Green Jobs, Green Homes:
Mass-Scale Retrofits for New York's Housing

Scaling up: greening to halt climate change
As we struggle to address global warming, the Center for Working Families believes the stage is set for mass-scale greening in New York State, driven and shaped by good public policy. Across the state, communities and local governments are increasingly clamoring for ways to switch to clean energy. New York State's "15x15" goal has sent state agencies into planning for the production of renewable energy and reduction of energy use. Private capital is increasingly available for greening projects, because they provide reliable returns. And public investment in greening can easily be structured to quickly pay for itself.

Why make greening a public program?
If well-guided by legislation, NYS greening can provide a great boost on economic development and redressing economic, social and even racial disparities. Since greening reaches deeply into the physical and economic organization of communities, well-crafted incentives can easily generate permanent good jobs, secure the affordability of housing, and help fix distressed urban cores. Research shows direct correlations between measures that reduce gas and heat emissions, for example, and improvements in health outcomes, as well as social benefits like community cohesion and reductions in crime.

Residential retrofitting that solves market problems - for example, distributing economic benefits across sectors and removing uptake barriers like up-front cost and split incentives for owners and renters - can meaningfully shift inequalities across New York State.

Building a coalition that can make it happen
The Center for Working Families has convened a powerful, dedicated coalition of the stakeholders needed to make New York State's Residential Retrofit policy a reality. The Center has brought together diverse interests - from environmental justice groups to big labor, government watchdogs to business - under the banner of climate change mitigation, energy bill savings and quality green jobs

Challenges ahead
The policy development process has arrived at the point of hammering out the details: how should jobs be structured within this program, how should career pathways be paved to really reach long-term unemployed populations? How exactly should the funding mechanism be designed to leverage private capital while securing public benefits? The Center for Working Families, in partnership with our fantastic coalition, is deeply engaged in answering these questions in the near term.