Exploring Climate Change in U.S. Housing Policy

ABSTRACT

Housing is an established channel for U.S. climate policy. Local and national environmental policymakers have attempted to mitigate the contributions of home energy use and residential sprawl to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global climate change for almost a half-century. More recently, hazard and planning officials are also exploring how to adapt housing to the multiple environmental effects that are already being realized as a consequence. But how is contemporary housing policy responding to the opportunities and needs of the climate crisis? The wide terrain of housing policy—including local land-use regulations, public subsidies for affordable housing production and maintenance, direct aid to households for their housing costs, the enforcement of fair housing laws, and the promotion of secure and affordable lending institutions among many relevant policy interventions—has struggled with integrating climate mitigation and adaptation strategies for a host of reasons. Resource constraints abound. Housing policymakers continue to focus on other persistent challenges such as the housing affordability crisis. The challenge of integrating climate response in this already complex social, economic, and environmental system may even be overwhelming. This special issue of Housing Policy Debate explores the ways in which the range of contemporary housing-relevant policy addresses climate change or, as the submissions suggest, ignores it.

KEYWORDS:

• climate change
• mitigation
• adaptation
• disaster housing
• residential energy

Climate change is increasingly seen as an integral component of housing policy by decision makers and the public press in virtually all its dimensions, in terms of both U.S. housing’s contribution to global climate change and its varying exposure to climate change’s effects (Flavelle, 2020; Gillis, 2021; Jingan, Hersher, Wendland, Newborn, & Rivero, 2021; Kamin, 2021; Plumer & Popovich, 2020; Wiener & Kammen, 2019). Housing is also now squarely established within climate policy as part of the strategic toolkit for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and as a channel for addressing the exacerbated social and economic injustice that fossil fuel consumption has wrought. These realizations have been long in the making.

Our homes’ locations, construction, and operations have massively—and negatively—contributed to greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and, in turn, global climate change in the last century. In the United States, homes currently account for 6% of direct national greenhouse gas emissions or, more accurately, 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions when also accounting for the production and distribution of electricity that is consumed by homes (DOE, 2021; EPA, 2021b). The United States’ housing emissions are equivalent to the sixth largest emitter on Earth.

Yet these tabulations do not fully account for the additional emissions from fossil fuel-based transportation that our residents take from and to home, from the massive amount of energy required for delivering and treating water supplies for our homes, or from the construction and operations in the megaprojects that defend an ever-widening urban residential footprint—all of which are determined by the location, density, and quality of our housing (Ewing & Rong, 2008; Gleaser and Kahn 2004; Jones & Kammen, 2011, 2014). From local building codes and zoning ordinances through state utility requirements to federal building energy research and assistance, the policy terrain designed around housing has only begun to account for the fact that most individual U.S. households’ carbon footprints come from housing regardless of household income (Song, Qu, Taiebat, Liang, & Xu, 2019). Stated more accurately, housing’s portion of individuals’ emissions comes from the policy decisions and industrial practices that encourage fossil fuel reliance for use in our homes and for getting around them.

At the same time as our housing has been part of the problem, it has received its blows. Policymakers and industrial proponents have encouraged residential land development in places and in ways that have set the resulting home occupants in harm’s way—in many cases knowingly. Our residential properties and their occupants are disproportionately exposed to the dozens of climatological effects resulting from global climate change, compared with other components of our human-built environment. From acute events such as hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires to slow-onset phenomena like drought and chronic flooding, homes are ground zero. For example, there are 5.7 million U.S. residential properties exposed to future flood risks. When realized, this exposure translates to expected annualized losses totaling $20.3 billion (First Street Foundation, 2021). Millions more live in the wildfire–urban interface, a number that grew over the last several decades as residential development spread in high-cost areas desperate for the single-family lots that perpetuate the climate crisis (Mietkiewicz et al., 2020).

Homebuyers’, homeowners’, and renters’ responses to these exposures are far from clear; purported threats of “climate gentrification” in one place play out against calls in others for increased regional infrastructure to defend residential communities from mass displacement in still others—each with its own ensuing pressures on the housing stock and costs (Fussell, Sastry, and Van Landingham 2010; Hino, Field, & Mach, 2017; Keenan, Hill, & Gumber, 2018; Siders, 2019; Van Zandt et al., 2012). The housing professions—including appraisers, real estate agents, builders, and mortgage lenders—and housing institutions—from local planners and building officials to national government-sponsored enterprises and housing assistance programs—mirror this overall lack of direction (Kousky, Kunreuther, LaCour-Little, & Wachter, 2020; Ouazad & Kahn, 2019). In increasingly repeating anecdotes, these same housing institutions are also occasionally known to encourage households into increasing exposure (Fields, 2021; Miller, 2019).

Further, like communities, ecosystems, and housing markets, housing’s physical contributions to global climate change and its exposure to it vary across socioeconomic communities. Low- and moderate-income households that are a traditional focus of U.S. housing policies are particularly vulnerable to these effects given their lack of wealth and physical protection, even as they are also disproportionately burdened by energy costs; suffer the health effects of hazardous energy choices; have limited to no access to energy efficiency improvements; site renewable energy installation, or electrification; and rely on fossil-fuel based transportation (Bednar, Reames, & Keoleian, 2017;Hernández, 2016; Kontokosta, Reina, & Bonczak, 2020; Pendall et al., 2014; Reames, 2016). Likewise, historically disadvantaged communities are also at particular risk from the resulting effects of climate change (EPA, 2021a). Exposure to climate change’s effects is particularly acute for residents of assisted housing units (Buchanan et al., 2020).

These simultaneous phenomena—housing’s contribution to climate change and housing’s exposure to its effects—now challenge traditional approaches to housing policy that emphasize homeownership for middle-income households and provide a thin safety net for low-income ones. Much more empirical work needs to be done to assess these policy overlays, and define which communities need focused attention and which households slip through the cracks.

The Policy Landscape

Fortunately (or unfortunately), much of the tradition of U.S. housing policy is mirrored by contemporary climate change action. Both have been built upon and have exacerbated historical disparities by race and income in the access to viable, affordable, and quality housing options. Both are governed by complexly interwoven authorities at federal, state, and regional levels (including utilities, water and stormwater districts, and transportation authorities), and local government. Both have attempted to rein in private-market actors and actions to middling effect. Public perceptions of their shared central challenge—that more housing is needed and that it must be environmentally sustainable and resilient—assume that other neighborhoods and other generations must bear the burden of solving it.

Most distressingly, both have suffered from an insufficient and unpredictable quantity of resources—financial, political, and intellectual—to meet the magnitude of their respective challenges. In the last few decades, formal connections between housing and climate policy have frequently blossomed and withered. Yet they have sprouted across a wide and occasionally unexpected terrain. Indeed, the most aggressive set of policies at the climate and housing nexus have been in relation to residential energy.

Energy Policy

U.S. policies for mitigating further climate change through housing harken back to the 1970s energy crisis, with early investments in residential energy efficiency and renewable energy research on the one hand and the establishment of energy assistance programs on the other. The studies under the former effort eventually launched the labeling program ENERGY STAR for home products and whole homes in the 1990s (Martín & McCoy, 2019). A lesser-known fact about this now commonly known home energy program is that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched it through its greenhouse gas-regulating authority under the Clean Air Act—that is, as a housing program intentionally designed for climate policy.

As a voluntary program, ENERGY STAR and its sibling home energy research and development programs have largely relied on market-based channels to reduce residential energy use. Green building programs’ popularity and their embrace of residential energy technologies subsequently grew what was once a cottage industry of building energy professionals into a sizable pool of green job training programs, certifications, and home rating protocols. Rebates, tax credits, and other purchase and retrofit incentives peaked during the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in the aftermath of the housing recession. Energy-progressive states, utility commissions, and local governments followed suit with their own carrots, combined with the sticks of increasingly stringent residential energy building codes and product standards to yield a positive increase in the average U.S. home’s energy efficiency—although this outcome has been tempered by the fact that the average U.S. home’s size has also grown (Desilver, 2015).

The other energy-focused policies related to housing are the energy assistance programs for low-income households, which have also evolved over time. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program started in 1976 to support modest energy retrofits. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program began in 1981 in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Administration for Children & Families to provide direct energy bill assistance, occasionally in coordination with weatherization. Both programs have historically been massively underresourced compared with the magnitude of households suffering from energy poverty and of the housing units that are modestly or severely inadequate in basic structural performance, let alone their energy consumption. ARRA dramatically increased these programs’ charges, to mixed effect (Allcott & Greenstone 2017; Fowlie, Greenstone, & Wolfram, 2018; Levinson, 2016; ORNL 2015).

For their part, scholars of the policies and programs have extensively focused on measuring current residential energy consumption patterns and behaviors (Min, Hausfather, & Lin, 2010; Salari & Javid, 2016). Building off this work has been the extensive effort to model the potential capacity of residential energy transformations in new housing and from expanding energy-efficient retrofits and on-site renewable energy, as well decades spent promoting denser urban forms for residential communities as an alternative to carbon-intensive sprawl to inform new public investments (Goldstein, Gounaridis, & Newell, 2020; Koomey et al., 1991; Lima Azevedo, Morgan, Palmer, & Lave, 2013).

Consequently, recent infusions of federal aid under last year’s American Rescue Plan, the very recent Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the pending Build Back Better legislation for energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electrification efforts again pose aspirational opportunities to reduce housing’s role in global climate change—although with likely implementation hurdles.¹ Ultimately, although most U.S. climate policymakers have been focused on the reduction of fossil fuel production and combustion at the source (that is, utilities and vehicles), the attention given to the residential end uses—and users—of energy and their transition to carbon-free housing has been quiet, slow-moving, and relatively effective.

Yet, this body of work has only occasionally focused on unique components of the housing stock, of housing assistance, or of housing policy at either national or local levels (Dastrup, McDonnell, & Reina, 2012; Estiri, 2016; Mueller & Steiner, 2011; Ray et al., 2019; Wilson, 2012). The oversight of the housing policy lens in this discussion has subsequently led to unresolved, significant challenges regarding housing affordability and the housing industry’s capacity to deliver on broad energy goals.

Housing Policy

For its part, U.S. housing policy has been comparatively timid in its integration of climate concerns. If housing policy could fall under categorization, it would include the wide terrain of local land-use regulations; public subsidies for affordable housing production and maintenance; direct aid to households for housing costs; the enforcement of fair housing laws; and the promotion of secure and affordable lending institutions, among other local and national public interventions. Most of this policy field has struggled with integrating climate mitigation and adaptation strategies for a host of reasons, money being first and foremost.

Regardless, there has been some attention to the former—that is, the integration of climate mitigation efforts such as energy labels and energy codes through incentives or requirements for public dollars, and direct funding of energy retrofits and upgrades for assisted housing. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s entitlement and competitive grant programs, and increasingly several state housing programs, imposed energy efficiency requirements in new and preserved housing, and housing finance agencies include these actions in their qualified allocation plans. Civic support for energy policy in affordable housing was crystalized by the Enterprise Community Partners’ Green Communities program, Elevate Energy’s pioneering multifamily energy retrofits, and coalitions such as Energy Efficiency for All, the Network for Energy, Water and Health in Affordable Buildings, and the Green and Healthy Housing Initiative. Again, the 2009 ARRA was a peak moment of investments in housing for physical improvements that would reduce energy consumption in the housing stock, including greening capital funds for public housing.

Recent attention to climate risks in the housing stock has also led to the modest integration of climate exposures in housing allocations across federal housing agencies. Inquiries by the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Mortgage Bankers Association regarding the exposure of the government-sponsored enterprises’ housing portfolio and the solvency of mortgage markets have also pushed the conversation, although with minimal policy or program action to date (Becketti, 2021).²

Statutory limitations around the role of housing policymakers and their institutions in relation to the location and quality of housing, especially private market housing, partially explain the field’s modesty. Yet the overall lack of public-sector resources for meeting the nation’s housing needs (including fundamental access, affordability, and quality), combined with the underlying societal goal of providing as much housing as possible, has made investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy for housing as well as climate resilience and hazard mitigation appear aspirational to many housers. Consequently, transformational and radical proposals such as the Green New Deal for Public Housing and the Green Homes Guarantee have attempted to push the housing policy terrain directly into climate goals (Aldana Cohen et al., 2019).

Hazard Policy

For all of housing policy’s inconsistency and omission, housing policy at least exists. The U.S. climate adaptation policy for housing has been neither environmental nor social. It is crisis driven. Public intervention largely comes only after disasters have damaged houses and destroyed their occupants’ livelihoods and lives (Bolin & Stanford, 1991; Comerio, 1998; Martín, 2019; Olshansky, Hopkins, & Johnson, 2012; Peacock, Van Zandt, Zhang, & Highfield, 2014; Quarantelli, 1995). This assistance surfaces well after state and local government and special districts have already made decisions that allow homes to be built in harm’s way or invested in infrastructure to harden existing development’s precarious viability. Rebuilding to predisaster conditions, then, becomes the expedient option for the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA)’s Individual and Housing Assistance Program and HUD’s Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery (Martín, Gilbert, Teles, & Theodos, 2019).

Indeed, the occasional infusion of federal and state funds for climate adaptation have tended to focus on larger-scale infrastructure that may protect residential communities rather than address individual homes or households; examples of these programs include HUD’s Rebuild by Design projects, National Disaster Resilience Competition, and Community Development Block Grants for Mitigation, along with FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program. Direct public investments for individual homes’ climate exposures (such as FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance) and related state and local efforts (such as New Jersey’s Blue Acres program) meet, like the energy retrofit and assistance funds, only a fraction of the need. The Biden administration’s reinstitution of the Obama-era Federal Flood Risk Management Standard and recent explorations of FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance property buyouts have heightened awareness (Greer & Brokopp Binder, 2017; Scata, 2020; Weber & Moore, 2019). However, again, these are offered largely after harm has already been realized.

Public property hazard insurance options—from the National Flood Insurance Program to state wind insurance pools and, likely, wildfire insurance pools—are among the few policy interventions beyond the modest housing-specific mitigation efforts (Kousky, 2018; Kousky & Kunreuther, 2014). These options tenuously exist, are often out of reach for low-income and hard-to-serve households, and do not address the myriad of chronic environmental hazards that increasing climate change brings. Without changes in home property insurance policy akin to recent personal health insurance reforms, more exposures will go unmitigated and the likelihood will increase that households—property owners and renters alike—will presume that their homes and communities can simply be rebuilt after the inevitable climatological events and resulting human and economic losses.

Indeed, the occurrence of severe climate change-related disasters has been the primary spur for reconsidering housing adaptation policy—although reconsideration inevitably yielded to rebuilding of housing in the same disaster-hit locations and almost always in the same socioeconomic context as before the disaster hit. The underlying social and economic vulnerability across households and investment disparities across communities persist (Bullard & Wright, 2012; Cutter, Boruff, & Shirley, 2003; Fothergill & Peek, 2004). Disaster housing scholars reviewed this terrain as early as the Northridge Earthquake and Hurricane Andrew (Comerio, 1997; Peacock, Gladwin, & Morrow, 2012; Zhang & Peacock, 2009). Yet Hurricane Katrina in 2005 spawned the most extensive policy response and scholarship focused on the efficacy and efficiency of housing decisions that are made after damage has been realized (Blakely, 2012; Gotham, 2014; Graham, 2012; Green & Olshansky, 2012; Lowe, 2012; Peek, Morrissey, & Marlatt, 2011; Spader & Turnham, 2014). A wealth of literature has surfaced after every major disaster event since.

However, the literature is still constrained by the rarity of examples of publicly supported housing-specific climate adaptation efforts or policies that can be assessed and critiqued beyond the traditional focus on rebuilding. Policy focused exclusively on housing’s adaptation to climate is still a work in progress. Private and civil actors are starting to make inroads into this policy terrain. Unlike the explosive growth of the industry offering home energy improvements, however, the providers of hazard mitigation services remain modest, although growing (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2021). Fortunately, advocates for aggressive policy among housers and emergency management advocates have proposed sweeping proposals for housing disaster policy, much like their green housing advocacy counterparts (Saadian, Gordon, Patton, & Rammler, 2020).

Building the Scholarly Foundations

Although the risks and vulnerabilities for housing units and occupant households—especially low-income ones—are increasingly known, much more work is needed to understand how climate risks are transforming settlement access, costs, demography, neighborhood change, and community capital. The disparity of benefits for different household types from the precious few interventions to date is also an evidence gap that desperately needs to be filled. Further empirical deciphering of the policy terrains of housing, energy, climate, and hazards, and uncovering their overlap, is desperately needed.

Housing scholars, public and private practitioners, and activists have more explicitly turned their gaze over the last decade to the ways in which housing is implicated in the human causes of global climate change and, most recently, to how housing is in turn being transformed by climate change’s effects. However, scholarship in both areas remains distressingly nascent. Fortunately, several scholars across a broad range of disciplines have provided a foundation for understanding the interconnected relationship of housing and global climate change.

Housing historians, for example, have known for some time that the relationship between our housing and our environmental ecosystems in general (and global climate change, more recently) has multiple dimensions, all of which are framed by explicit local, state, and national policy. Several early scholars created a foundation of empirical inquiry in relation to the design and construction of the physical American home and its general relationship to the built and natural environments (Crawford, 1996; Hayden, 1981; Jackson, 1987; Wright, 1983). These roots quickly blossomed into a wide range of inquiry about the physical effects of housing and on housing by the environment writ large. From the history of technology, for example, scholars tracked the evolution of specific, energy-consuming home technologies (Bigott, 2001; Cavanaugh, 1997; Cooper, 1998; Ogle, 1996; Tobey, 1996) and the interplay between resource consumption and societal benefit. More recent work followed the evolution of the green housing movement, its origins in the early environmental movement and 1970s energy crisis, and its proponents’ resulting advocacy that produced much of current housing policy related to the environment (Laird, 2003; Wolfson, 2013).

The growth in scholarship in the last two decades around residential energy use and behaviors on the one hand, and around postdisaster housing conditions on the other, has changed—including many of the references scattered in this policy review. This special issue is the first attempt by Housing Policy Debate (HPD) to crystalize this range of policy studies and, most importantly, learn from the policy interactions.

The Special Issue on Climate and Housing Policy

Through four guest editors covering the multiple dimensions of the climate–housing policy nexus, HPD issued a call for papers to explore the vast terrain of climate and housing policy interactions, including an equal and flexible emphasis on both climate mitigation and climate adaptation and how these relate specifically to housing conditions, markets, programs, regulations, and policy. Out of dozens of abstracts submitted by February 2020, the guest editors invited 18 authors to pursue full submissions. Over the course of a year, 10 submissions were developed, reviewed, and selected for final inclusion in this issue.

The articles cover a range of housing policies, from local to federal. These include local housing planning and political intervention, regional gentrification and displacement of individual households, eviction protections (or the lack thereof), the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, housing disaster recovery assistance, property buyout programs, and the few instances of whole-community climate displacement programming by public entities.

The editors also note a relatively equal split between those submissions focused on housing policy responses to acute shocks because of climate change—that is, hazard events that result in housing disasters—and the articles focused on preparations and adaptations that anticipate future acute and chronic hazards. The former group of submissions contribute substantially to the literature on disaster housing policy—particularly regarding recent and notable hazard events like Hurricanes Maria. Because U.S. climate policy is filtered through the lens of emergency management, the guest editors welcomed submissions exploring climate-related hazard and disaster policy in relation to housing. Scholars did not disappoint in this category.

For example, García traces the insidious mechanics of eligibility for postdisaster assistance—in this case, FEMA’s Individual Assistance Program. The author documents the experiences of households denied because of the unavailability of documentation such as clear property title—the presence of which is historically and culturally defined, and repeats known cases including Louisianians after Katrina. The article breaks apart the program rules that are in desperate need of revision for flexibility and inclusion, as opposed to the current and purposeful rigidity and exclusion that succeeds only in demonizing and prolonging the suffering of needy households.

The financial effects of disaster events are large and long-standing, especially for low-income households (Ratcliffe, Congdon, Teles, Stanczyk, & Martín, 2020). The two articles on postdisaster evictions—one by Raymond, Green, and Kaminski and the other by Brennan, Srini, Steil, Mazereeuw, and Ovalles—also point to the ways in which the most vulnerable households are excluded from housing recovery policies and left to suffer consequences even worse than those of the disaster itself. These articles tackle two distinct policy contributors to the dire conditions of those at risk of eviction and homelessness, the former looking at state landlord–tenant laws in places with low protections and the latter focusing on both renters’ and landlords’ challenges in accessing assistance as well as the consequences to renters regarding housing options and burdens after eviction. Both articles point to the increase in eviction rates that is recurrently seen after events that necessitate possible federal intervention along with state and local renter protection reforms.

Nelson, Ehrenfeucht, Birch, and Brand continue the focus on households that suffer through hazards—but in this case focus on the chronic environmental hazards shaped by global climate change rather than singular acute events that cause suffering. The authors remind us that housing status is an evolving and dynamic condition, and that households must constantly make choices about the location, quality, and costs of their housing—especially when they have been given few options. Because chronic climate phenomena typically do not fall within definitions of disaster declarations, this article reinforces evidence regarding the inflexibility of current policy despite the effects of the environmental changes on lives and livelihoods being as real as those of singular, severe hazard events.

In contrast to these submissions focused on households, Martín, Teles, and DuBois focus on the federal processes and the state and local governments caught in these same postdisaster scenarios. Their review, across a decade of housing recovery funding, demonstrates how specific policy decision points—from disaster declaration through special Congressional appropriations to local governments’ program management—shape the rate of recovery or, rather, the gaps therein. The submission also qualitatively reminds us of the varying capacity in state and local governments that constrains household-level interactions with recovery programs and, eventually, households’ receipt of benefits that they are legally due, but all too often functionally denied.

Shamsuddin and Leib present an interesting bridge between the housing policies in effect immediately after climate-related hazard events and those that support traditional (that is, nondisaster) housing production and occupancy. The article explores whether hazard events (in this case, hurricanes) influence the program elements of long-standing housing programs (in this case, the LIHTC program), surprisingly finding that repeat-disaster locations rarely alter their housing finance schema to support more resilient housing production and preservation. The continued forced separation of climate and housing policy described in the article suggests that lessons are not being learned—or may be intentionally ignored.

The other half of the articles focus on longer term adaptation policy and planning for housing and the programs meant to reduce long-term exposure, particularly about individual home buyout programs and community-wide adaptation strategies that shape housing. Greer and Brokopp Binder update previous work with recent practical and scholarly insights into the practices of property buyouts, providing a helpful review of the literature as well as key questions about how housing and disaster policies continue to be at odds. That tension, of course, results primarily in households in need or in harm’s way falling through the cracks.

And those questions about disparity and equity are summarily posed and successfully answered by the three articles focusing on climate adaptation policies and their housing effects—all in different contexts and through different policy means. Loughran and Elliott also focus on the federal buyout programs, looking particularly at patterns of uptake, assistance, and relocation by race. The article provides preliminary evidence that race factors into not only households’ decisions to take advantage of mitigation programs, but even the outcomes of program benefits such as the racial composition of their relocation. Seong, Losey, and Gu take on the FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant program, finding the value of assistance to be higher but the timing of it to be lower in urban counties. Shokry, Anguelovski, Connolly, Maroko, and Pearsall look at the potential for unintended negative outcomes from the assumedly beneficial climate adaptation policy: the displacement of residents caused by the economic pressures brought on by adaptation investments and green infrastructure amenities.

All three articles remind us that disaster policy, the default climate adaptation policy for housing, focuses on property and not people. In so doing, policy also forgets that individual properties do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they form geographically bound and culturally connected communities that have been shaped by racism, wealth disparity, and political access. The so-called race-neutral and class-neutral frames of environmental and disaster policies have been anything but, as fair housing inquiry has demonstrated time and again. It is important to note, then, that all of the articles selected for publication in this issue pay special attention to equity and capacity,albeit in different ways and at different scales—a trait that portends an even greater focus on extant housing disparities as the climate crisis proceeds. In short, these articles collectively push the scholarship on climate and housing policy further.

Planting Future Pillars

Our homes provide the physical boundaries for many household activities. They are nodes within which we use energy and consume materials. They are defenses against the outside elements and a range of environmental hazards (not to mention the hazards within). They define the geography of our social networks and the location and transportation of economic and cultural activities. In each of these critical ways, housing policy is now climate policy.

There is no turning back. The paths of climate policy with housing policy have become obviously and inextricably intertwined. Business as usual is no longer tenable for housing policy, nor for energy or hazard policies. But what should policy reform be? And, more to the point of this special issue and future inquiry, what evidence and insight can inform that reform?

The contributions in this special issue provide some answers. Yet several questions remain. Most notably, the editors were quick to identify an omission in the final submissions: all focus exclusively on housing policies in relation to climate change’s effects rather than its contributions—that is, all address responses and adaptations to the growing reality of climate change’s effects. None of the final submissions address the flip side of the climate–housing coin: the policies and strategies to reduce the underlying greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change or, ideally, eliminate it. What does this say, both about the current scholarship (and scholars’ interest) and about the current policy context in which this special issue is framed? We hope the absence is simply random, and not a product of scholars’ interests lying far from fossil fuel reductions in housing or policymakers’ acquiescence.

Within housing adaptation, a few critical policy areas were also absent from the submissions, such as homeowner and disaster insurance policies, housing affordability and finance, and the effectiveness of property risk disclosure laws. There was also limited coverage of the range of climate-related effects (with a notable emphasis on hurricanes and floods). Most submissions also looked at national policy levers over local and state actions.

We encourage future special issues to expand on both challenges of climate mitigation and adaptation from the lens of housing policy, particularly those fields not addressed in this issue.

Acknowledgments

The author and guest editor would like to acknowledge and thank the guest coeditors—April Jackson of the University of Illinois Chicago, Tony Reames of the University of Michigan, and Shannon Van Zandt of Texas A&M University—for their generous time and attention to designing the call for papers and reviewing submissions for this special issue. All four guest editors also express our gratitude to the many external reviewers who provided critical anonymous feedback on individual submissions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carlos Martín

Carlos Martín is director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, and Rubenstein Fellow in Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.

Notes

1. At the time of this special issue’s publication, the final Build Back Better plan embodied in the FY2022 budget reconciliation had not passed Congress and been signed into law.

2. Documentation of the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s inquiry into the flood risks of the government-sponsored enterprises can be found here: https://www.fhfa.gov/Videos/Pages/FHFA-Public-Listening-Session-on-Climate-and-Natural-Disaster-Risk-Management-at-the-Regulated-Entities.aspx