Decarbonizing residential building stock is crucial to mitigating climate change. However, local and national decarbonization policies can potentially create unintended harms for tenants, including unsustainable rent raises and unnecessary or illegal evictions. These policies must be designed and implemented carefully to protect renters, who are more likely than homeowners to be from Black, Brown, and low-income communities that already disproportionately bear the negative effects of climate change. Not doing so will exacerbate the housing crisis while driving more Americans into homelessness. This paper offers recommendations for tenant protection in building decarbonization policies.

New York State and New York City have enacted climate legislation with ambitious energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction targets. New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) and New York City’s Local Law 97 (LL97) impact various housing sector stakeholders, including owners, developers, renters, and financiers. Compliance will require significant investments over the next two decades, especially for high-emission buildings. While market-rate properties can finance upgrades through operating income or debt, affordable housing faces financial challenges.

Recommendations in this paper focus on strategies to make compliance more feasible and accelerate decarbonization for all housing sectors.

This report showcases how cities in the US can implement building decarbonization policies and programs in an equitable manner while also incorporating a broader set of community priorities and needs in the development, delivery, and outcomes of the program. The paper also presents case study examples from cities in the United States that have implemented community-driven buildings retrofit programs and highlights learnings from their programs for other cities.

This study analyzes the costs and benefits to LMI households of efficient electrification, including both installation and operation of residential space heating, water heating, and other equipment.

Compiling national outdoor air pollution data from across the government and other expert sources, this report shows the extent of the harm caused to people and the environment from fossil fuel burning equipment in homes and buildings, the disproportionate impact this pollution has on environmental justice communities and other vulnerable demographic groups, and how the use of methane gas in buildings is connected to the broader system of methane gas extraction and distribution.

This report looks at the existing research on climate and housing in the U.S, in two key areas: how housing decarbonization and production strategies can reduce pollution to mitigate climate change, and how climate change impacts renters, homeowners, and the broader housing industry. The paper also identifies key research gaps where more evidence would help policymakers to navigate the tensions between different policy approaches.

WE ACT's Out of Gas, In with Justice pilot studied the feasibility and benefits of electrification in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) by comparing improvements to air quality and participant satisfaction between 10 apartments with induction stoves and 10 with their existing gas stoves. It is the first study of its kind to focus on the effects of residential cooking electrification with tenants in-place in an urban public housing setting with low-income residents and residents of color. This pilot offers lessons for policymakers, public housing agencies, and affordable housing providers on cooking electrification and its impact on indoor air quality, social acceptance of electrification measures, and infrastructure challenges for existing housing in environmental justice communities.

Retrofitting buildings is a critical climate strategy, but we cannot ignore the embodied carbon impact of these retrofits. The production, transportation, and installation of materials all come with their own carbon footprints. This report provides data to support using low-carbon and carbon-storing materials in deep energy retrofits to reduce net emissions and transform buildings into climate assets. Lower embodied carbon options exist today and can be substituted for traditional materials.

Over half of California’s 3.2 million multifamily units were constructed before energy efficiency standards, resulting in poor performance and high greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve California’s greenhouse gas reduction goals, affordable multifamily housing must improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, and lower tenant utility bills while enhancing quality of life. Yet building owners face many challenges to improving the performance of their buildings. This report covers the role certain types of energy service agreements, combined with federal incentives, can play in scaling affordable multifamily retrofits.

One of the most pressing challenges in electrifying multifamily housing is the issue of split incentives for housing providers. Although housing providers want to prioritize the health, comfort and safety of residents by transitioning to all electric buildings, they encounter many difficulties trying to finance electrification. This report describes how utility allowance methods affect a property’s operating income and residents’ energy burdens, and it examines the impact of utility allowances on affordable housing electrification.