRM structure at or above the threshold must be brought into compliance, with the lowest floor elevated at least two feet above the base flood elevation shown on the FEMA map—or three feet above the highest adjacent grade where the map shows no base flood elevation. The practical next step is not to guess. It is to pull the scope of work and a defensible market-value basis together and take both to the city’s floodplain administrator before demolition begins.

What Chapter 240 actually says

Binghamton’s Chapter 240, Flood Damage Prevention, was adopted in 1987 and revised in 2019. Its definition section is the place to start, because it controls the rest of the conversation. The ordinance defines substantial improvement as:

Any repair, reconstruction, or improvement of a structure, the cost of which equals or exceeds 50% of the market value of the structure either: (1) Before the improvement or repair is started; or (2) If the structure has been damaged and is being restored, before the damage occurred.

Two features of that language deserve attention. First, the comparison is between project cost and market value of the structure. Land value is not part of the denominator, which means a high lot value does not buy you headroom. Second, the measurement point is the condition before work starts. If you are restoring after a flood or fire, the relevant value is the pre-damage value, not the post-damage condition.

The definition then adds a timing rule that catches many owners off guard:

For the purposes of this definition, substantial improvement is considered to commence when the first alteration of any wall, ceiling, floor or other structural part of the building commences, whether or not that alteration affects the external dimensions of the structure.

In plain terms, the clock starts when the first structural alteration begins—not when the building permit is issued, not when the contractor’s final invoice arrives, and not only when the footprint changes. A kitchen that involves opening a wall, replacing a floor, or altering a ceiling can start that clock even though the house looks the same from the street. This is why sequencing and documentation matter: photograph and record the pre-project condition, keep the scope of work in writing, and get the scope reviewed before the first wall comes down.

The two carve-outs, and why they are narrower than they look

The same definition excludes two categories of work from the substantial-improvement calculation:

• Projects to comply with existing state or local building, fire, health, sanitary, or safety code specifications that are solely necessary to assure safe living conditions.
• Alterations to a structure or contributing structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places or a state inventory of historic places.

Both are fact-specific. The code-compliance exclusion turns on the words “solely necessary” and “safe living conditions”—a phrase that does not cover general upgrades or work bundled with discretionary improvements. The historic-listing exclusion depends on the property’s actual listing status and on whether the structure is a contributing resource. Neither exclusion is self-executing. Treat them as questions for the local administrator, supported by documentation, rather than as exemptions you can claim on your own.

Who decides, and what triggers the permit

Chapter 240 designates the Director of Planning as the local administrator responsible for granting or denying development permit applications under the chapter. It also requires a development permit before the start of construction or any other development within the area of special flood hazard. That is the procedural hook: in a mapped flood zone, the renovation conversation runs through the Planning Director’s office, not only through the building code process.

FEMA’s flood map guidance is useful context here. It notes that every community participating in the National Flood Insurance Program has a floodplain administrator who works with FEMA during the mapping process, and that any place with a 1% or greater annual chance of flooding is considered high risk—with at least a one-in-four chance of flooding during a 30-year mortgage. Those odds are the reason the 50% test exists. It is not a penalty for renovating; it is a way of deciding when a repair is large enough that the building should be rebuilt to a safer standard.

What compliance would actually require

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s post-flood compliance guidance describes the same 50%-of-market-value test and explains the consequence for pre-FIRM structures: if the damage or improvement reaches that threshold, the entire structure must be brought to code compliance. For elevation, DEC states that structures newly built or brought to compliance must have the lowest floor at least two feet above the base flood elevation shown on the FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map. Where the map shows no base flood elevation, the lowest floor must be at least three feet above the highest adjacent grade prior to construction.

That is the mechanism by which a kitchen renovation can become an elevation requirement. The ordinance does not single out kitchens. It asks whether the work, taken as a whole, crosses a ratio—and if it does, the remedy is applied to the structure, not to the room.

One caution about the two-foot figure: it appears in DEC’s general post-flood compliance guidance, not in the retrieved text of Binghamton’s Chapter 240. Whether the city’s currently codified standard matches, exceeds, or differs from that figure is a question to confirm with the Planning Director’s office and the current adopted text. New York’s Department of State model-laws guidance notes that municipal floodplain laws may require a higher standard than state and federal minimums but may not require less in order to remain in the NFIP—so the local number is the one that governs your permit.

Before you rely on a map, confirm the map

Chapter 240 cites a Flood Insurance Study for the City of Binghamton dated June 1, 1977, with accompanying flood insurance rate maps and flood boundary-floodway maps on file at the Division of Building and Construction. That citation tells you what the ordinance adopts; it does not tell you what map is currently effective for a specific parcel. DEC’s county table lists Broome County’s digital flood map status as “Preliminary Maps Available,” which is a practical reason to confirm the effective map and base flood elevation for your address before you build an elevation figure into a renovation budget.

The FEMA Flood Map Service Center is the official source for flood hazard mapping products, and FEMA describes the Letter of Map Change process for amending or revising a map after a community adopts it. If your property’s mapped status is uncertain, that is a separate process from the renovation permit, with its own standards and timeline.

A worksheet for the pre-application conversation

You do not need to resolve the 50% question yourself before talking to the city. You do need to arrive with the right materials. A useful packet includes:

1. A written scope of work that separates structural alterations from cosmetic finishes, with line-item cost estimates for each.
2. A market-value basis for the structure, excluding land—and a clear statement of the method used to arrive at it.
3. The property’s FIRM zone and base flood elevation, from the currently effective map, plus the panel number and effective date.
4. Pre-FIRM or post-FIRM status, based on the structure’s construction date relative to the community’s earliest flood map.
5. Pre-project documentation: photographs, measurements, and a description of existing conditions, dated before work begins.
6. Any claimed exclusion, with the documentation that supports it—code citations for safety work, or listing documentation for historic status.

Bring the same packet to your insurer. FEMA notes that there is typically a 30-day waiting period for an NFIP policy to take effect, with exceptions for coverage required by a government-backed lender or related to a community flood map change. If your renovation changes your insurance position, you want that conversation to happen on the same timeline as the permit conversation, not after closing.

What the floodplain law does not do

New York’s Department of State model-laws chapter is candid about the limits of flood damage prevention laws. It states that such laws do not typically limit density or use of land in floodplains, prevent floodwater conveyance areas from being reduced, prevent valley storage from being filled, or consider increased flood risk from development, sea level rise, or increased precipitation due to climate change. That is worth keeping in view. Complying with Chapter 240 is a floor for a safe renovation; it is not a full resilience plan for a block, a neighborhood, or a watershed.

For a First Ward owner, the honest summary is this: the 50% rule is a definitional test, and the definition is public. Read it, gather the numbers it asks about, and take them to the Planning Director’s office before the first wall opens. The answer for your kitchen depends on your scope, your structure’s value, and your parcel’s mapped elevation—three things you can document, and one conversation you should have early.

Questions readers ask

Does the 50% test use the value of my house or my house plus land?

The ordinance’s definition refers to the market value of the structure. Land value is not part of that figure. How market value is established for a specific application is a question for the local administrator; the retrieved text does not prescribe an appraisal method.

My renovation is cosmetic. Does the rule still apply?

The definition starts the clock at the first alteration of any wall, ceiling, floor, or other structural part, whether or not exterior dimensions change. Cosmetic work that does not touch those elements is treated differently from work that does—but the classification is a determination for the administrator, not a self-certification.

I own a historic building. Am I exempt?

The definition excludes alterations to structures or contributing structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places or a state inventory of historic places. Whether your building qualifies, and whether the proposed work counts as an alteration under that exclusion, should be confirmed with documentation before you rely on it.

Where do I find my base flood elevation?

Start with the FEMA Flood Map Service Center for the currently effective map, then confirm with the city, since Chapter 240’s cited study dates to 1977 and DEC lists Broome County’s digital maps as preliminary. The Planning Director’s office is the local administrator for permit purposes.

What if I disagree with the determination?

Chapter 240 defines an appeal as a request for review of the local administrator’s interpretation of a provision, and a variance as a grant of relief from the chapter’s requirements. Both are separate processes with their own standards. The retrieved text does not describe the full variance procedure, so ask the administrator for the applicable application requirements.

On the front of the shirt, a yellow caution triangle sits above a crossed-out hand. The words NOT FRIENDLY and DO NOT TOUCH are set in warning-sign lettering, the kind of blocky, all-caps type you see on a chain-link fence or a locked gate. The crossed-out hand is the universal symbol for no—no entry, no parking, no touching. Together, the graphic borrows the visual grammar of public safety signage and applies it to a person.

That is the whole design. There is no joke tucked into a corner, no second layer of irony. The shirt says what it means, and it says it in the language of municipal caution. The question worth sitting with is not whether the shirt is funny—it is, in a dry way—but what happens when a private boundary is dressed up as public infrastructure.

What the warning sign actually says

Warning signs are designed to be read at a glance by strangers. They assume no prior relationship, no context, no shared language beyond the symbol itself. A yellow triangle means pay attention. A crossed-out hand means stop. The lettering is not conversational; it is declarative. It does not ask. It informs.

When that grammar is printed on a shirt, the wearer becomes the sign. The boundary is no longer something you have to explain in the moment—it is pre-loaded, visible from across a room, legible before anyone speaks. That is the useful argument of the design: it turns a personal limit into a piece of public-facing infrastructure. It says, in effect, this is not a negotiation.

I read the crossed-out hand as the most interesting element. A hand is the part of the body that reaches, that offers, that touches. Crossing it out is not a rejection of a specific person; it is a rejection of the gesture itself. The shirt does not say I dislike you. It says do not reach for me. That is a narrower and more honest claim.

The introvert label is doing less work than the sign

The listing title includes the word introvert, and that is the frame most people will bring to the shirt. But the design itself does not say introvert. It says not friendly and do not touch. Those are not the same thing. Introversion is about where energy comes from; unfriendliness is about how you treat other people. The shirt collapses the two, and that collapse is the source of its humor—and its slight dishonesty.

Plenty of people who wear a shirt like this are perfectly friendly once you are inside the boundary. The sign is not a description of character. It is a description of access. It marks the perimeter, not the interior. Read that way, the shirt is less a statement about personality than a statement about consent: ask before you cross.

That reading also explains why the design works better as a warning sign than as a slogan. A slogan would try to be clever. A warning sign just does its job. The shirt borrows that bluntness and lets the wearer borrow it too—a way to be legible without having to be verbal.

Where the sign language comes from, and where it stops

The yellow caution triangle and the crossed-out hand are not owned by any one company or movement. They are part of a visual vocabulary that has been standardized across workplaces, roadways, and public buildings for decades. I am not making a claim about the specific origin of this particular design or about how the listing performs; I am reading what is visible on the shirt.

What is visible is a deliberate mismatch. The sign is institutional; the wearer is a person. That mismatch is the joke, but it is also the argument. We already accept that a locked door or a wet floor can communicate a boundary without anyone having to stand there and explain it. The shirt asks why a person cannot do the same.

The answer, of course, is that people are not doors. A sign on a shirt invites a reaction in a way a sign on a wall does not. It is a provocation as much as a boundary. The crossed-out hand is funny because it is rude, and it is rude because it is honest. The shirt does not pretend to be polite. It chooses clarity over warmth.

What the shirt asks of the room

A boundary is only useful if other people can read it. The shirt assumes a room full of strangers who will either respect the sign or ignore it. That is a small gamble, but it is the same gamble every visible boundary makes. The design does not try to soften the message or make it charming. It puts the caution triangle front and center and lets the wearer decide when to put it on.

If you are looking for the shirt itself, it is the Not Friendly Do Not Touch warning sign tee from Quirky Cotton Collective. The design is exactly what the listing shows: the lettering, the triangle, the crossed-out hand. Nothing more, nothing less.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

What you can do

If you want to read the design for yourself, the listing is the primary source. Look at the triangle first, then the hand, then the words. Ask what each element is doing and whether the combination holds together. That is the same habit you would bring to any sign on a fence or a gate: read the symbol, read the text, and decide whether the boundary is clear. The shirt is not a policy document, but it is a small piece of public language, and it is worth reading closely.

On a dark shirt, centered, in lowercase, sits the word meh. It is very small. There is no animal, no slogan, no illustration, no exclamation point. The period is there, and the letters are lowercase, and the whole thing occupies less space than a pocket. That is the entire design as shown in the native garment preview for the Quirky Cotton Collective listing.

Most printed shirts argue outward. They want to be read across a room, and they are built for that distance—big type, high contrast, a joke that lands before you have finished walking past. This one does the opposite. Its scale is the argument. The word is legible only up close, which means the shirt is not addressed to the room. It is addressed to whoever has already leaned in.

That distinction matters more than it first appears, and it is the thing I want to work through here: a small printed word is not a quiet version of a loud one. It is a different kind of statement altogether, because it changes who the statement is for.

Reading the object literally

What is actually on the garment, per the visual observation: very small, centered, lowercase meh. lettering on a dark shirt. No animal illustration. No pride variant. The retail title calls it a funny sarcastic introvert minimalist saying, but titles are marketing copy, not print. The print is four letters and a period, set small, set centered, set lowercase.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not tell us. It tells us the designer chose understatement as the whole visual strategy. It does not tell us anything about the wearer’s personality, politics, mood, or social circle. A shirt is a surface with ink on it. The interesting question is not what kind of person buys it but what kind of exchange the design sets up.

The period is doing work

Lowercase meh alone is a shrug. Lowercase meh with a period is a shrug that has finished shrugging. The period closes the sentence, which means it closes the conversation—or at least declines to extend it. Punctuation is where a lot of the meaning lives here, and the period is the part that turns a vague feeling into a small, complete utterance.

Set that utterance in tiny type on a dark ground and you get something close to a boundary marker. Not a hostile one. A boundary marker of the mildest possible kind: I am here, I am fine, I am not going to perform enthusiasm about it. The scale keeps it from becoming a confrontation. The period keeps it from becoming an invitation to negotiate.

Why small type changes the social contract

A large printed joke is a gift to strangers. It gives them something to react to, and it implicitly invites the reaction. That is a generous move, and it is also an exposed one—you have handed the room a script and now you have to live with how people deliver their lines.

Small type withdraws that gift. It says the shirt is not a conversation starter; it is a conversation ender, available only to people already close enough to read it. The design effectively filters its audience by distance. From across the street, the shirt is just dark fabric. At arm’s length, it is a small, dry remark. The wearer has not refused contact. They have set the range at which contact is welcome.

I think that is the real reason the minimalist version of this idea works better than a louder one would. A big MEH is a performance of indifference, which is a contradiction—you cannot loudly not care. A small meh. is indifference that has not bothered to raise its voice, and that is consistent with itself.

What it asks of the other person

Every printed word makes a demand on the reader, even a tiny one. This design asks the reader to do three things: come closer, read carefully, and then decide whether to say anything at all. The third is the interesting one. The period has already signaled that no reply is required. A person who respects the design will let the remark stand.

That is a useful thing to notice about understatement in general. Small statements are not weaker statements. They are statements that trust the reader to meet them at the right distance. When someone shows you a small meh.—on a shirt, in a text, in the tone of a Tuesday—the courteous response is usually not to argue with it or try to cheer it up. It is to register it and move on. The design is a small lesson in leaving things alone.

The minimalist claim, examined

The listing calls the shirt minimalist, and on this point the marketing and the artwork agree. Minimalism here is not an aesthetic pose so much as a subtraction: remove the animal, remove the extra words, remove the exclamation, shrink what remains until only the core utterance is left. What survives the subtraction is the word and its punctuation, and the punctuation turns out to be load-bearing.

I would not overclaim what that means. It does not make the shirt profound, and it does not make it a statement about mental health, introversion as a diagnosis, or any movement. It is a small joke about a small feeling, printed at a scale that matches the feeling. That is a coherent design decision, and coherence is rarer than it sounds.

If you are considering it

The shirt is the Meh Funny Sarcastic Introvert Minimalist Saying from Quirky Cotton Collective. The thing to know before you decide is that the print is genuinely small and centered on a dark ground, with no illustration. If you want a shirt that announces itself, this is not that shirt. If you want one that keeps its remark to itself until someone is close enough to deserve it, the scale is the feature, not a limitation.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

On a white shirt, the words I HAD POTENTIAL sit in capital letters above a curved white ramp. At the upper left ledge of that ramp, there is a dashed empty circle. At the lower right flat ledge, a solid white ball rests. The ramp descends from left to right, and the dashed circle marks where the ball would have been if it had ever been placed there. The solid ball is where it ended up.

That is the whole design. No arrows, no equations, no extra caption. The joke depends on recognizing a standard physics diagram: a ball at the top of a ramp has gravitational potential energy, and a ball at the bottom has converted that potential into motion and then into rest. The shirt uses the vocabulary of mechanics to say something about a person. The dashed circle is the life that could have been. The solid ball is the life that is.

What makes the design worth more than a glance is that it does not choose between the two readings. It lets the physics and the self-description sit on the same plane. The dashed circle is not a mistake in the drawing; it is the point. Potential, in physics, is a capacity that exists before anything moves. In everyday language, potential is a compliment people pay to the young and a reproach people aim at the grown. The shirt collapses those two meanings into one image and then refuses to explain which one it means.

The curved ramp matters, too. A straight diagonal would read as a simple slope, a one-way decline. The curve suggests a path that bends, accelerates, and then flattens out. The ball on the lower right ledge is not falling anymore. It is at rest. That is a different statement from I failed. It is closer to I am done moving. The design does not say the ball rolled badly. It says the ball is no longer on the ramp.

I keep thinking about the dashed circle as an invitation that was never accepted. It is drawn in outline, which means it is still visible. A solid circle would have been a second ball. A dashed circle is a placeholder, a shape that says something could go here without insisting that it should. The shirt is not angry about the empty circle. It is not even sad about it, exactly. It is noting it. That tone is hard to pull off in a garment, and it is the reason the design works as more than a slogan.

The phrase I had potential is usually said with a sigh, or as a punchline, or as a way of getting ahead of someone else’s judgment. On the shirt, it is said next to a diagram. The diagram does not argue with the phrase. It illustrates it. The ball is where it is. The dashed circle is where it was not. The ramp is the distance between them. That is a complete thought, and it does not need a follow-up.

If you are the kind of person who reads a shirt like this and immediately wants to know whether the dashed circle is meant to be the ball’s starting position or a second ball that never arrived, you are already inside the design’s logic. The answer is that both readings are available, and the shirt does not adjudicate. A dashed outline can mean absent or hypothetical or yet to be filled. The solid ball can mean actual or settled or stuck. The design trusts you to pick the one that fits your day.

That is also why the shirt does not need a caption beyond the four words. The words set the tone; the drawing supplies the argument. If the shirt said only I had potential, it would be a complaint. If it showed only the ramp and the balls, it would be a physics diagram. Together they become a small essay about the difference between what a system can do and what it did. The dashed circle is the system’s capacity. The solid ball is the system’s output. The ramp is the part nobody photographs.

The shirt is listed as I Had Potential Funny Physics Pun Sarcastic Minimalist Quote from Quirky Cotton Collective. The design is white on white, which means the contrast comes from the shape of the lines rather than from color. The capitals are plain. The ramp is a single curved stroke. The dashed circle is a ring of short segments. The solid ball is a filled circle. There is no shading, no gradient, no second color. That restraint is what keeps the joke from turning into a lecture.

I do not know whether the shirt is comfortable, how it fits, or how it holds up after a wash. I have not worn it. What I can say is that the artwork is legible as a diagram and as a sentence, and that the two readings reinforce each other rather than competing. The dashed circle is the most interesting part because it is the only element that is not fully resolved. It is a question mark drawn as a shape. The solid ball is an answer, but not necessarily a happy one. The ramp is the part that made the answer possible.

There is a version of this shirt that would be cruel, and a version that would be self-pitying. This one is neither. It is dry. It presents the evidence and lets you draw the conclusion. The conclusion might be I wasted it, or I spent it, or I am still here. The design does not say. It just shows the dashed circle and the solid ball and the curve between them, and trusts that you have enough physics to read the rest.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

Four root vegetables sit in a row of soil, each with a face: a carrot, a radish, a beet, an onion. Their roots are drawn down into the dirt, visible, thin, a little unruly. Around them, in a ring of capital letters, the shirt reads: LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW.

The design is a pun, and the pun is doing two jobs at once. To root for someone is to cheer them on. A root is also the part of the plant that holds it in place and pulls water from the ground. The shirt stacks those meanings on top of each other, then adds a second verb—watch—that turns the whole thing into a small theory of how people grow best. Not alone. Not in a straight line. In view of one another.

I keep looking at the onion. It’s the one on the right, round and layered, its roots splayed out like a small brush. The carrot is taller. The beet is wider. The radish is small and pink and seems to be leaning slightly toward the beet. None of them are the same shape, and none of them are trying to be. That’s the part of the artwork that does the most work, and it’s easy to miss because the words are so loud.

Two meanings of rooting, and one quiet boundary

The phrase let’s root for each other is an invitation. It asks the wearer and the reader to become a certain kind of audience for one another—the kind that claps when someone else’s root finally takes hold. That’s a generous posture, and it’s the one most people see first.

But and watch each other grow is not quite the same gesture. Watching is passive. It requires proximity and patience, but not intervention. The shirt doesn’t say make each other grow or help each other grow faster. It says watch. There’s a boundary in that verb, and I think it’s the more interesting half of the design. You can cheer for someone without managing them. You can be present for a season of change without treating another person’s growth as a project you’re responsible for completing.

The vegetables reinforce this. Their roots are drawn in soil, not in air. They are anchored. They are not being pulled up to check on their progress. The artwork shows growth as something that happens underground, mostly out of sight, and the smiling faces are the part that surfaces. That’s a fairly accurate picture of how people change, and it’s a useful corrective to the version of mutual support that turns into surveillance.

What the shirt is not saying

It would be easy to read watch each other grow as a demand for endless expansion—the language of hustle culture dressed up in garden gloves. I don’t think the artwork supports that reading. A carrot doesn’t grow forever. It grows to a carrot’s size and then it’s done, and the point of the root is to be harvested or to seed, not to keep adding inches for their own sake. The four vegetables are different species. They have different mature shapes. The shirt puts them side by side without ranking them.

That’s a small argument, but it’s a real one: mutual encouragement doesn’t require a shared scoreboard. The radish will never be the carrot, and the beet will never be the onion, and the design is at peace with that. If the shirt has a thesis, it’s that rooting for someone means wanting them to become more fully themselves, not more like you.

The pun also depends on the roots being visible. The illustrator could have drawn four smiling vegetables with no roots at all—cute, generic, forgettable. Instead the roots are the most detailed part of the drawing. They’re the evidence that the growth is real and that it’s happening in dirt, not in a highlight reel. I read that as a deliberate choice, though I can’t verify the artist’s intent. What I can say is that the visible roots are what make the second half of the sentence land.

An everyday object for a specific kind of friendship

Most slogan shirts are about the wearer: a mood, a hobby, a joke that only the wearer needs to get. This one is about a relationship. It addresses a second person, or a group, and it asks them to participate in a particular way. That makes it a strange and rather specific thing to put on a shirt—closer to a note passed in class than a billboard.

I think that’s why the design works as a gift for a gardening friend, a coworker who has been quietly learning a new skill, or someone in the middle of a slow recovery that doesn’t have a dramatic before-and-after. The shirt doesn’t promise results. It offers company. The four vegetables are smiling, but they’re also just sitting there in the soil, doing the unglamorous work of being rooted. That’s the register the design is pitched in, and it’s a relief after a season of louder, more performative messages.

If you’re looking for the exact shirt, it’s the Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden design from Quirky Cotton Collective. The artwork is the one described above: the four smiling root vegetables, the visible roots, the ring of capital letters. I’m not going to tell you how it fits or how it washes, because I haven’t worn it. What I can tell you is what the drawing says, and the drawing says something worth saying.

The part I keep coming back to

It’s the onion’s roots. They’re drawn as a little fan of lines, and they look almost like a hand waving. I don’t think that’s intentional, but it’s the kind of accidental detail that makes a design feel alive. The onion is the vegetable most likely to make a person cry, and here it is, smiling, rooted, waving. That’s a better summary of mutual support than most essays manage: stay in the ground, keep your roots visible, and cheer for the ones next to you even when they make you tear up.

The shirt doesn’t ask you to grow forever. It asks you to grow where you’re planted, and to let someone watch. That’s a smaller promise than it first appears, and a more honest one.

Editor’s note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

On a dark shirt, the word meh appears in large, bold, lowercase white letters. The type is heavy and unadorned, the kind of weight usually reserved for a band name or a protest slogan. Then comes the period. It sits at the baseline like a full stop after a sentence that was never worth starting. The native garment preview shows no animal illustration, no secondary graphic, no decorative frame—just the word, the dot, and a lot of dark ground around them.

That period is the whole argument. Without it, meh is a shrug, an open-ended noise. With it, the word becomes a verdict. The shirt is not asking you to agree. It is not asking you to laugh. It is closing the conversation before anyone can mistake the wearer for someone who wants to have one.

Why the lowercase matters

Lowercase meh is a different word from MEH. Set in caps, the same letters would read as a shout—an opinion delivered at volume. In lowercase, the word keeps its flat, dismissive tone. The bold weight creates a small tension: the letters are loud, but the word is not. That mismatch is the joke, and it is also the design. The shirt performs indifference at a size that cannot be ignored.

I read the period as the visual equivalent of a door closing gently but firmly. It is not a slam. It is not rude. It is simply the end of the sentence. In a culture that treats enthusiasm as a default setting, a period after meh is a small act of boundary-setting. The wearer is not hostile. They are just not available for the performance of caring.

The introvert reading, and its limits

The retail title includes the words introvert and dry humor, and it is easy to see why. A single word, delivered flatly, with no follow-up, is a recognizable introvert move. But the shirt does not actually say introvert. It says meh. The distinction matters. Introversion is a temperament; meh is a stance. The shirt is not a personality test. It is a piece of typography that happens to align with a certain social preference.

That is why the design works better than a longer slogan would. A shirt that said I’m an introvert, leave me alone would be explaining itself. This one just stops. The period does the work that a paragraph would otherwise have to do.

What the shirt asks of the people around it

An invitation, a boundary, a deliberately small statement—these are the everyday materials of community life. The meh. shirt is a boundary made visible. It does not tell you what the wearer is feeling. It tells you what they are not going to do: elaborate, perform, or pretend to be more excited than they are. In a neighborhood, that kind of clarity can be useful. Not every conversation needs to be a performance of enthusiasm. Sometimes the most honest thing a person can offer is a flat, complete sentence.

The shirt is available at the Quirky Cotton Collective listing on Amazon. The design is what it is: large bold lowercase meh. lettering on a dark shirt, no animal illustration, no extra ornament. If you are looking for a meh shirt that commits to the bit, the period is the commitment.

The limits of reading a shirt

I can describe the type, the weight, the color, and the punctuation. I cannot tell you how it fits, how it wears, or how strangers react to it. Those are not visible in a garment preview. What is visible is the design decision: a word that means I don’t care set in letters large enough to prove that someone cared about the layout. That contradiction is the shirt’s small, dry pleasure. It is not a manifesto. It is a period at the end of a very short sentence.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The first thing I notice is the triangle. Yellow, equilateral, the same shape that warns you about a wet floor or a high-voltage panel. Inside it, a hand with a diagonal slash through it. Above and below, in block letters that look borrowed from a municipal sign shop: NOT FRIENDLY. DO NOT TOUCH.

This is the artwork on the Quirky Cotton Collective shirt listed as Not Friendly Do Not Touch Funny Warning Sign Introvert. I am looking at the design, not wearing it. What interests me is not the joke, exactly. It is the grammar. The shirt does not say “I am shy.” It does not say “please give me space.” It borrows the visual vocabulary of public safety—the caution triangle, the prohibition slash, the imperative verb—and applies it to a person. That is a stranger move than it first appears.

What the sign language actually does

A warning sign is a contract. It assumes a reader who is about to do something—step on the floor, touch the wire—and it interrupts that action with a consequence. The triangle is not decorative. It is a shape that has been standardized precisely so you do not have to read the words to know something is at stake.

When that grammar gets printed on a shirt, the wearer becomes the hazard and the viewer becomes the person about to make a mistake. The crossed-out hand is doing specific work: it is not a hand waving, not a hand reaching out, not a hand held up in a stop gesture. It is a hand that has been ruled out. The slash is the same one you see over a cigarette or a U-turn. It does not negotiate.

My reading—and this is interpretation, not a claim about the designer’s intent—is that the shirt is less about introversion than about the exhaustion of being read as available. The word “friendly” is doing a lot of quiet labor here. It is not “dangerous.” It is not “violent.” It is “not friendly,” which is a social category, not a physical one. The caution triangle is almost a joke about that mismatch: the sign treats a social boundary as a safety hazard, and in doing so admits that for some people, unwanted conversation feels exactly like that.

The difference between a boundary and a performance

There is a version of this shirt that would be merely rude. A shirt that says “go away” in aggressive type is a closed door. This one is more interesting because it is formatted as information. The caution triangle implies a reader who is capable of adjusting their behavior. The imperative—DO NOT TOUCH—is blunt, but it is also a rule, and rules are addressed to people who might follow them.

That is the useful argument I keep coming back to. The shirt is not a rejection of other people. It is a request for a specific kind of encounter: one where the other person reads the sign first. The crossed-out hand is not a fist. It is a hand that has been politely removed from the equation. The yellow triangle is not a threat. It is a heads-up.

Whether that reads as funny or hostile depends entirely on the room. In a crowded bar, it is a punchline. In a grocery store line, it is a small act of self-defense. On a bad day, it is a permission slip. The design does not resolve that ambiguity, and I do not think it is supposed to. The warning-sign format is doing the work of making a personal limit look like public infrastructure—something that was always there, something you should have seen coming.

Why the caution triangle is the right container

I have been thinking about this in the context of the other small-statement shirts I have written about—the ones that use understatement or a single word to make a point. This one is louder, but it is also more structured. The triangle gives the joke a frame. Without it, the words would just be a sentence on a chest. With it, the shirt becomes a sign, and a sign implies a jurisdiction.

That is the part I find genuinely clever. The wearer is not claiming a personality trait. They are claiming a zone. The caution triangle is a boundary marker, and boundary markers are how we make shared space legible. A crosswalk, a fire lane, a wet floor—these are all agreements about where certain behaviors are allowed. The shirt borrows that agreement and applies it to the space around a body.

I do not know whether the person wearing it is an introvert, or just tired, or making a joke. The shirt does not require me to know. It requires me to read the sign. That is a lower bar than friendship and a higher bar than nothing.

What the design asks of the viewer

The crossed-out hand is the only symbol on the shirt that is not made of letters. It is also the only one that is universal. You do not need to read English to understand a hand with a slash through it. That is a small, practical piece of design thinking: the shirt works even at a distance, even in a crowd, even for someone who is not going to stop and parse the words.

But the words matter too. NOT FRIENDLY is a strange thing to announce, because friendliness is usually something you demonstrate, not something you declare. Putting it on a shirt turns a social performance into a stated fact. It is the visual equivalent of saying “I am going to be quiet now” before the conversation starts. It is not an apology. It is a forecast.

I think that is why the shirt works as more than a novelty. It is a small piece of public communication that treats the wearer’s limits as information worth sharing. The caution triangle is the container, the crossed-out hand is the rule, and the block letters are the plain-language version for anyone who needs it. It is not a cure for anything. It is a sign. And signs, when they are well made, do exactly one thing: they tell you what to expect before you get there.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

If you own a two-unit building in Binghamton and one of your tenants qualifies for EmPower+, the number that matters most is not a rebate dollar — it is 50 percent. Under NYSERDA’s published program rules, if 50 percent or more of the units in a 2–4 family building are income-eligible, the entire building is treated as income-eligible. In a double, that means one qualifying tenant can open the whole structure to an assessment and to incentives.

The second number is the upstate cap. For 2–4 family rental units, low-income projects are capped at $12,000 for the initial unit and $6,000 for each additional income-eligible unit; moderate-income projects are capped at $6,000 for the initial unit and $3,000 for each additional unit. Broome County falls on the upstate side of the program’s line — counties south of and including Ulster and Dutchess are downstate, everything else is upstate — so those are the figures that apply here. Before you assume anything about your own building, the practical next step is to pull the current Broome County income table on NYSERDA’s eligibility page and check your tenant’s household size against it.

Who the program is built for

EmPower+ is an income-qualified program, not a general efficiency rebate. NYSERDA’s landlord fact sheet describes it as serving property owners with 1–4 units who rent to income-eligible tenants, offering “low- to no-cost energy efficiency upgrades.” The renters page is more precise: low-income units are those with combined income at or below 60 percent of State or Area Median Income, whichever is greater, and moderate-income units are at or below 80 percent.

That 50-percent rule is the hinge for a double. A two-unit building where one tenant is income-eligible meets the threshold on its face. But the rule is about which units are income-eligible, and eligibility is determined through the application — so the honest answer is that the building-level treatment follows from the tenant’s approved application, not from a landlord’s own read of a pay stub. Confirm it with the assigned contractor or a Regional Clean Energy Hub before you plan a scope of work around it.

What EmPower+ actually pays for

According to NYSERDA’s renters page, rental and 2–4 family units can receive:

• A no-cost home energy assessment;
• No-cost measures installed at the time of the assessment;
• Funding toward air sealing, insulation, heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and electrical service and wiring upgrades.

The landlord fact sheet lists a narrower set of “may include” items — high-efficiency lighting, air sealing, and additional insulation for walls and attic — and notes that more comprehensive projects may require a contribution from the owner. Read those two documents together and the shape of the program is clear: the assessment and direct-install measures are the no-cost layer, and the deeper work is where the incentive caps and owner contributions come in.

Incentive amounts depend on income eligibility, the type of measure, and the number of units. Low-income units can receive up to 100 percent of eligible measure cost; moderate-income units up to 50 percent. Both are subject to the caps above.

The money math for a Binghamton double

Take the caps at face value and the arithmetic is straightforward. A two-unit building with both units income-eligible at the low-income tier has a program ceiling of $12,000 plus $6,000 — $18,000 across the building. At the moderate-income tier the same building tops out at $6,000 plus $3,000 — $9,000. A building where only one unit is income-eligible is capped at the initial-unit figure for that tier.

These are ceilings, not estimates. NYSERDA’s FAQ is explicit that some homes need little work and will not use the entire incentive, while others need extensive work and will use all of it. There is no published per-building projection for a Binghamton double, and anyone who offers you one before an assessment is guessing.

The distinction that matters for your budget is between “no cost to you” and “low cost to you.” The landlord fact sheet uses both phrases deliberately. Low-income projects can be fully covered up to the caps; moderate-income projects carry a required owner contribution. If you are planning cash flow, plan around the moderate-income scenario, not the best case.

What you have to do as the building owner

The application starts with the tenant, not with you. NYSERDA’s FAQ lays out the sequence: the household creates a profile on the MyEnergy Portal and completes the application; once approved, the program emails the contact information for the assigned EmPower+ contractor; the contractor schedules the home energy assessment; the contractor submits recommendations to the program for review; and after approval, the contractor provides an overview of approved incentive amounts and schedules the work.

Your formal role is consent. The renters page states that rental properties must have approval from the building owner for core energy efficiency improvements to proceed. The FAQ adds nuance: a landlord does not have to be involved for a no-cost assessment and limited direct-install measures, but owner participation is encouraged because it produces a more comprehensive project. In practice, a double owner who wants the full scope should get approval on file early rather than waiting to be asked.

You cannot hire your own contractor. The FAQ says customers choose from a list of program contractors or let NYSERDA assign one, and those contractors are credentialed by the Building Performance Institute and other standard-setting organizations. Contractors are not code inspectors, so a clean EmPower+ project is not a substitute for a separate code review if your building has other issues.

What EmPower+ will not cover

The exclusion list is short and worth reading before you get your hopes up. Per the FAQ, EmPower+ does not provide significant roof repairs or replacements, whole-house window or door replacements, or extensive home repairs to address water damage or other health and safety concerns. If your double has a roof at the end of its life or a basement that takes on water, EmPower+ is not the program for that work, and treating it as one will waste a season.

Heat pumps are conditional, not automatic. The FAQ says approval depends on existing heating fuel type and current insulation levels, and that for low-income natural gas customers, heat pumps are installed only if the household has been pre-approved for the Department of Public Service’s Energy Affordability Guarantee Pilot. A contractor who promises a heat pump before the assessment is skipping a step.

One thing you do not have to worry about: liens. The FAQ states there is no cost or future obligation when a project is completed through EmPower+, and no repayment is required if you move or your income changes. Financing through the Green Jobs–Green NY loan programs is a separate matter with its own transfer and payoff rules.

A practical sequence for a Binghamton double

1. Check the income table first. Use NYSERDA’s eligibility page, select Broome County and the tenant’s household size, and see whether the household falls in the low- or moderate-income band. The page’s table did not render in the source material reviewed for this article, so verify the current figures directly rather than relying on a remembered threshold.
2. Talk to your tenant before they apply. The application is theirs, and the 50-percent whole-building rule only helps you if their eligibility is established. Ask whether they are willing to apply and what documentation the program requires.
3. Put owner approval in writing early. Core efficiency work needs building-owner approval. Getting it on file before the assessment avoids a stalled project.
4. Ask the contractor for the approved incentive breakdown in writing before work begins. The FAQ says that breakdown comes after program approval of the project. That document is what separates a covered project from a surprise owner contribution, and it is the single most useful piece of paper in the process.
5. Budget for the moderate-income cost share. If the household lands in the moderate tier, a 50-percent owner contribution applies up to the caps. Know that number before you sign a scope.
6. Separate the work EmPower+ will not do. Roof, windows, doors, and water-damage repairs need a different plan and probably a different program.

Where the program rules are moving

EmPower+ is not static. The FAQ references March 2026 income updates and explains that applicants approved under older moderate-income figures can ask their contractor to submit a case so TRC can re-verify income and adjust the incentive. It also notes that the upstate and downstate tiers use different standardized contractor pricing and different project-level caps. Broome County sits in the upstate tier, so a Binghamton landlord comparing notes with a downstate landlord will see different numbers for the same building type — that is program design, not a local penalty.

There are also add-on funding streams layered on top of the base caps. The renters page lists Sustainable Futures Program maximums — $5,000 for a heat pump water heater, $10,000 for an air source or ground source heat pump, $5,000 for a panel box, $2,500 for an electrical wiring upgrade — and Home Electrification and Appliance Rebate amounts, including up to $1,600 for air sealing, insulation, and ventilation. These are maximums, not entitlements, and eligibility depends on the combination of measures the contractor proposes. Treat them as reasons to ask questions during the assessment, not as line items you can bank in advance.

What this means for a Binghamton block

The program’s structure rewards a specific kind of landlord behavior: talking to tenants early, getting consent on paper, and asking for the approved incentive breakdown before work starts. It does not reward treating EmPower+ as a general repair fund. For a city with a lot of older two- and three-unit housing stock, the 50-percent rule is the detail most likely to be missed — and the one most likely to change what a building can actually get done.

The honest limits are worth stating plainly. The published sources give caps and rules, not project-level estimates, and they do not connect EmPower+ to flood risk, sewer backups, or watershed resilience. A landlord with a wet basement on the Chenango side of town should not read this program as a solution to that problem. What EmPower+ can do is tighten a drafty double, add insulation, and in some cases address heating and electrical service — work that lowers a tenant’s energy burden and makes the building more comfortable. The next step is a phone call to 1-866-NYSERDA or a Regional Clean Energy Hub, and a look at the current Broome County income table before anyone promises you a number.

Questions Binghamton landlords ask

Can I apply for EmPower+ myself, or does my tenant have to?

The application is the household’s. NYSERDA’s process starts with the tenant creating a MyEnergy Portal profile and completing the application. Your role is to approve the work. The landlord fact sheet directs property owners to the tenant application process and to the program’s contractor list.

Do I have to pay anything?

It depends on the tier and the scope. Low-income projects can be covered up to 100 percent of eligible measure cost within the caps. Moderate-income projects require an owner contribution of up to 50 percent within the caps. A contribution is also required if the project exceeds the caps or involves certain measures such as heating replacements, per the FAQ.

Will the program put a lien on my building?

No. The FAQ states there is no cost or future obligation when a project is completed through EmPower+, and no repayment is required if the occupant moves or income changes. Separate financing through Green Jobs–Green NY loans has its own rules.

Can I get a new roof or windows through EmPower+?

Generally no. The FAQ excludes significant roof repairs or replacements, whole-house window replacements, whole-house door replacements, and extensive repairs for water damage or health and safety concerns.

How long does approval take?

The FAQ says an application submitted with all necessary paperwork can be approved in as little as two days, and that missing documents add time. The assessment and work scheduling happen after that, so the full timeline depends on the contractor and the scope.

Program rules, caps, and income tables change. Verify current figures with NYSERDA at 1-866-NYSERDA or through a Regional Clean Energy Hub before making a decision about your building.