We’ve developed a suite of resources to help developers, owners, and operators of affordable housing make their properties more resilient to reduce displacement of residents, damage to property, business interruptions, and other harmful impacts of our changing climate.
As a national leader in green building, resiliency, and disaster preparedness, we’ve transformed best practices from across the country into actionable strategies, tools, and support. Whether you’re looking to understand your risk, build readiness plans, mitigate impact, or recover from a disaster, we have the tools you need. Consult the FAQ towards the bottom of this page to help you find the information you need fast in the event of a crisis.
Assessing Your Risk
These resources were created to help you understand your risk so you can build capacity, align finances, and update your operational guidelines.
Climate Proof Affordable Housing
Promoting Climate Resilient Public Housing examines how four public housing authorities proactively responded to the challenges presented by Superstorm Sandy, and offers eight tactical steps for creating safer, more resilient homes.
Identify At-Risk Properties
Portfolio Protect identifies high-risk properties by address and offers recommendations to help minimize potential harm to your property or properties and keep residents' homes safe.
Assess Threats: Florida
Keep Safe Florida was designed to help owners of affordable housing assess and address threats from climate change and natural disasters across the state.
Building Protect helps evaluate specific needs at the building level.
Community Risk Assessment
This resource helps you build a Community Risk Assessment to identify and prioritize local risks so that you can pursue appropriate risk reduction measures.
Residents, business owners, and other community-based organizations, spent a decade drafting recommendations for the Community Plan, which put people at the for...
Ensuring Readiness
Once you understand your risk, these tools help you build readiness plans to ensure you can maintain critical operations during a climate change event.
Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan
This resource takes you through the steps for creating a recovery plan, including links to additional tools and resources that can help bring your plan to life.
Reducing Displacement
This resource provides a summary of key causes for resident displacement after a disaster and how community-based organizations and affordable housing providers can protect tenants.
Preparation by Disaster
Our community-powered resources list what to do when preparing for floods, fires, earthquakes, poor air quality, and extreme heat.
Mitigating Impact
These tools take you beyond the theory of your readiness plans into execution, so you’re fully prepared to take on the impact of a climate change event.
Resilient Housing in Island Communities
This guide leverages insights from our Keep Safe program to outline best practices for resilient homes in island communities.
Business Continuity Toolkit
This comprehensive digital resource helps you practice your readiness plan to ensure business continuity throughout a natural disaster.
Multifamily Strategies for Building Resilience
This guide provides owners and operators of multifamily housing with practical guidance on re-designing and retrofitting their buildings to adapt to and provide protection from climate risks and other potential hazards.
Rebuilding Stronger
These resources were designed to ensure equitable recovery, providing best practices from across the country that help you rebuild while supporting residents.
Funding Sources Overview
Summary of funding sources from the federal government for states, tribes, and local jurisdictions.
Philanthropy Resources
Government funding is often insufficient to address disaster needs fully. This resource explains the role charity, philanthropy, and mutual aid can play in filling in the gaps, especially in frontline communities.
Post Disaster Planning for Community
This toolkit helps create and implement a strategic post-disaster plan where the short-term response supports long-term preparation efforts.
Building Green
The First 20, a peer network of early adopters of our 2020 Green Communities Criteria, share learnings, provide individualized technical assistance, and showcase best practices in healthy, sustainable, resilient affordable housing design and operations.
Practical Solutions
What's Possible: Investing NOW for Prosperous, Sustainable Neighborhoods offers innovative, forward-thinking solutions that focus on decarbonization, resilience, and equity, and prioritize communities of color and communities with low-incomes who have disproportionately felt the adverse impacts of climate change.
