Electrifying heating systems with air-to-air heat pumps is crucial for achieving global greenhouse gas targets. This report uses simulations of 550,000 U.S. households to evaluate the costs and benefits of various heat pump performance levels and insulation upgrades. The analysis highlights the potential for significant emissions reductions and identifies the importance of efficiency and insulation in optimizing cost-effectiveness. It also suggests that supportive incentives and policies may be necessary to address affordability challenges and promote widespread adoption.

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.

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.

This report delves into the critical role of building decarbonization in achieving California’s ambitious climate goal of net-zero emissions by 2045. To equitably decarbonize the residential buildings sector, Californians need accessible and affordable clean energy financing strategies to make significant investments to electrify and reduce energy consumption in all aspects of their daily lives.

Addressing Regulatory Challenges to Tribal Solar Deployment is a project that seeks to address policy challenges or barriers that affect solar projects differently or disproportionately because they are located on Tribal land. This three-part guidebook presents significant regulatory challenges and associated solutions, case studies of Tribal solar deployment projects, and briefs highlighting issues that are uniquely or specifically relevant to solar deployment on Tribal land.

This report develops a framework for states to use to advance building decarbonization. It also includes case studies from different regions. Decarbonization is essential but requires carefully thought out policies and coordination among multiple stakeholders. States play a unique role in this, ranging from establishing energy codes, regulating emissions, and engaging with energy providers.

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.

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.

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.