Bomee Jung wants to help housing owner and operators accomplish green retrofits quickly and efficiently. She is putting two decades of experience leading groundbreaking initiatives to improve efficiency and resilience in multifamily housing into action as CEO and co-founder of Cadence OneFive, a company that aims to accelerate decarbonization.
Jung was previously vice president for energy and sustainability at the New York City Housing Authority, where she led the growth in retrofit and sustainability construction from $18 million to more than $1 billion. Before that, she designed climate programs for Enterprise, helping New York City adopt the Green Communities standard and developing post-Hurricane Sandy resilience initiatives. An urban planner with a background in web programming, Jung in 2002 co-founded GreenHomeNYC, a nonprofit democratizing green building knowledge and sustainability careers.
Jung’s recent honors include awards from the Women of Color Collective in Sustainability, Urban Future Lab, and the New York Energy Consumers Council. In the first of a series of profiles featuring seven outstanding housing leaders charting a course to a more resilient future, we spoke with Jung about her start-up journey, the need for a new narrative about energy retrofits, and a lesson she learned from the housing industry.
In 2021, you co-founded Cadence OneFive, a public benefit corporation that helps multifamily housing owners conduct preliminary scopes of work, streamline bidding, and maximize decarbonization efforts. How did you get into this work?
For two decades, my business partner Marc Zuluaga and I have been decarbonizing and improving multifamily housing. We saw how systemic market problems slow down and derail renovations. And if the building doesn’t get renovated, the residents don’t see the benefits and the asset becomes less valuable.
We wanted to create an intervention that changed the market dynamics. The premise of our company is to find places where decision-making is getting stuck, and deliver the information and tools needed to unblock them and deliver a better, more protective housing product faster.
What challenges have you encountered?
For a long time, advocates argued that saving operating expenses justifies retrofit work. I am less enthused about that message – it suggests that sustainability is an optional add-on that must “pay for itself.”
I would love the story about why we do climate-responsive construction to be more about core housing arguments and less about short-term economics. Buildings are meant to protect people, and we're not doing as good of a job of protecting people as we could. Our aging buildings predate much of our understanding of building science and weren’t built for climate challenges. When we're talking about climate-responsive construction, we're talking about core building systems: building envelopes, HVAC, hot and cold water, and conveyance. I’d love to see that perception shift to: “What is the best way to provide core services?”
You’ve mentioned that there is often tension in the affordable housing field between building high-quality homes and building more of them. How do we reconcile that?
Our understanding of what constitutes quality housing has changed. People are becoming more aware that the weather itself is becoming more hostile and that our buildings are not meeting the challenges of the times.
When we had the Canadian wildfires last year, New Yorkers saw haze inside their homes because of infiltration from the outside. There’s greater awareness about the risks of high heat for vulnerable and elderly people. It’s time for us as a professional community to upgrade our expectations of quality housing.
Enterprise is one of the places where you’ve made great impact on resilience and sustainability in multifamily housing. How did that experience inform your current work?
I learned it’s hard to create change, but resulting progress can be very sticky. Getting a mandate [to adopt Enterprise Green Communities] through required a lengthy multi-stakeholder process and a lot of conviction on the part of New York City. But once the mandate was in place, people got down to work and got it done.
The housing industry is highly capable and given the resources and compelling reasons to change the way we do business, we’ll get on the ball and do it.
I also appreciated Enterprise’s role in capacity building. It’s not just supporting the people who are most technically capable. It’s about long relationships with community-based organizations from their inception.
When Hurricane Sandy happened, we doubled down on Enterprise’s role as a convenor and capacity builder. It was about bringing together on-the-ground organizations so they could learn from each other. And I’ve taken that mindset with me – to help build capacity so there is real agency at the community level.
As an entrepreneur, a cofounder, and a woman of color, you’ve spoken out about the need for more inclusivity and better representation in your field. Have you seen any changes?
At Cadence, we have a dual mission of profit and having an impact on climate, and we’re going to make the most out of the opportunities we have. But only a tiny amount – less than 2% of investment – goes to startups founded by women, and even less to founders of color.
As a founder, I don’t think I can do much to create systemic change, so on a personal level, it feels very much about using my seat for representation. I try to speak out more, point out what goes on with women and founders of color.
I also speak out about having Asperger’s. There is stigma around it, and people think of media representations like the movie “Rain Man” – it’s not always like that. It might be a coworker who makes you feel a bit uncomfortable because they ask a lot of questions! I also want folks who may be more private about their experience to feel like they are not alone.
What is next for your company? What are your priorities in the near future?
In the two and a half years that we’ve been in existence, we’ve been serving New York State. More than 5,500 buildings have gone through Cadence’s process of preliminary scoping. We’ve piloted a contractor procurement process that slashed the time required by 93% (from six weeks to two days) while decreasing bid variance by more than 75% (from 40% to 5% to 10%). Now we’re preparing to go national.
We think the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund [GGRF] is important for the industry, and we intend to be in other major multifamily markets supporting the deployment of those funds and projects that want to take advantage of them.
GGRF has the potential to be a real lever for getting the retrofit finance market in a different place. And hopefully this is how we shift from thinking about climate-responsive construction as an add-on that’s supposed to cut operating costs towards thinking about buildings that are well-suited to protect people in the climate conditions that we’re heading into.
Vesna Jaksic Lowe is an award-winning freelance journalist.