In this new guide, Grist examines the impact these changes could have, and are already having, on the things you do every day. Flipping on your lights. Turning on your faucet. Paying household bills. Visiting a park. Checking the weather forecast. Feeding your family.

The decisions have left communities less safe from pollution, more vulnerable to climate disasters, and facing increasingly expensive energy bills, among other changes. Read on to see how.

— Katherine Bagley

Your Home

Flip on your lights:

Pulling back from renewable energy could make your electricity bills go up.

When Trump began his second term, it was with a vow to “unleash American energy.” But over the last six months, it’s become clear that this call to arms was meant strictly for fossil fuels, not the country’s booming renewable energy industry. Trump has issued a series of executive orders to revive coal production, and he has opened up millions of acres of public land to oil and gas drilling and issued a moratorium on offshore wind leases.

This commitment was deepened with the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law on July 4. It bolsters investment in fossil fuels while sunsetting Biden-era credits for electric vehicles, energy efficiency, and wind, solar, and green hydrogen. Climate and clean energy advocates described the bill as “historically ruinous” for renewables and a massive handout to the oil and gas industry. The problem: Power demand is rising sharply, and recent growth in renewable energy has been reliably and affordably meeting that demand.

All of this could soon impact Americans’ electricity bills: According to one analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation, by 2035 the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could spike wholesale electricity prices 74 percent by stifling renewable energy at a time when new capacity is needed, and raise consumer rates by 9 percent to 18 percent, or $170 annually.

— Rebecca Egan McCarthy

 

Turn on your faucet:

Regulatory delays will continue to allow PFAS to contaminate drinking water.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a class of manmade chemicals used to make everything from firefighting foam to nonstick cookware. Better known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily, the compounds have become ubiquitous in our lakes, soil, and even our own bodies. Roughly half the U.S. population consumes water tainted with PFAS. 

After years of mounting contamination and public outcry, the Environmental Protection Agency finally took steps to regulate the chemicals last year, establishing maximum levels for six PFAS types in drinking water. But in May, the Trump administration said it would rescind the existing rules and issue new ones for four of the chemicals, and delayed implementation of two others until 2031. 

Exposure to PFAS has been linked to decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, and reduced immune function.

— Naveena Sadasivam 

 

Check your weather forecast:

Funding and staff cuts are making it harder to track climate change and weather.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, provides critical scientific research on the Earth’s environment to U.S. communities and lawmakers. It houses the National Weather Service, which generates the data that makes weather forecasts possible, as well as the National Hurricane Center, which tracks tropical storms. 

In the first few months of Trump’s second term, his administration fired hundreds of NOAA employees, with plans to cut the agency’s workforce by a further 17 percent next year. NOAA has also taken steps to discontinue the collection of essential satellite data that forecasters use to track hurricanes once they form. 

Combined, these cuts could threaten lives: In June, John Morales, a longtime meteorologist in Miami, warned his viewers that “the quality of forecasts is becoming degraded” and that meteorologists may be “flying blind” with hurricane tracking this year due to the Trump administration’s “cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science.”

— Matt Simon 

 

Run your appliances:

Disbanding energy-efficiency programs could increase your utility bills.

If you’re browsing for a new household appliance, like a dishwasher or washing machine, you might notice that some of them come equipped with a blue “Energy Star” label. The mark signifies that a machine meets a certain energy-efficiency standard, set by the federal government, and it allows consumers to choose appliances that can help keep utility bills low. Earlier this year, the EPA announced internally that it was planning to shut down the popular, voluntary program — though building and consumer advocates are now trying to save it.

If Energy Star is indeed over, it would mark the end of a program that saves American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes into the program. 

The Department of Energy has also separately rolled back a slew of mandatory efficiency standards on appliances, ranging from microwaves to washers and dryers, dehumidifiers to ovens. Researchers estimate that the lower benchmarks could cost consumers $43 billion over 30 years of sales, due to increased electricity bills.

— Tik Root

 

Pay your bills:

Tariffs are disrupting supply chains and raising household costs.

Trump dubbed April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed tariffs as high as 50 percent on nearly every country in the world, as well as several key commodities. Although he swiftly paused them for 90 days, the threat of reinstatement looms and some tariffs — on China, Canada, and aluminum — have already gone into effect, with higher prices on consumer goods like clothes, toys, and furniture. 

Companies generally pass the cost of tariffs on to their customers (even if Trump tells them not to). If Trump’s full, proposed tariffs ever do take effect, economists anticipate increased prices on everything from cars to electricity to building materials, the latter of which could also make natural disaster recovery and home insurance more expensive.

— Tik Root

 

Your Commute

Fill your gas tank:

Fuel-efficiency rollbacks could cost you more at the pump and worsen air quality.

Gas-powered cars have become more fuel efficient and less polluting over the years largely due to federal regulations. After the 2008 financial crash, the Obama administration used the bailout of the auto industry as leverage to impose stricter fuel-efficiency requirements, ensuring cars drive farther on less gas, thereby saving consumers money at the pump and reducing air pollution. The Biden administration later strengthened those rules, requiring that automakers sell passenger cars averaging 65 miles per gallon by 2031 — a one-third increase from 2024 standards. The threshold, which applies across an automaker’s product lines, was designed to gradually shift the industry toward electric vehicles, which do not release exhaust fumes or other tailpipe pollutants. 

In June, the Trump administration began the process of formally rescinding those rules. According to an estimate last year from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Biden-era rule would have saved $23 billion in fuel costs while also reducing emissions and pollution.

— Naveena Sadasivam

 

Drive your EV:

Loss of tax credits and cuts to federal program will make it harder to buy and drive an electric vehicle.

Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, federal tax credits for the purchase or lease of an EV — of up to $7,500 for new cars and $4,000 for used — would run through 2032. But the One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed those measures and cut the runway to only a few months. The erasure will likely make electric vehicles more expensive, which would put the technology further out of reach for many low- to moderate-income Americans. 

For those who still can buy an EV, finding a place to plug in could be difficult. In February, the Federal Highway Administration said it was suspending the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, program, which would have directed some $3 billion to states to expand the nation’s charging network. In June, a judge blocked that move and ordered the administration to unfreeze funds, but the court battle isn’t over.

— Tik Root

 

Take public transit:

A funding freeze is pausing certain train, bus, and bike lane projects.

For those who don’t exclusively rely on cars to get around, Trump’s second term has been none too kind on the buses, railways, and bike lanes that make up the country’s public transit system. Trump has relentlessly attacked New York City’s congestion pricing, designed to reduce traffic and raise funds for public transit, and threatened to cut public transit funding to major cities like New York and Chicago. 

In March, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy froze funds and ordered an investigation into any departmental grants that involve “equity analysis, green infrastructure, bicycle infrastructure, [and] EV and/or EV-charging infrastructure.” The directive also instructed employees to flag projects “that purposefully improve the condition for EJ [environmental justice] communities or actively reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions.” The decision reverses Biden-era efforts to reduce the climate footprint of the transportation sector, which is America’s largest contributor to global warming, emitting over 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases per year. 

— Sophie Hurwitz

 

Your Food

Buy groceries:

New tariffs could raise your grocery bill.

The Trump administration’s whiplash approach to a wide swath of exorbitant tariffs on other countries has sowed confusion among consumers, manufacturers, and agricultural growers. 

Although Mexico and the U.S. briefly appeared to reach an agreement, Trump is now threatening a 30 percent tariff on all Mexican imports, and a 17 percent rate on Mexican tomato imports has already gone into effect. Other tariffs could drive costs up even higher: Trump’s 50 percent steel and aluminum imports could hike up the price of canned foods, for example. And country-specific tariffs could increase the prices of imported goods like coffee and chocolate.

— Frida Garza

 

Get food assistance:

Funding cuts are leaving people hungry.

Local food systems and national food safety nets have been decimated by recent federal cuts. In March, after freezing nearly two dozen streams of funding, the Department of Agriculture cancelled future rounds of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. The two initiatives were slated to dole out roughly a billion dollars to states, tribes, and territories to reduce food insecurity. As a result, the USDA’s Emergency Food Assistance Program’s deliveries to food banks and soup kitchens have been reduced or cancelled entirely; kids in schools and lower-income families have less access to affordable meals; and agricultural producers across the country have been forced to lay off employees, delay projects, or shut down entirely.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act made unprecedented cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, a federal program that helps nearly 42 million Americans afford groceries. The cuts are further poised to increase food insecurity across the country at a time when persistently high food costs, fueled in part by worsening climate disasters, are among most Americans’ biggest economic concerns.

— Ayurella Horn-Muller 

 

Eat safe food:

Federal job cuts are disrupting food safety programs.

The Trump administration cut 20,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention— two agencies that monitor and respond to foodborne illness outbreaks. Although some employees were later reinstated, the FDA has paused multiple initiatives due to staff shortages, including a quality control program that keeps the agency’s network of food-testing laboratories running efficiently. The FDA also paused its quality-testing program for milk and suspended a program to test milk and cheese for bird flu just before the program launched. Meanwhile, the USDA axed a proposed Biden-era rule to reduce salmonella risk in poultry.

The U.S. food supply is one of the safest in the world, but experts say these cuts threaten to disrupt that system and undercut its ability to keep consumers safe in the long term.

— Frida Garza

 

Support local farmers:

Funding cuts are leaving small farmers in the lurch, threatening locally sourced food supplies. 

Federal agricultural policy has centered on two major priorities during the early months of the second Trump administration: First is the slashing of federal food and agriculture funding, which has left small producers struggling to stay afloat. Second is giving farmers who grow traditional commodities such as corn, cotton, and soybeans multibillion-dollar bailouts. This strategy first became clear when the USDA began freezing and cutting billions of dollars to programs that supported the purchasing of goods from small and midsize farms. Then, the agency expedited disaster subsidies — funds meant to help agricultural producers recover from extreme weather — for commodity farmers. The decision funneled economic aid away from small producers into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. 

With the strain of an agricultural recession looming over regions like the Midwest, experts see these moves by the administration ultimately leading to the loss of many more small American farms, which would disrupt local economies and limit access to fresh food.

— Ayurella Horn-Muller

 

Your Community

Take a breath:

Regulatory rollbacks could make air quality worse.

From rally stages to debate podiums, Trump repeatedly promised to deliver “clean air and clean water” if elected to a second term. He broke that promise almost from Day 1. Trump’s EPA is carrying out a massive deregulatory agenda, much of it focused on rolling back protections for the air we breathe. It rescinded billions of dollars in funding for a range of air quality initiatives, including clean energy projects and monitoring efforts in low-income and minority communities, though a judge ultimately ruled the latter unlawful. At the same time, the administration has also dramatically reduced the number of cases it brings against polluters. It even set up an email inbox soliciting requests from companies seeking exemptions from a range of clean air rules.

The agency has also taken steps to roll back limits on carbon dioxide and mercury emissions from power plants and methane emissions from oil and gas fields, which drive climate change and threaten human health. And in July, it repealed the “endangerment finding” — the landmark legal determination that classifies greenhouse gases as air pollutants and gives the EPA authority to regulate them.

— Naveena Sadasivam

 

Prepare for extreme weather:

Cancelled grant programs are making communities less resilient to natural disasters.

This spring, the Trump administration cancelled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, program — an initiative that sends billions of dollars to communities, municipalities, and states proactively so that they can prepare for natural disasters before they hit. The program funds projects like burying power lines, building culverts, and upgrading power stations to make them more resilient to extreme weather. 

Trump canceled $750 million in new resilience funding and clawed back nearly $900 million in grant funding provided to BRIC by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, money that was already approved but not yet disbursed. The abrupt move ultimately led to the disruption of $3.6 billion in planned resilience spending across the U.S. — the kinds of projects that help protect people from flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and more at a time when climate change is increasing their severity and frequency. Under Trump, FEMA also cancelled $600 million in flood-mitigation assistance funding to communities this year.

— Zoya Teirstein

 

Go outdoors:

A defunding campaign is threatening our shared spaces.

The future of public lands, parks, and forests in the U.S. is in the midst of a dramatic reshaping by Republicans, risking permanent changes to the environment and how we experience the outdoors. The Trump administration has fired a thousand National Park Service workers, hindering conservation efforts and leaving parks unable to accommodate the millions of visitors they typically welcome each summer. The administration also stripped protections for nearly 60 million acres of national forest and identified millions of acres eligible for potential oil and gas development. And a growing movement among Republican lawmakers and the administration would sell off millions of acres of public lands for housing and energy development — a policy opposed by 74 percent of Americans. 

In June, the Department of Justice granted the president the authority to revoke national monument designations, a status that marks land as permanently protected. The move threatens sites such as Bears Ears in Utah and the Sáttítla Highlands in California — two monuments that Trump has singled out in particular — which are significant to tribes and illustrate the complex history of U.S. public lands as stolen land.

— Miacel Spotted Elk

 

Wildlife watching:

New definitions are weakening species protections.

For decades, the Endangered Species Act recognized that in order to protect animals, it was vital to save the habitats they live in. The policy has led to the rebound of iconic species like the bald eagle, grizzly bears, grey wolves, and panthers, and it has protected millions of acres from development. But in April, the Trump administration proposed a new definition of the word “harm” that scientists, legal experts, and conservationists warn will hamstring the act’s effectiveness. 

Instead of the Endangered Species Act regulating activities that indirectly impact endangered or threatened species, like drilling in the spawning grounds of Atlantic sturgeon or logging forests that are home to a rare owl, the law will now only consider direct, intentional harm to the animal itself — killing, hurting, or capturing it. The rule change comes at a time when climate change and land use decisions increasingly threaten ecosystems and the animals that rely on them.

— Katherine Bagley 

 

Protect your health:

An attack on science is hindering research on public health.

The federal government has hemorrhaged more than 50,000 employees since Trump was reelected in January, including many who play crucial roles in keeping American waters and air safe from pollutants and disease-causing organisms. A quarter of the staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alone were fired, leaving gaping holes across an agency tasked with keeping tabs on the movement of pathogens across the nation. The EPA is in the midst of a defunding and deregulation campaign, including the elimination of its research division, all of which limits its ability to oversee polluters. And the National Institutes of Health is rebranding its research on the intersection of climate change and public health, now focusing solely on extreme weather and excluding any mental health work.

— Zoya Teirstein

 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s environmental policies are reshaping everyday life. Here’s how. on Jul 30, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist staff.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is preparing to shut down seven major investigations and cases concerning alleged housing discrimination and segregation, including some where the agency already found civil rights violations, according to HUD records obtained by ProPublica.

The high-profile cases involve allegations that state and local governments across the South and Midwest illegally discriminated against people of color by placing industrial plants or low-income housing in their neighborhoods, and by steering similar facilities away from white neighborhoods, among other allegations. HUD has been pursuing these cases — which range from instances where the agency has issued a formal charge of discrimination to newer investigations — for as many as seven years. In three of them, HUD officials had determined that the defendants had violated the Fair Housing Act or related civil rights laws. A HUD staffer familiar with the other four investigations believes civil rights violations occurred in each, the official told ProPublica. Under President Donald Trump, the agency now plans to abruptly end all of them, regardless of prior findings of wrongdoing.

Four HUD officials said they could recall no precedent for the plan, which they said signals an acceleration of the administration’s retreat from fair housing enforcement. “No administration previously has so aggressively rolled back the basic protections that help people who are being harmed in their community,” one of the officials said. “The civil rights protections that HUD enforces are intended to protect the most vulnerable people in society.”

In the short term, closing the cases would allow the local governments in question to continue allegedly mistreating minority communities, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. In the long term, they said, it could embolden local politicians and developers elsewhere to take actions that entrench segregation, without fear of punishment from the federal government.

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett declined to answer questions, saying “HUD does not comment on active Fair Housing matters or individual personnel.”

Three of the cases involve accusations that local governments clustered polluting industrial facilities in minority neighborhoods.

One concerned a protracted dispute over a scrap metal shredding plant in Chicago. The facility had operated for years in the largely white neighborhood of Lincoln Park. But residents complained ceaselessly of the fumes, debris, noise and, occasionally, smoke emanating from the plant. So the city allegedly pressured the recycling company to close the old facility and open a new one in a minority neighborhood in southeast Chicago. In 2022, HUD found that “relocating the Facility to the Southeast Site will bring environmental benefits to a neighborhood that is 80% White and environmental harms to a neighborhood that is 83% Black and Hispanic.” Chicago’s mayor called allegations of discrimination “preposterous,” then settled the case and agreed to reforms in 2023. (The new plant has not opened; its owner has sued the city.)

In another case, a predominantly white Michigan township allowed an asphalt plant to open on its outskirts, away from its population centers but near subsidized housing complexes in the neighboring poor, mostly Black city of Flint. The township did not respond to a ProPublica inquiry about the case.

Still another case involved a plan pushed by the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, to build a water desalination plant in a historically Black neighborhood already fringed by oil refineries and other industrial facilities. (Rates of cancer and birth defects in the area are disproportionately high, and average life expectancy is 15 years lower than elsewhere in the city, researchers found.) The city denied the allegations. Construction of the plant is expected to conclude in 2028.

Three other cases involve allegations of discrimination in municipal land use decisions. In Memphis, Tennessee, the city and its utility allegedly coerced residents of a poor Black neighborhood to sell their homes so that it could build a new facility there. In Cincinnati, the city has allegedly concentrated low-income housing in poor Black neighborhoods and kept it out of white neighborhoods. And in Chicago, the city has given local politicians veto power over development proposals in their districts, resulting in little new affordable housing in white neighborhoods. (Memphis, its utility and Chicago have disputed the allegations; Cincinnati declined to comment on them.)

The last case involved a Texas state agency allegedly diverting $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and other communities of color hit hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and toward more rural, white communities less damaged by the storm. The agency has disputed the allegations.

All of the investigations and cases are now slated to be closed. HUD is also planning to stop enforcing the settlement it reached in the Chicago recycling case, the records show.

The move to drop the cases is being directed by Brian Hawkins, a recent Trump administration hire at HUD who serves as a senior adviser in the Fair Housing Office, two agency officials said. Hawkins has no law degree or prior experience in housing, according to his LinkedIn profile. But this month, he circulated a list within HUD of the seven cases that indicated the agency’s plans for them. In the cases that involve Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, Flint and Houston, the agency would “find no cause on [the] merits,” the list reads. In the two Chicago cases and the one involving Memphis, HUD would rescind letters documenting the agency’s prior findings. Hawkins did not respond to a request for comment.

The list does not offer a legal justification for dropping the cases. But Hawkins also circulated a memo that indicates the reasoning behind dropping one — the Chicago recycling case. The memo cites an executive order issued by Trump in April eliminating federal enforcement of “disparate-impact liability,” the doctrine that seemingly neutral policies or practices could have a discriminatory effect. Hawkins’ memo stated that “the Department will not interpret environmental impacts as violations of fair housing law absent a showing of intentional discrimination.” Four HUD officials said such a position would be a stark departure from prior department policy and relevant case law.

The reversal on the Chicago recycling case also follows behind-the-scenes pressure on HUD from Sen. Jim Banks. In June, Banks, a Republican from Indiana, wrote a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in which he criticized the administration of President Joe Biden’s handling of the case as “brazen overreach.” Noting that the Chicago plant would supply metal to Indiana steel mills, Banks asked the Trump appointees to “take any actions you deem necessary to remedy the situation.” Banks did not respond to a request for comment.

That case and others among the seven had also received scrutiny from other federal and state agencies, including the EPA and the U.S. Department of Justice. The EPA declined to say whether it was still pursuing any of the cases. The DOJ did not respond to the same inquiry.

The case closures at HUD would be the latest stage in a broad rollback of fair housing enforcement under the Trump administration, which ProPublica reported on previously. That rollback has continued in other ways as well. The agency recently initiated a plan to transfer more than half of its fair housing attorneys in the office of general counsel into unrelated roles, compounding prior staff losses since the beginning of the year, four HUD officials told ProPublica.

The officials fear long-lasting ramifications from the changes. “Fair housing laws shape our cities, shape where housing gets built, where pollution occurs, where disaster money goes,” one official said. “Without them, we have a different country.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

Nearly 1.3 million Texas homes are similarly situated in parts of the state susceptible to dangerous floodwaters, according to a state estimate. A quarter of the state’s land carries some degree of severe flood risk, leaving an estimated 5 million Texans in possible jeopardy.

Yet, local governments — especially counties — have limited policy tools to regulate building in areas most prone to flooding. The state’s explosive growth, a yearning for inexpensive land, and a state far behind in planning for extreme weather compound the problem, experts said.

While cities can largely decide what is built within their limits, counties have no jurisdiction to implement comprehensive zoning rules that could limit people from living close to the water’s edge.

Camp Mystic and many of the other camps along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, where the disaster’s wreckage has been concentrated, were far outside city limits and any regulatory authority of the Kerrville City Council.

Some guardrails exist when it comes to building on flood plains. For property owners in flood-prone areas to tap federal flood insurance, localities have to enact minimum building standards set by the federal government. And counties can use a limited supply of federal dollars to relocate residents out of flood zones. However, those programs have had mixed success. Other programs to fortify infrastructure are tied to federally required hazard mitigation plans, which most rural counties in Texas do not have on file.

Keeping people out of the state’s major flood zones altogether is unrealistic if not impossible, experts in flood plain management and infrastructure said.

For one, it’s human nature to want to be near water — whether it’s to live or vacation there.

“Everybody is drawn to water,” said Christopher Steubing, who heads the Texas Floodplain Management Association. “It becomes challenging when you’re telling people what they can and cannot do with their property. It’s a delicate balance, especially in Texas.”

Families have flocked to Texas from more expensive parts of the country in search of a lower cost of living, moving to places more vulnerable to severe weather events like flooding and wildfires intensified by climate change, research shows.

The state’s population has mushroomed over the last decade, spurring a building frenzy in cities and unincorporated areas alike. The state’s total population has grown by more than 7 percent since 2020. Meanwhile, the Hill Country, which includes Kerr County, has grown by about 9 percent.

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Kerr County has seen relatively little population growth in the last few years, said Lloyd Potter, the state’s demographer. But other parts of the Hill Country, including neighboring Gillespie County, have seen relatively steady population growth.

“It is a desirable area for retirees,” Potter said. “It’s beautiful, and it’s reasonably close to urbanized areas, so I think that (growth is) likely to continue.”

Some people don’t have a choice but to live in flood-prone areas, where land is typically cheaper. Often, cities and towns only allow cheaper housing like mobile and manufactured homes to go in places that carry a higher risk of flooding, said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies climate risk. When a weather disaster destroys a mobile home park, often it gets rebuilt right where it was, Rumbach said.

“The only place you can build it is right back in the flood plain,” Rumbach said.

Determining what can be built on flood plains is largely left to local officials, who may feel uneasy about limiting what property owners do with their land — especially in a state like Texas, known for prioritizing personal liberty — for fear that doing so will harm the local economy or lead to retribution against them at the ballot box, experts said. Often, the aim is not to stop people from building there altogether, but to create standards that make doing so less risky. Even when places adopt new rules, development that predates those rules is often grandfathered in.

How strictly local officials regulate development in flood plains comes down to political will, said Robert Paterson, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture.

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“Fundamentally, disasters are a human choice,” said Paterson, who specializes in land use and environmental planning. “We can choose to develop in relation to high risk, or we can choose not to. We can stay out of harm’s way.”

Texas adopted its first statewide flood plan last year. As more people move outside of the state’s major urban areas, cities, towns and counties have increasingly adopted flood plain management rules for the first time or enacted stricter ones, Steubing said.

“You have counties that are catching up and adopting standards, but the growth can happen a lot faster than we can get ordinances adopted,” Steubing said.

Even so, localities aren’t tackling development in flood zones quickly enough to keep up with the pace of massive weather disasters, Rumbach said, and states can’t afford to wait for every city and county to adopt stricter standards. State lawmakers, currently weighing what measures to take in the flooding’s aftermath, should consider ways to give cities and counties better tools to manage flood plain development, he said.

“States are the right level of government to do this because they’re close enough to their communities to understand what is needed in different parts of the state and to have regulations that make sense,” Rumbach said. “But they’re far enough away from local governments that we can’t have this race to the bottom where some places are just the Wild West, and they’re able to build whatever they want while others are trying to be responsible stewards of safety and lower property damage.”

There is evidence that some Texas cities are taking flood plain management seriously. Most parts of Texas saw relatively little development on flood plains during the first two decades of this century, according to a study published last year by climate researchers at the University of Miami and other institutions. But parts of the Hill Country like Kerr, Bandera, Burnet and Llano counties saw more flood plain development than other parts of the state, researchers found.

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As the Hill Country population grows, people are increasingly finding themselves in harm’s way, said Avantika Gori, an assistant professor of civil and environmental at Rice University and flood expert. Local and state officials can make different decisions on how to develop around flood plains, she said.

“We can’t prevent extreme rainfall from happening, but we can choose where to develop, where to live, where to put ourselves,” Gori said.

Hill Country, particularly the areas farther from the Interstate 35 corridor, is less developed. There could be a temptation to build more as part of the recovery.

Following the 2015 Wimberley flood, developers pressured regulators to allow for more building in the flood plain as the area’s population continued to grow, said Robert Mace, executive director and chief water policy officer of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.

“My advice is, a river is beautiful, but as we’ve all seen, it can be a raging, horrific beast, and it needs to be treated with respect,” Mace said. “Part of that respect comes from making careful decisions about where we build.”

A confluence of factors lead to structures being built on the flood plain, said Jim Blackburn, a professor of environmental law in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Rice University.

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Lax regulations with loopholes that allow existing structures to remain on flood plains, out-of-date flood maps that do not show the true risks posed to residents and economic incentives for developers to build on seemingly attractive land near the water all encourage the development to continue, Blackburn said.

“I get it,” Blackburn said. “People want to be by the river. It’s private property, and we don’t like to tell people what to do with their private property, but there comes a point where we have to say we’ve had enough.”

The federal regulation of development on flood plains is largely done through the National Flood Insurance Program, which subsidizes flood insurance in exchange for implementing flood plain management standards. Under federal law, buildings on a flood plain must be elevated above the anticipated water level during a 100-year storm, or a storm with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. Local governments must implement the program and map flood plains. Local officials may impose additional building restrictions for building in these areas, such as the requirement in Houston that all new structures be elevated two feet above the 500-year flood elevation.

Kerrville last updated its rules overseeing flood plain development in 2011, according to the city’s website. A city spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

Texas historically has been unfriendly to federal environmental regulation, which is viewed as excessive red tape that gets in the way of economic progress, Blackburn said.

That has led to the state being decades behind the curve in reacting to more frequent and intense rainstorms fueled by a warming climate. As temperatures on average go up, more water on the Earth’s surface is evaporated into the atmosphere, and the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. That extra moisture in the atmosphere creates more intense and frequent storms, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Additional development can also leave flood maps even further out of date as more impermeable surfaces replace natural flood-fighting vegetation, Sharif said.

A 2018 study authored by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and other UTSA researchers found that the 2015 Wimberley flood was worsened by new construction removing natural barriers to flooding, although natural causes were the primary drivers of the flood.

Experts said that the flooding in the less-developed Kerr County was likely not worsened in a significant way by development. Sharif did encourage the state to fund a study similar to the one he conducted on the Wimberley flood to allow regulators and residents to better understand how exactly Friday’s flood occurred.

Sharif also argued in favor of further investments in “impact-based forecasting.” That area of study combines regular forecasting with on-the-ground information about what the impact of that forecast will be and who is in harm’s way to provide clearer warnings to residents, or, in Sharif’s words, “What do 7 inches of rain mean for me as a person staying in a camp near the river?”

Many of the flood plain maps throughout the state are out of date, given the reality of more frequent and intense storms and continuing development, Blackburn said, and local officials face political pressures not to restrict new development with tougher building codes.

In 2011, the city of Clear Lake installed, then removed signs warning that a hurricane storm surge could reach as high as 20 feet in the city after concerns were raised that the signs were impacting property values.

“I think that tells us a lot,” Blackburn said. “We’re more worried about home sales than the safety of the people buying the homes.”

— Alejandra Martinez contributed. Graphics by Carla Astudillo.

Disclosure: Institute for Economic Development – UTSA, Rice University, University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas at San Antonio have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Disasters are a human choice’: Texas counties have little power to stop building in flood-prone areas on Jul 12, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joshua Fechter.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

On Monday, June 23, a crowd of about 2,000 people surrounded the Eldorado Hotel & Spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet had come for a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association. “Not for sale!” the crowd boomed. “Not one acre!” There were ranchers and writers in attendance, as well as employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory, all of whom use public land to hike, hunt and fish. Inside the hotel ballroom where the governors had gathered, Michelle Lujan Grisham, the New Mexico governor, apologized for the noise but not the message. “New Mexicans are really loud,” she said.

On the street, one sign read “Defend Public Lands,” with an image of an assault rifle. Others bore creative and bilingual profanities directed at Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who oversees most of the country’s public acreage, and Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican from Utah, who on June 11 had proposed a large-scale selloff of public lands. Lee, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was not in Santa Fe, so the crowd focused on Burgum, who earlier that afternoon had addressed the governors about energy dominance and artificial intelligence. “Show your face!” the crowd chanted. But he had already departed the hotel through a back door. That night, a hunting group projected an image of him on the exterior wall of the hotel. “Burgled by Burgum,” it read.

In the weeks before the meeting, the possibility of selling off large swaths of public lands had seemed as likely as at any time since the Reagan administration. On June 11, Lee had introduced an amendment to the megabill Congress was debating to reconcile the national budget. The amendment mandated the sale of up to 3 million acres of land controlled by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, with the vast majority of proceeds going to pay for tax cuts. Although Lee had framed his measure as a solution to the West’s acute lack of affordable housing, it would have allowed developers to select the land they most desired. Under the amendment’s original language, the ultimate power to nominate parcels for sale fell to Burgum and Brooke Rollins, head of the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service.

In the days after the Santa Fe protest, the outcry from hunting and outdoor recreation groups escalated across the West and the Senate parliamentarian ruled that Lee’s amendment violated the chamber’s rules. Republican lawmakers from Montana opposed the amendment; Burgum also distanced himself from it. (“It doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s part of this bill,” he told a reporter on June 26.)

By the time Burgum made his comments, Lee’s effort seemed doomed, and days later he announced that he was removing the amendment; public land advocates celebrated. “This win belongs to the hunters, anglers, and public landowners,” wrote Patrick Berry, the president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. But the celebration may have been premature. In a social media post announcing his decision, Lee indicated that he would revisit the issue: “I continue to believe the federal government owns far too much land,” he wrote. And powerful forces still support privatization. At the Santa Fe gathering, Rollins had been asked during a press conference about the effort to sell federal land. She told reporters she wasn’t familiar with the specifics of Lee’s amendment but supported his broader vision and suggested such efforts will continue regardless of the fate of the amendment. “Half of the land in the West is owned by the federal government,” said Rollins. “Is that really the right solution for the American people?”

The circumstances that led to Lee’s proposal continue to simmer. The American West has an acute lack of affordable and attainable housing. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Colorado, with a population of 6 million, is lacking 175,000 rental units for people who earn up to 50% of area median income. New Mexico, which has one-third of Colorado’s population, is lacking 52,000 such rentals; Utah, 61,000. But nowhere is the issue as acute as in Nevada, where Las Vegas and Reno are encircled by public land. The state of 3.27 million is estimated to lack 118,000 such rentals.

The lack of housing emerged as a lever for Lee, who has sought to challenge federal control of public lands since he was first elected to the Senate in 2010. A year after winning his seat, he introduced a bill to sell a limited amount of public land, saying, “There is no critical need for the federal government to hold onto it.” In 2013, he and others in his state’s delegation wrote a letter demanding the transfer of federal lands to Utah and angrily accusing the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres nationwide, of “obvious abuse.” And in a 2018 address at a think tank, he compared federal land managers — and people who recreate on public acreage — to feudal lords, ruling from far-off kingdoms on the coasts. He also denounced “elite publications” that advocated for the protection of public lands, and he used the language of political war to describe the conflict over federal land: “It will take years, and the fight will be brutal.” (Lee’s office did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.)

But this spring, Lee found support from unlikely places: the coastal elites he previously railed against seemed open to some of his ideas. The arguments in favor of privatization and development use a word of the season: abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book of the same name argues that burdensome regulatory processes have crushed the American housing market. While the authors focus on increasing supply in urban areas, in April, The New York Times ran an op-ed calling for building housing on public lands. That same week, the Times Magazine, in a piece titled “Why America Should Sprawl,” framed outward growth, including through the sale of public lands, as all but inevitable. The American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, has estimated that the nation could build 3 million homes by opening federal land. In December, AEI leaders advocated for federal land sales in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, promising that disposal could “usher in housing abundance and prosperity.”

When pitching his land-sale bill, Lee adopted a more moderate tone than in years past, focusing squarely on housing. On June 20, he posted on X, “This is to help American families afford a home.” On June 23: “Housing prices are crushing families.” The next day: “This land must go to American families.”

But it’s challenging to build affordable housing on public land for a host of reasons, among them the high cost of infrastructure such as water pipelines and the cumbersome bureaucratic processes involving land agencies. But a primary obstacle is the price of that land itself: When it’s sold at market rate, it’s extremely difficult for developers to create affordable homes. “High land costs alone can kill an otherwise great affordable housing project,” said Waldon Swenson, vice president of corporate affairs for Nevada HAND, which builds affordable rental housing.

In fact, past public land sales have created very little affordable housing. There’s just one prominent test case, in Nevada, where a 1998 law enables the sale of federal land at market rate in the Las Vegas Valley and at steeply discounted prices throughout the state if it’s to be used for affordable housing. Though municipalities can buy BLM land at $100 per acre to create affordable housing, the law has so far created just about 850 affordable units on 30 acres of land. By contrast, the law’s market-value mechanism has enabled the sale of more than 17,000 acres of land at an average of more than $200,000 per acre. In March, the BLM sold 42 acres for $16.6 million. Meanwhile, according to a recent analysis, rents in Clark and Washoe counties have respectively risen by 56% and 47% since 2018.

Lee’s amendment did little to address these issues and lacked any definition of affordable or attainable housing. Furthermore, it allowed private developers to nominate parcels for sale — at market rate only. “It would be an unmitigated disaster,” wrote Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado law school. John Leshy, a former solicitor for the Department of the Interior during the Clinton administration and an emeritus professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said that the bill was “not a well-designed scheme to get more acres out there built with affordable houses.” Leshy, the author of “Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands,” added, “I think it is just a ploy to get your toe in the door to start selling off lots of federal land.”

Congress’ stance toward public land shifted as settlers moved westward, violently displacing tribal nations. During the homesteading era, the General Land Office — a precursor to the BLM — was tasked with disposing of federal lands to states. But in the late 19th century, states began to request that Congress set aside lands for national forests. As a condition of its statehood, in 1896 Utah relinquished any claim to ownership of “unappropriated public lands” — an acknowledgment that appears in its state Constitution. As the conservation movement took off in the early 20th century, lawmakers and presidents set aside more public land. In 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which codified the BLM’s role in stewarding lands and declared that they would remain public unless their sale served “the national interest.”

Lee has lamented the impact of those historic changes on Utah, where 42% of the state is BLM land, saying in a 2018 speech, “Manifest destiny had left us behind, in some respects.”

A movement in the 1970s tried to reverse those historical currents when Western ranchers and lawmakers calling themselves “Sagebrush Rebels” sought to claim federal lands for states. They found sympathetic ears in Washington, D.C.: Ronald Reagan, during a 1980 campaign stop in Salt Lake City, said, “Count me in as a rebel.” Once elected, he nominated as secretary of the Interior James Watt, an attorney who favored transfer of public lands to the states. Reagan also came to rely on an economic adviser named Steve H. Hanke, who arrived at the White House from Johns Hopkins University. Hanke was more strident about getting rid of public lands than Watt; he has written that public lands “represent a huge socialist anomaly in America’s capitalist system.”

Hanke helped drive an ambitious effort to dispose of national forests and grazing lands, and in 1982 the Interior Department announced plans to sell millions of acres — as much as 5% of the public estate — in order to reduce the national debt. Hanke later joined The Heritage Foundation, entrenching the idea of privatizing lands at the conservative think tank and predicting that Americans would come around to his way of thinking. Since then, the foundation has regularly advocated for selling public lands. (The foundation did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica.)

Lee is deeply tied into The Heritage Foundation, which he has called “a guiding light for generations.” In 2016, The Heritage Foundation suggested that Trump nominate Lee to the Supreme Court. Among Utah’s leadership, his positions on federal land are widely held. Last year, the state attorney general filed suit to the United States Supreme Court, seeking to seize 18.5 million acres of federal public land. The court declined to hear the case.

Public lands are popular, especially among hunters, hikers and off-roaders, and periodic efforts to sell them have incurred wrath. In 2017, Jason Chaffetz, the former Utah representative, retracted a disposal bill after a backlash. Last December, a survey of 500 Utah voters commissioned by the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust found that a majority of both Democrats and Republicans supported preserving national monuments in the state. In its preelection policy recommendation known as Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation called for the privatization of everything from public education, using school-choice programs, to Medicare, by automatically enrolling patients in insurer-run plans. But it notably didn’t call for the privatization of the public estate.

Instead, Lee has recently focused the debate on affordable housing. In 2022 and 2023, Lee introduced legislation to sell Western lands called the HOUSES Act. The bill was more prescriptive than his reconciliation amendment: It only allowed states and municipalities to nominate lands for disposal, rather than developers, and it required that 85% of nominated parcels be developed as residential housing, at a minimum of four homes per acre, or as parks. But like his amendment to the reconciliation bill, Lee’s HOUSES Act lacked a definition of affordable housing, and critics suggested that it would lead to the building of mansions. In both 2022 and 2023, when Lee reintroduced the bill, it did not pass out of committee.

But it caught the attention of Kevin Corinth, then the staff director on the Joint Economic Committee, which advises Congress on financial matters. After leaving the Capitol, Corinth joined the American Enterprise Institute, which began focusing on building housing on federal lands. This March, AEI held an event with powerful developers to discuss its ideas, which it called “Homesteading 2.0.” Edward Pinto, a former Fannie Mae executive who helps oversee AEI’s housing research, said during the event that the proposal “grew out of an effort that Sen. Lee undertook with the HOUSES Act.”

AEI advocates for dense development of single-family homes, but its ultimate vision remains opaque: The group has spoken of creating unregulated “freedom cities” far from existing infrastructure, and its proposals for 3 million houses seem ambitious. Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit group in Montana, published an analysis finding that existing public land could support less than 700,000 new homes; Nicholas Irwin, the research director for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Lied Center for Real Estate, said he found Headwaters’ numbers more convincing.

When I asked Pinto for a real-world example that illustrates his hopes for the West, he pointed to Summerlin, a planned community in Las Vegas, and Teravalis, a forthcoming development in Buckeye, Arizona, a rapidly expanding city at Phoenix’s edge. Both are owned by Howard Hughes Holdings, a developer based in Texas.

Housing in Summerlin is not easily attainable — its median home price approaches $700,000. Teravalis, meanwhile, was first proposed more than 20 years ago and has been beset by delays, in part due to ongoing litigation with the state, which claims that the developer has not proven that it can obtain a sufficient water supply. A spokesperson for Howard Hughes Holdings, which bought the development in 2021, wrote that the company is “working with local stakeholders around long-term water policy to support the full build out of Teravalis for more than 300,000 residents over several decades.”

Earlier this year, Pershing Square Holdings, which is controlled by the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, purchased $900 million of stock in the company. (Ackman, a prominent supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign, is now the executive chairman of Hughes’ board of directors. Through a spokesperson, he declined to comment for this article.)

Teravalis’ first lots sold for a steep $777,000 per acre without homes on them, and Hughes’ plans are for 2.8 dwellings per acre — less than a quarter of the figure that Pinto cited as ideal for naturally affordable housing. Hughes is currently planning a grand opening for November. The company did not say how much homes would cost, but a spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The need for new housing in the Phoenix West Valley is urgent, and Teravalis will help meet that demand.”

When given the option, developers often pursue the profit margins of high-end housing. In 1998, Congress passed a law, the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, that allows any of the state’s municipalities to request the sale of federal lands for affordable housing. (SNPLMA relies on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to define affordable housing, which it says are units within reach of those making up to 80% of the area’s median income.) Still, to date, only about 900 acres have been set aside for affordable housing projects under the law — and only 30 of those acres have been developed into homes where low-income residents can actually live.

It’s unclear why so few affordable housing projects have been built at a time when they are so desperately needed. Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick attributed it to bureaucratic delays: “It’s taken a long time to get through the process with the BLM.” According to Maurice Page, executive director of the Nevada Housing Coalition, the average time the BLM takes to review projects has recently dropped — from between three and five years to one. Only at that point can a developer close a deal. Tina Frias, CEO of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, said such delays can be crippling.

In 2023, the BLM began selling Nevada land for affordable housing for $100 per acre. (Previous SNPLMA affordable housing sales had averaged nearly $35,000 per acre.) Still, local authorities have not requested the transfer of many parcels in recent years. According to the BLM, only three new affordable housing projects are moving toward approval.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency wrote, “BLM Nevada can only offer land after it has been nominated by an eligible entity and BLM has confirmed that there are no encumbrances or restrictions on the parcel. In many cases, the restrictions referenced by stakeholders originate with the nominating entities themselves.”

SNPLMA’s affordable housing mechanism is also poorly understood. Alexis Hill, the chair of Washoe County’s board of commissioners, which includes Reno, told me she didn’t know whether the affordable housing provision applied there. (It does.) When I asked Biden’s former BLM director, Tracy Stone-Manning, who now leads The Wilderness Society, whether the $100-per-acre provision was applicable statewide, she said she did not know. Squillace, the Colorado law professor, also admitted he wasn’t sure how widely the provision applied.

Steve Aichroth, the administrator of the Nevada Housing Division, acknowledged a disconnect between agencies. His office is hiring an official to work with municipalities and the BLM. “If you came back to us in about a year we’d have better answers,” he said.

In the meantime, both of the state’s Democratic senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, have proposed legislation that would open federal acreage for housing and transfer it to trust land for tribal nations — while protecting other territory for conservation. The governor, Joe Lombardo, a Republican, recently signed a bill to invest $183 million of state money in developing housing for lower- and middle-class residents. Elsewhere in the West, New Mexico is leasing state lands to develop apartments. In Utah, the state housing office is encouraging cities to change zoning requirements to increase density; it is also using public funds to finance private developments and looking to build on state lands. Before Lee pulled his amendment, I spoke with Steve Waldrip, who directs housing strategy for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. During our conversation, Waldrip expressed concern that the hyperpoliticized debate around a broad federal land sell-off was hampering focused efforts to alleviate the region’s housing crisis. “There’s no silver bullet that’s going to solve the affordability crisis,” he said.

But some continue to believe a simple solution exists. After Lee’s amendment died, I spoke with Pinto, who directs AEI’s efforts to push for housing on federal lands. He struck a conciliatory tone, given the political climate. (The sweeping GOP bill passed Thursday without Lee’s amendment.) At the moment, Pinto said, there doesn’t appear to be an easy route to sell large swaths of public land for development. “The path forward is to have a much more targeted approach.”

In Nevada, such a thing is already happening. Last year Clark County bought 20 acres from the BLM for $2,000, and the county’s plan is to turn that land into single-family houses for first-time homebuyers. This spring, a new affordable housing development opened in Las Vegas — an apartment complex for people 55 and older with rent starting at $573. The project was built by a developer called Ovation on former public land that was transferred through SNPLMA. It had taken a while — the deal was first proposed in February 2020. But recently, the pace of transfers has picked up. Ovation says it’s also working on a similar project in the city of Henderson. It was nominated for BLM approval last February and, according to Jess Molasky, the company’s chief operating officer, “We hope to be in the ground in the first quarter of next year.”

Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Abe Streep.

Losing your home and everything in it, then having to invest time and money to repair and replace everything, is extremely difficult; navigating insurance companies, government agencies, and legal issues is exhausting and nerve-racking. To help you through it, Grist put together a guide to the process for renters and homeowners.

Jump to:

↓ Protecting your belongings and documents
↓ Are you a renter? Know your rights
↓ How to navigate government aid, donations, and insurance
↓ How to avoid fraud and scams
↓ Building a new home or repairing your home

Protecting your belongings and documents

If you live in a region that’s particularly prone to disasters — hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, for example, or fires in the West — you should prepare well in advance. One of the most important things to do is create digital copies of essential documents, and keep physical copies in a weatherproof bag or container.

For homeowners, that means your homeowners insurance policy, the deed to your house, and loan paperwork. Renters, keep copies of your lease agreement and renters insurance policy if you have one. These documents will help establish your ownership or residency at the time of a disaster. (If you don’t have a written lease, a verbal contract may hold up, but try to find documentation supporting the agreement — a text, email, etc.)

Keeping copies of other helpful files, such as a recent tax return and bank statements, as well as government-issued IDs, Social Security cards, immigration records, and anything else that provides your address is a good idea. Pay stubs can help prove your income if you apply for FEMA aid.

Read more: How to pack an emergency kit and plan your evacuation route

Lastly, consider keeping photos of your home and big ticket items, such as appliances, TVs, stereos, or laptops — and write down serial numbers — so that you can prove what they looked like before the disaster. Government agencies or insurance companies will likely ask for proof that specific damage, like a collapsed roof, isn’t the result of deferred maintenance or a previous disaster.

All of this administrative setup can save a lot of hassle in a crisis. When Hurricane Harvey caused $125 billion in damages in Southeast Texas in 2017, more than a quarter of all FEMA applicants were denied aid; common reasons included that people couldn’t prove homeownership or failed to provide valid identification. In 2020, survivors of the Almeda wildfires in Oregon faced similar hurdles: FEMA denied 57 percent of all applications. Mobile or manufactured homeowners in particular had a hard time proving ownership and residency.

If you live in a mobile or manufactured home, be sure that you have a safe place to go in case of severe weather — especially tornadoes. Here are some helpful tips from the National Weather Service to stay safe. To prepare for hurricanes or other high-wind storms, consider reinforcing your roof, anchoring your foundation, and reinforcing doors.

Are you a renter? Know your rights

Nearly 35 percent of households in the U.S. rent their home, and they are especially vulnerable to the impacts of disasters. They have more limited access to recovery funding from federal aid or insurance, and almost no control over the process of rebuilding their damaged home, since they don’t own the property. Renters insurance primarily covers the cost of personal belongings that are damaged during a disaster; some policies may include reimbursements for hotels or temporary living situations.

Finding new housing after a disaster can be difficult because rents often skyrocket after a disaster, and there are fewer undamaged properties available on the market. While homeowners can request a mortgage payment deferral, landlords often won’t make the same concession. The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that rents typically rise between 4 to 6 percent annually for about three years after a major disaster.

In Los Angeles, some units that escaped the Palisades Fire were relisted for three times as much despite a California law capping such increases to 10 percent after a disaster declaration. The organization also found that renters were more likely to be displaced than homeowners, and for longer stretches of time. Evictions also rise in the two years following a disaster.

Renters’ rights and protections vary by state. Some allow tenants to withhold payment until repairs are made; others say nonpayment for that reason could be grounds for eviction. Either way, you may be entitled to certain protections, such as reimbursement for simple repairs you make yourself, through your lease. 

Here are some tips:

• Get it all down in writing. The Legal Aid Disaster Resource Center recommends documenting any conversations you have with your landlord about damages and repairs. This will provide proof of any agreements regarding specific damages, costs, and other details. This can help if you must go to court to break a lease due to unsafe conditions.
• Understand the legal process. Your landlord cannot evict you without filing a legal complaint, and in some states they must provide written warning before taking that step. If you have not terminated or violated your lease, your landlord cannot legally change the locks, shut off the utilities, or remove your property without going through the legal process of eviction — even if you were evacuated or forced from your home. This is important to know because landlords sometimes evict tenants after a disaster to renovate buildings and increase rents. If your landlord attempts to wrongfully evict you, consult a lawyer or a pro bono legal aid organization. 
• Disaster Legal Services, funded by FEMA, works with state bar associations and pro bono lawyers to set up hotlines for legal services following a federally declared disaster. (Call 1-800-621-3362.) However, as of March 2025, parts of that program are suspended after the Trump administration froze some FEMA funding. You can also find free or affordable legal services through other avenues, like typing “legal aid society” and your location into a search engine, or checking with trusted people and organizations in your community. 
• Know how federal aid works. Tenants who are displaced or evicted after a disaster are eligible for help from FEMA. You might receive direct assistance to pay rent, or reimbursement for staying at a hotel. The agency may also provide temporary housing until your home is habitable again. After a series of disasters hit Lake Charles, Louisiana, between 2020 and 2021, some residents lived in FEMA trailers for over a year as they searched for an affordable place to live. 

Read more: How FEMA aid works

Some other resources for renters’ rights:

• The National Low Income Housing Coalition has a host of resources, including how disasters impact federally assisted housing, specific housing needs by state, and a guide on eviction processes.
• Your local health department, city or county government, or legal aid organization will likely have a webpage dedicated to renters’ rights. For example, the Tennessee health department describes renters’ rights, and this outlines landlord and tenant protections for rural east Tennessee specifically.
• The Stanford Legal Design Lab and Charitable Trusts has a database where you can find local legal rules about housing, eviction, rent, and landlord-tenant issues, and groups and guides that can help you with housing assistance. 

Read more: This long-term recovery guide outlines resources you can use in the weeks and months after a disaster

How to navigate government aid, donations, and insurance

Homeowners facing costly repairs after a natural disaster have options for aid. Insurance policies may cover some or all of the damages. Federal agencies like HUD, FEMA, and the Small Business Administration will provide funding as well. Some people turn to their own savings, mutual aid groups that raise money and distribute it directly, or crowdfunding platforms to help cover costs.

Insurance: Homeowners should first file a claim with their insurance company. Based on what your policy covers and your insurer pays, you can then apply for other types of federal aid. It’s important to keep good records and itemize your costs and reimbursements. You can receive payouts from a combination of private and public aid, but be careful of double-dipping: If you will receive funds from one source for specific damage, government aid can’t be used to cover the same costs.

The legal term for this is “duplication of benefits.” Let’s say your insurance paid to replace your roof, but not the cost of removing mold in your walls. You cannot legally receive additional money for the damage to your roof, but you can apply for help covering the cost of mold removal or other damage not covered by your insurance policy.

Federal/state aid: To receive assistance from federal or state agencies, you must submit an application to the agency. This can usually be done online, and you may be able to apply in person or over the phone. There is a specific process cities, states, and tribal governments must navigate in order for residents to receive FEMA aid. If you are a U.S. citizen, or meet certain qualifications as a non-citizen, and live in a disaster declaration area that was approved by FEMA and the president, you are eligible to apply for aid immediately after they announce it. You can apply on disasterassistance.gov, through the FEMA app, or at a FEMA recovery center. FEMA offers survivors eligible for individual assistance:

• A one-time grant of $750 for emergency needs and essential items like food, baby items, and medication 
• Temporary housing assistance equivalent to 14 nights in a hotel in your area 
• Up to 18 months of rental assistance
• Payments for lost property that isn’t covered by your homeowners or renters insurance
• Other forms of assistance, depending on your needs and losses

You can track the status of your aid application via the app or disasterassistance.gov and receive notifications if FEMA needs more information from you. 

You will need to provide proof of your identity and residency and document the damages that your home sustained. A FEMA inspector will meet you at your home to determine the damages. If your application is approved, you will receive funds or a loan approval with details on which repairs are covered. 

You may also qualify for rental assistance from FEMA. You must apply for individual disaster assistance to be considered for rental assistance. These funds can be used for rent, including a security deposit, and utilities such as electricity and water, at a house, apartment, hotel, or recreational vehicle that is not your damaged home. Residents in counties with a federal disaster declaration are eligible to apply under FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program. The rate is set by an area’s Fair Market Rent; find yours here. 

Read more: Everything you need to know when applying for individual and rental assistance from FEMA

If your application is denied, you have the right to appeal the decision within 60 days. You should include any information that was missing from your initial application, as well as supporting documents showing costs, damages, and proof of residence and ownership of your home. Lawyers and community advocates can help you write the appeal. You will need to sign the letter, along with a statement verifying that you authorized someone else to write the appeal. FEMA has 90 days to review your appeal, but delays are possible given the volume of paperwork the agency may be reviewing. 

Some homeowners may also apply for help through the Small Business Administration’s program, which provides low-interest loans for repairs. You don’t have to own a business to apply, and FEMA may refer you to SBA’s application to check if you qualify for additional aid for funds to make your home more resilient to future disasters.

Mortgage, rent, and utility relief: Homeowners may qualify for mortgage relief. Providers aren’t legally required to offer assistance, but they can waive late fees, delay foreclosures, and provide forbearance. It is usually up to the homeowner to initiate a conversation about these options.

If you have a loan backed by the Federal Housing Administration, you have more legal protections. If you’re unable to make payments, your mortgage servicer cannot initiate a foreclosure for 90 days after a presidentially declared disaster in your area, and you can negotiate a repayment plan or modify some terms of your loan. You may also be able to meet with HUD-approved counselors trained in foreclosure prevention, who can help you evaluate your options and finances.

Both renters and homeowners may qualify for rental and utility assistance from government agencies and nonprofit organizations. If your home or rental unit is uninhabitable or you cannot stay there for another reason, there are likely organizations providing assistance with finding a place to live. Be on the lookout for applications for these in the days and weeks after a disaster. (If you’re not sure where to start looking, here are some examples of types of organizations that provided these services after Helene in 2024; they included local nonprofits, churches, housing organizations, county governments, and more.)

Crowdfunding/GoFundMe: Some disaster survivors turn to crowdfunding platforms to cover costs for evacuations, funerals, or repairs. According to data from GoFundMe, one of the largest platforms, disaster recovery campaigns in the U.S. raised over $100 million in 2023. This avenue is often faster than waiting on insurance claims and FEMA applications. Donations you receive are considered gifts, and you will not be required to pay taxes on them, as long as you don’t promise donors goods or services in exchange. However, you can’t apply for other sources of aid to cover the same expenses you list in the campaign you create.

Read more: The agencies, organizations, and officials that respond to disasters

How to avoid fraud and scams

There’s always the risk of fraud as con artists posting as government officials or unscrupulous contractors try to bilk people out of their money or rip them off with shoddy work. A few tips can minimize the risk.

• Verify the identity of anyone who approaches you unsolicited with offers of help. Ask for identification. FEMA employees, housing inspectors, and other government officials carry official IDs. A government uniform is not proof of identification.
• Government officials will not ask you for money or for financial information. Do not trust anyone who seeks payment up front or promises a loan or grant.
• Work with reputable contractors and check their credentials and licenses before hiring them (more on this below). Here are some tips from the National Insurance Crime Bureau to avoid getting taken.
• Ask for written quotes and contracts throughout the process.

If you have knowledge of fraud, waste, or abuse, you can report it to the FEMA Disaster Fraud Hotline at 866-720-5721 or email StopFEMAFraud@fema.dhs.gov. You also can contact the National Center for Disaster Fraud. Before calling, gather as many details as possible, including how and where it occurred. You can also report it to your state’s attorney general or local law enforcement. 

Be wary of disaster investors: You may receive calls, texts, or other communications pressuring you to sell your home as-is, for cash. These “disaster investors” take advantage of the stress and uncertainty that people feel as they return to damaged homes. Their offers often target individuals who will have a difficult path to recovery, including low-income homeowners and the elderly.

In Hawaii, following the devastating 2023 wildfires, the governor issued an order banning such unsolicited offers in Maui, and the state eventually opened investigations into some companies.

Investors trying to scoop up properties to flip after a disaster will often make offers that are lower than market value, even with the damage your home might have sustained. If you are interested in selling, work with a trusted real estate agent of your choosing, and check what comparable homes should sell for in your area. Never sign any agreements or contracts about a potential sale without carefully reviewing them — no matter how much you’re pressured to sign on the spot.

Choose a contractor carefully: You’ll likely need to hire a contractor to do major repairs, and it’s important to vet any offers to fix up your home. Here are some tips for avoiding scams from the NC State Board of Examiners of Electrical Contractors and Legal Aid of East Tennessee:

• Be wary of door-to-door repair solicitations or people who demand deposits or payments in cash. Contact your insurance company for guidance before beginning any work.
• Require a written contract that outlines the work to be done, materials to be used, a payment schedule based on completion of work, and a timeline for completion. A licensed general contractor is generally required to be insured and list their license number on all contracts.
• Do not make payments before the work specified on the payment schedule is completed.
• Check with the Better Business Bureau for any history of complaints: 1-800-544-7693 or online. You can also look at reviews on sites such as Yelp, Google, or Angie’s List.
• Verify the company’s permanent business address.
• Check with your local home builders association to verify credentials and membership.
• Some contractors require you to obtain permits, and others take care of it. Ask your contractor, and then contact your local building inspections and permitting office to determine if permits are required. If so, confirm that the contractor has acquired them before construction begins.
• Before making final payment, evaluate the completed work and require the contractor to confirm that all subcontractors and suppliers have been paid to eliminate potential liens on your property.
• You can always verify whether the contractor is licensed to perform the specific work by visiting licensing board websites or calling the board offices. 

Building a new home or repairing your home

As you make repairs or reconstruct your home, you may be able to use insurance payouts and other assistance to make the place more resilient.

Consider installing more energy-efficient features, including new insulation, double-paned windows, and hurricane shutters. If you’re in a flood zone, you may want to elevate outdoor components of your HVAC system so that they don’t flood in the future. If you live in a tornado-prone area, you could add or retrofit a room to serve as a storm shelter. Materials like stucco can help fire-proof your home more than wood or vinyl siding. Some communities can qualify for the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, a federally funded program managed by local government agencies, that aims to help homeowners with structural elevation, reinforcing buildings to withstand natural disasters, and buyouts by FEMA. The land is deeded to the local county for parks, greenways, and other municipal projects.

In some flood cases, you may be required to elevate your home to avoid future damages. This is typically the case if you participate in the National Flood Insurance Program or if your community has or adopts stricter floodplain management. After receiving FEMA aid, you could be required to purchase a flood insurance policy.

After clearing out debris, consider planting native grasses, shrubs, and trees that suit your local ecology. This can help prevent soil erosion and improve drainage, which might help reduce water in your home during major rainstorms, particularly in basements. Some native species may be drought-tolerant and somewhat fire-resistant, as well. Opting for pea gravel or stones to fill out your landscaping instead of Bermuda grass can help reduce the risks of fire spreading over your lawn. Make sure that you create a buffer zone between your house and landscaping; additionally, pruning and clearing fallen branches and leaves can help reduce future risks.

Read more: How to make sure your home is better protected from disasters

Download a PDF of this article | Return to Disaster 101

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to find housing and rebuild your home after a disaster on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

Though the move was celebrated by Governor Gavin Newsom as he signed the bills into law, it has exposed tensions between the progressive priorities that motivate Democratic lawmakers. Housing affordability advocates have clashed with those promoting environmental justice, with the former boosting the bills and the latter remaining wary. More broadly, the move exposes divisions between those who want more tools to mitigate climate change and environmentalists who would rather maintain strict limits on what can be built and how.

The reforms target the California Environmental Quality Act, which then-governor Ronald Reagan signed more than 50 years ago. Known as CEQA, the legislation requires public agencies and decision-makers to evaluate the environmental impact of any project requiring government approval, and to publicize any effects and mitigate them if feasible.

Supporters say the law has prevented or altered scores of projects that would have been detrimental to the environment or Californians’ quality of life. But CEQA has also become the basis for a regular stream of formal complaints and lawsuits that pile substantial costs and delays onto projects that are ultimately found to have minimal harmful effects — sometimes killing them entirely. In one infamous instance, opponents of student housing near the University of California, Berkeley argued that the associated noise would constitute environmental pollution under CEQA, which led to a three-year legal battle that the university only won after it went to the state Supreme Court. Examples like this have led CEQA, which was once a national symbol of environmental protection, to become vilified as a cause of the state’s chronic housing shortage.

After this week’s reforms, most urban housing projects will now be exempt from the CEQA process. The new legislation also excepts many zoning changes from CEQA, as well as certain nonresidential projects including health clinics, childcare centers, and advanced manufacturing facilities, like semiconductor and nanotech plants, if they are sited in areas already zoned for industrial uses. (A related bill also freezes most updates to building efficiency and clean energy standards until 2031, angering climate advocates who otherwise support the push for denser housing.) Governor Newsom used a budgetary process to push the long-debated changes into law, with strong bipartisan support. 

Some activists welcomed the changes, saying they will lead to denser “infill” housing on vacant or underutilized urban land, slower growth in rents and home prices, and shorter commutes — with the welcome byproduct of fewer planet-warming emissions. 

“For those that view climate change as one of the key issues of our time, infill housing is a critical solution,” read one op-ed supporting the measures. Other environmentalists, however, lambasted the changes as environmentally destructive giveaways to developers. After Newsom signed the legislation, the Sierra Club California put out a statement calling the changes “half-baked” measures that “will have destructive consequences for environmental justice communities and endangered species across California.”

At a time when President Donald Trump’s assaults on climate policy and environmental protections have galvanized opposition from the left, what unfolded in California serves as a reminder that, even among Democrats, a divide remains on the extent to which regulation can help — or hurt — the planet. It’s the type of pickle that liberals across the country may increasingly face on issues ranging from zoning to permitting reform for renewable energy projects, which can face costly delays when they encounter procedural hurdles like CEQA. (Indeed, in California, CEQA has been an impediment to not just affordable housing but also solar farms and high-speed rail.)

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“How do we make sure the regulations we pass to save the planet don’t harm the planet?” asked Matt Lewis, director of communications for California YIMBY, a housing advocacy organization and proponent of the CEQA reforms. Transportation accounts for the largest portion of California’s carbon footprint, and Lewis argues that denser housing will be key to keeping people closer to their jobs. But, he said, people with a “not in my backyard” attitude have abused CEQA to slow down those beneficial projects. (His organization’s name is a play on this so-called NIMBY disposition, with YIMBY standing for “yes in my backyard.”)

“One of the leading causes of climate pollution is the way we permit or do not permit housing to be built in urban areas,” Lewis said, adding that more urban development could reduce pressure to build on unused land in more sensitive areas. He pointed to other legal backstops, like state clean water and air laws, that can accomplish the environmental protection goals often cited by supporters of the CEQA process. “CEQA isn’t actually the most powerful law to make sure that manufacturing facilities and other industrial facilities protect the environment,” he said.

In short, Lewis believes that any downsides of the new reforms pale in comparison to their benefits for both people and the planet. “Did we fix it perfectly this time? I’m willing to admit, no,” he said, adding that any shortcomings that environmentalists are concerned about could be repaired in future legislative sessions.

But many environmentalists contend that the downsides in the new legislation are too large.

“We put one foot forward but we take another step back,” said Miguel Miguel, director of Sierra Club California, noting his opposition to the nonresidential exemptions. He said that CEQA often acts as a first line of defense that allows community input on development projects. Without it, he argues, community voices will be marginalized. Miguel speaks from personal experience: CEQA helped save the mobile home park where he grew up from being replaced by more expensive apartments. 

Kim Delfino, an environmental attorney and consultant who followed the legislation, said that the scope of the reforms expanded from simple support for urban housing development to become “a potpourri of industry and developer desires.” She added that CEQA requires biological surveys that can be the first step to invoking other environmental protections.

“If you never look, you will never know if there are endangered species there,” she said. “We’ve decided to take a head-in-the-sand approach.”

This impasse between environmentalists and housing-focused advocates like Lewis is now decades-old and among the reasons that CEQA reforms — or rollbacks, depending on whom you ask — have taken so long to come about. As the fight has drawn out, skepticism has become entrenched. 

“Maybe I’m wrong,” California YIMBY’s Lewis said of his optimism that the latest changes can thread the needle between the state’s housing needs and environmental priorities. But, he added, he’d rather defer to elected lawmakers than environmentalists, who have long opposed his housing advocacy. “The environmental movement in California has been fundamentally dishonest about housing,” he charged.

The Sierra Club’s Miguel, for his part, hopes for more cooperation between the competing parties, lest the disagreements poison future legislative efforts. At the end of the day, all parties involved share the same broad goals, if with different levels of emphasis.

“We have to do everything and anything all at once,” he said, referring to climate and environmental policy. “That is fine art.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can weaker environmental rules help fight climate change? California just bet yes. on Jul 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

Janine Jackson interviewed Cal Poly Pomona’s Farrah Hassen about criminalizing homelessness for the June 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Janine Jackson: In 1999, then–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that “streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there. Bedrooms are for sleeping.” He added that the right to sleep on the streets “doesn’t exist anywhere. The Founding Fathers never put that in the Constitution.”

That absurd out-of-touchness, the failure, not merely of empathy, but of knowledge? Our guest reports that still seems to undergird much of what we are told are policies and laws meant to address homelessness, including at the highest levels.

Farrah Hassen has been tracking the issue for years. She’s a writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. She joins us now by phone from Sacramento. Welcome to CounterSpin, Farrah Hassen.

Farrah Hassen: Hi, Janine. Thanks for having me.

Other Words (6/4/25)

JJ: I want to ask you about Grants Pass v. Johnson, last year’s Supreme Court case that you wrote about recently for OtherWords, but I’d like to start, as you do, with the acknowledgement that ought to anchor every story we see: that a person who works full time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the United States. That’s the reality, that’s the understanding that any of our responses ought to take on board, or to be judged by, yes?

FH: That’s correct. I mean, we have to consider that backdrop if we are going to talk about the growing problem of homelessness, and the related housing crisis. And, unsurprisingly, homelessness has increased as our government has diminished social safety nets. And we have to consider that when we think about how people fall into homelessness.

JJ: So rather than respond with a commitment to housing and social services, and job and wage growth, what we’ve seen is criminalizing. I couldn’t find it, but I remember Rudy Giuliani saying that he hoped that his crackdown on unhoused people would lead to them just going away, just sort of disappearing. And that seems to be some of the thinking behind, if not the Grants Pass ruling, some of the support for it. So tell listeners a little about what Grants Pass, that decision, did, and then, what didn’t it do?

FH: A year ago, on June 28, in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there is no available shelter. The Supreme Court overturned the 2018 Martin v. Boise precedent that had been decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had said that the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause prohibits cities from penalizing unhoused people for sitting, sleeping or lying outside on public property unless they have access to adequate temporary shelter.

And so, for some context, in Grants Pass, like other cities across the United States, the number of people living unhoused easily exceeds the number of available shelter on any given night. Debra Blake was among those Grants Pass residents who were forced to live outside—in her case, for eight years—after losing her job and housing. Moreover, her disability disqualified her from staying in the town’s only shelter. And the city had these anti-camping ordinances that prohibited people like Debra Blake from sleeping or camping in the public, and they interpreted “camping” to even include the use of bedding, like a blanket, to stay warm in the cold.

Anyone who violated these ordinances in the city could be ticketed, could face fines, even subject to criminal prosecution. And the Grants Pass City Council themselves revealed that the underlying goal of these ordinances was to “make it uncomfortable enough for unhoused people in our city so they will want to move down the road.”

Cal Matters (2/27/25)

And so in Debra Blake’s case, after being banished from every park, accruing thousands in fines, she sued the city of Grants Pass as part of this class action suit, for violating unhoused residents’ constitutional rights. And the Oregon District Court agreed in 2020 that the city’s actions constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

But, sadly, Blake never got to see the results. And the city of Grants Pass ended up appealing this decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the city’s favor.

And which brings us back to today. And I should also note, going back to the Supreme Court’s decision, that, importantly, it did not say, “Therefore, state and local governments must now criminalize homelessness.” But because the high court found Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances constitutional, many jurisdictions, unfortunately, including in California where I live, have used the court’s decision as a green light to crack down on people living unhoused, including by passing these “anti-camping ordinances,” similar to Grants Pass, which broadly criminalized the act of sleeping or pitching tents or other structures on publicly owned property.

JJ: It’s clear that the issues of homelessness involve many societal factors other than housing. And, at the same time, there’s an Occam’s razor at work here. There’s a reason that “housing first” lands as a call, isn’t there? For people who think, “Well, it’s very complicated. It’s about mental health, it’s about family structure” or whatever, housing first makes a lot of sense, if folks would just think of it that way, yeah?

Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (6/23)

FH: That’s absolutely correct. There is a misconception that homelessness is primarily caused by addiction and mental illness—which is not to say, to be clear, that there are not people suffering from mental illness and addiction among our nation’s unhoused population.

But there was this landmark study in June 2023 by the University of California San Francisco that focused on California, and it found that poverty and high housing costs are, in fact, the driving forces of homelessness. And that’s just more confirmation that housing unaffordability is the primary cause of homelessness, as other research and experts have long noted.

And that’s why, therefore, using the findings of this evidence, punitive fines, arrests, sweeps of encampments do not address the root of the problem, which is, again, the absence of permanent, affordable and, I might add, adequate housing. And so there are more things our country can do instead of criminalizing homelessness, which only traps people into these cycles, these endless cycles of poverty and homelessness, not to mention criminal penalties being inhumane to begin with.

And so housing first, as you mentioned, is one proven, evidence-backed solution here. It prioritizes providing permanent housing as soon as possible to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, without preconditions. It’s in contrast to what some people want, which is treatment first, or treatment only. Housing first also is coupled with voluntary supportive services to help improve housing stability and well-being, especially for those people who may need additional support, additional treatment.

And housing first has had strong bipartisan support for decades. It’s been supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies. And there’s so much evidence that shows that housing first actually works, including in places like Houston, Texas, which notably reduced homelessness by nearly two thirds over a decade. So that’s just yet another example of why, instead of kicking people while they’re down, housing support, combined with other voluntary services, really helped to lift people back up.

JJ: I’ll just only ask you, finally, Farrah Hassen, if you see a particular role for news media here, either for good or for ill, in terms of consideration of this question, which I want to ground folks in the statement that you have in the piece, “Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime.” It’s not bending laws of nature, it’s just informed effort. And I wonder what role you think news media might play there.

Farrah Hassen: “We have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight.”

FH: Oh, thank you. I really do appreciate that question, because underlying that question is, I believe, a larger narrative of how we talk about housing in this country. And you would never know that it’s actually a well-defined and internationally protected fundamental human right that all people—not people who have to be means-tested, or meet certain qualifications—all people are entitled to. Why? Because we all know innately, looking at our own lives, that housing is essential to life, to health, to well-being, but in the United States, it has primarily treated housing as a commodity, and it’s failing to protect this right for large numbers of people.

Homelessness itself, the sheer fact that over 770,000 people last year experienced homelessness, a record high, directly violates this right to adequate housing. So we have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight, as if there are not larger structural factors at play that contribute to housing remaining perpetually unaffordable for more and more people living in this country.

And so obviously the US doesn’t recognize housing as a human right, but I believe we should talk about it more, like we do about the need for Medicare for All, which is rooted in healthcare for all. We need these economic, social and cultural rights, along with civil and political rights, to really be able to live our lives to the fullest. And, fundamentally, that means transforming our nation’s approach to housing policies, and to remember that people shouldn’t be punished as well, as we look back on homelessness, for living in public spaces. People should not be punished for existing.

JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor at Cal Poly Pomona Farrah Hassen. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

FH: Thanks so much, Janine.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Misión Milagro is despised by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Washington has imposed sanctions on officials in countries using this and other Cuban medical missions. Supposedly aimed at stopping the “trafficking” of medical staff, the real intent is to destroy services that have proved immensely popular for their free, high-quality treatment, often in remote areas with few health facilities. The US falsely demonizes Cuba’s aid as “forced labor,” which is also a source of income for the besieged country.

Successes of Rubio’s “enemies of humanity”

Rubio’s attack on medical brigades is only the most recent example of the hybrid warfare conducted by successive US administrations against Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Already designated as “strategic threats” to US security, according to Rubio, these countries are now also labelled “enemies of humanity.” In reality, all three countries have made major advances in human development, albeit constrained (most heavily in Cuba’s case) by Washington’s attacks.

Cuba’s medical brigades derive from its community-based health system, whose success is recognized in medical journals and affords Cubans a three-year greater life expectancy than people in the US. Health services in Venezuela and Nicaragua have learnt from this model. For example, Nicaragua’s 180 casas maternas, assisting women in the late stages of pregnancy, have drastically reduced maternal deaths.

Venezuela leads Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in building affordable housing; its Great Housing Mission, launched in 2011, handed over its five millionth home a year ago. Nicaragua is building more than 7,000 “social interest” homes annually.

Cuba, sadly, has an ongoing housing crisis, primarily caused by the US embargo, which has produced a severe shortage of building materials. One-third of homes are unfit, while its 13,500 annual building program inevitably falls short.

However, Cuba invested in its education system during the most prosperous years of the revolution, when it benefited from the international solidarity of the Soviet Union. Cuba’s schools serve the most remote communities, and attendance is close to 100%. ELAM, its medical school for internationals, has trained an astonishing 31,180 doctors from 122 countries.

Venezuela invested heavily in education as a means of empowering the populace, building thousands of new schools in underserved barrios and rural areas. By 2005, illiteracy was eradicated using Cuban-developed methods. By 2008, four out of five young adults were enrolled in higher education, the highest rate in the region.

All three countries guarantee free education at all levels, including university. Nicaragua, for example, has created new technical colleges training some 46,000 students.

Cuba and Nicaragua are two of LAC’s safest countries. A common factor is that their police forces were completely reformed, post-revolution, and they have been able to limit drug trafficking and keep at bay the violent gangs that bedevil other countries.

The Venezuelan revolution inherited chronically high crime levels, but in recent years has achieved a significant decrease in homicides, which has been publicized not only by Caracas but by the US president. However, Trump deceitfully claims Venezuela has achieved this by deliberately exporting its criminals to the US.

In terms of national security, Nicaragua and Venezuela have among the lowest military spending levels in the LAC region; Cuba, subject to constant US threat, is among the highest. Nevertheless, its spending of around $130 million annually pales in comparison with that of over a trillion by the US.

Socially conscious foreign policy

Perhaps most challenging to the US has been the independent foreign policy and the championing of regional integration by the three countries striving for socialism.

Back in 2004, Venezuela and Cuba successfully founded ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), scuttling Washington’s neoliberal free trade FTAA initiative. Venezuela followed with PetroCaribe, supplying oil to Caribbean nations on favorable terms. The founding of CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) in 2010, again spearheaded by Venezuela, provides an alternative to the US-dominated OAS (Organization of American States) as a region-wide political forum, which explicitly excludes the US and Canada.

The three leftist states have also been international leaders in support of Palestine. Cuba was the first country in the LAC region to formally sever diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973. Nicaragua severed relations in 1982. These were temporarily reinstated by the neoliberal government in 1993, only to be again severed in 2010 after the Sandinistas returned to power. Venezuela severed relations with the Zionist state in 2009. Also in 2009, fellow ALBA nation Bolivia severed relations with Israel. These were temporarily reinstated in 2019 by the Áňez coup regime but again severed by the current Bolivian President, Luis Arce, in 2023. Last year, Nicaragua filed a case against Germany at the International Court of Justice over its military and political support of the genocide by Israel.

Human rights weaponized

Washington disregards the achievements in these three countries that former Trump functionary John Bolton called the “troika of tyranny,” instead weaponizing “human rights” to characterize them as authoritarian dictatorships. This is hypocritical in two senses.

One is that their human rights records, by any standards, are no worse than those of many other countries in the region, and in most respects, they are better than those of the US itself.

The other is that the US has been the primary cause of tightened security in these countries. The alleged limits on political expression are a response to constant interference – military interventions, coup efforts, and assassination attempts. Biden, for instance, upped the bounty on the head of Venezuela’s president to $25 million.

Washington leads the chorus of complaints when a demonstration in Cuba is suppressed or a political party in Venezuela or Nicaragua is banned. The US tries to act as if it were an impartial observer, rather than – as is invariably the case – the funder or supporter of whatever opposition group is being “victimized.”

Washington’s concern about “human rights” is a charade, which disappears if the government in question is a US client state, e.g., El Salvador.

If countries pose a “strategic threat” to US interests, it is because of their record in improving the most important human rights, which, according to the United Nations, are “the right to life, food, education, work, health, and liberty.” In respect of these wider rights, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua show that huge progress can be made by progressive, revolutionary governments that have rejected the neoliberalism pursued in LAC countries favored by Washington.

Sanctions on Venezuela have led to the deaths of over 100,000 Venezuelans by 2020. The blockade of Cuba, costing the country $13.8 million daily, is so destructive that nearly one in ten Cubans has left the country in the last three years. Nicaragua is losing $500 million in development funding annually because the US is blocking loans from the World Bank and other institutions.

It could hardly be more obvious that Washington’s aim is to destroy each country’s social achievements and impoverish their people so that those who do not die, fall sick, or migrate eventually will rise up against their governments. And then the likes of Rubio make inane statements such as offering “unwavering support and solidarity for the Cuban people.”

Washington’s endgame

What do successive US administrations and the opposition groups that they support actually want to achieve in the targeted countries?

Over 30 years ago, prominent Cuban exiles were calling for “a sudden, dramatic and, if necessary, convulsive shift to free-wheeling capitalism.” Twenty years ago, the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, established by President George Bush, outlined a broad neoliberal vision for the country. A trawl of recent statements by exile groups reveals many vague demands for “democracy,” “transparent institutions,” “support for youth,” and so on, with some limited, specific proposals such as “restitution of property rights” (for Cubans in Miami looking to cash in on potentially valuable property their families abandoned 60 years ago).

The Nicaraguan opposition is profoundly divided between the left and the right, with the right seeking to exclude the left from power, while the marginal “left” opposition has never garnered significant political support (the Sandinistas successfully mobilized the progressive vote in elections). The UNAMOS party, some of whose members were formerly Sandinista officials in the 1980s, offers a program focused on restructuring the government with only vague objectives for social development.

The far-right opposition in Venezuela, led by Washington’s darling Maria Corina Machado, promises a bloodbath with no amnesty for the Chavistas. Machado’s surrogate, Edmundo González Urrutia, ran for the presidency in 2024 on a platform calling for extreme neoliberal privatization of education, health care, housing, food assistance, and the national oil agency.

Regardless of the expressed aims of opposition groups, the likely outcome if one or more of the three governments were to lose power is evident. The coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018 was a foretaste: murders of police and of Sandinista sympathizers, uncontrolled availability of firearms, empowerment of local criminals, importing violent gang members from El Salvador, destruction of public buildings, and much more.

The kind of anarchic chaos that exists in Haiti is a very possible outcome, possibly leading to a repressive, authoritarian regime – but Washington-friendly – like that in Bukele’s El Salvador.

The often-overlooked accomplishments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have been made despite enduring aggressive US interventions. Washington continues to hypocritically weaponize human rights, using hybrid warfare to erode these achievements and justify regime change as a democratic project.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Perry and Roger D. Harris.

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Kennell Staten saw Walker Courts as his best path out of homelessness, he said. The complex had some of the only subsidized apartments he knew of in his adopted hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, so he applied to live there again and again. But while other people seemed to sail through the leasing process, his applications went nowhere. Staten thought he knew why: He is gay. The property manager had made her feelings about that clear to him, he said. “She said I was too flamboyant,” he remembered, “that it’s a whole bunch of older people staying there and they would feel uncomfortable seeing me coming outside with a dress or skirt on.”

So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.

Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)

Staten’s complaint is one of hundreds impacted by a major retreat in the federal government’s decadeslong fight against housing discrimination and segregation, according to interviews with 10 HUD officials. Those federal staffers, along with state officials, attorneys and advocates across the country, described a dismantling of federal fair housing enforcement, which has been slowed, constrained or halted at every step. The investigative process has been hobbled. The agency is withholding discrimination charges that HUD officials say should already have been issued. Those accused of housing discrimination appear newly emboldened not to cooperate with the agency. And at least 115 federal fair housing cases have been halted or closed entirely since Trump took office, with hundreds more cases in jeopardy, HUD officials estimate.

These changes raise questions about the future of one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement, which advocates see as urgently needed today amid a historic housing shortage and rising complaints about housing discrimination.

“It’ll give free rein to companies, to states, to governments to take advantage of people, to refuse to respect their rights, without fear of response from the government. They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. “The civil rights laws that people marched for and fought for and died for, that Congress passed and at least sensibly expects to be enforced, that’s just not happening right now. It’s not happening. And people are really being harmed by it.”

Asked to comment on the findings in this story, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement: “HUD is committed to rooting out discrimination and upholding the Fair Housing Act. ProPublica continues to cherry pick examples to further an activist narrative rather than report the facts.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

For many victims of housing discrimination, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has long been the best path to winning justice. Recent investigations by the office and its state and local partners have led to millions of dollars in relief for victims and reforms from landlords, mortgage lenders and local governments.

When a California city began requiring property owners to evict tenants if the county sheriff’s department said they had engaged in criminal activity — regardless of whether they were convicted — it was a HUD investigation that led to a nearly $1 million settlement and a repeal of the ordinance. (The city did not admit liability.) The agency also secured a $300,000 settlement for a mother, daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend in Oklahoma who were allegedly harassed and assaulted by neighbors because the boyfriend was Black, to which the landlord responded by trying to evict the mother. (A representative for the property ownership company said company leadership has changed since the allegations.)

Such victories may be rare in the next four years.

“We are being gutted right now,” said one agency official, who, like others, requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “And it feels like it’s not even the beginning.”

The Fair Housing Office’s staff of roughly 550 full-time employees is set to fall by more than a third through the administration’s federal worker buyout program, according to a HUD meeting recording obtained by ProPublica. Internal projections that have circulated widely among HUD staffers suggest far deeper cuts could follow.

Those accused of housing discrimination seem to have taken notice. HUD officials described an increase in defendants ignoring correspondence from investigators or even copying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in their communication with HUD, seemingly in hopes the cost-cutting department will take their side.

“For them to face a consequence, they will need to be brought through a litigation process, which requires expenditure of litigation from the department, and they know that we don’t have those resources anymore,” one HUD official said. “They also feel emboldened that this administration will not consider the things that they are doing to be illegal.”

Some defendants have been more explicit about this. In one case, a midwestern city — which had allegedly allowed local politicians to block affordable housing in white neighborhoods — asked HUD officials if the agency still had the backing to pursue the case if the city walked away from the negotiating table, one official said. In another case, a public housing authority, also in the Midwest, rescinded a six-figure settlement it had offered two days prior, citing Trump’s newly issued executive order attacking “disparate-impact liability.” The housing authority had allegedly favored white applicants and denied applicants with even modest criminal records. HUD spent years building the case; it crumbled in 48 hours. (HUD officials shared details on these and other cases on the condition that ProPublica not name the parties or locations, as the deliberations are private.)

Without the support of agency leadership, HUD is in a weaker negotiating position, dimming the prospects of major settlements or reforms. In another case involving a public housing authority, this one on the East Coast, HUD is considering settling for no monetary penalty — although it would not have accepted less than $1 million under the prior administration, officials said. HUD found the housing authority excluded disabled applicants and that some of its buildings had tenants who were disproportionately white (which the authority has denied).

When settlement negotiations collapse, HUD regularly issues “charges of discrimination,” akin to filing a lawsuit. Four months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency had charged at least eight cases and announced major steps in another four. In the second Trump presidency, HUD has not filed a single charge of housing discrimination, officials said.

It’s not for a lack of credible complaints, HUD officials say. There are dozens stuck in limbo at the agency’s Office of General Counsel, HUD officials estimated, including several where officials had conducted lengthy investigations and determined a civil rights law had been violated. One such complaint involves a New York woman who said she was sexually harassed for years by a maintenance worker in her building. The worker allegedly grabbed her breasts and told her that to receive repairs she would have to call him after hours — allegations that HUD officials found to be credible. But Trump appointees have not allowed them to file a charge, officials said.

Lovett, the HUD spokesperson, said that “the Department is preparing multiple charges that will be issued within the next week against individuals who we believe violated the Fair Housing Act.” She did not respond to a request for details about those charges.

Many of the cases halted by HUD involve claims of housing discrimination because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Those appear to have been undermined by Trump’s “defending women” executive order, issued on his first day in office, which eliminated executive branch recognition of transgender people. Another executive order declaring English the country’s official language has paralyzed cases involving the requirement that housing providers who receive federal funds try to reach people with limited English proficiency. Other cases now in peril involve environmental justice, like disputes over the construction of pollution-emitting factories in poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. Race-based discrimination cases could be next on the chopping block, given the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, some HUD officials fear.

Previously there were many channels through which the public could file housing discrimination complaints to HUD. In March, the agency shut down all but one of them (with limited exceptions), citing staffing reductions. Now complaint hotlines and inboxes go unmonitored, with answering machines informing callers: “The number you reached is no longer in use.”

Investigations have been thwarted. Staffers can no longer travel to look for witnesses, as staff credit cards now have $1 spending limits. Agency attorneys must seek approval from a Trump appointee for basic tasks, such as issuing subpoenas, taking depositions, assisting with settlement discussions and even merely speaking to other attorneys in and outside government. As that approval seems to rarely come, investigations languish, HUD officials said. Even routine settlements now require approval from a political appointee, exacerbating the case backlog and delaying relief for victims, officials said.

The dysfunction has at times taken more mundane forms. For around two weeks in March, the Fair Housing Office’s work slowed to a crawl after DOGE canceled, without notice, a contract that had enabled staffers to quickly send certified mail to people involved in cases, according to officials and federal contracting data. It was a crucial resource — the office mails tens of thousands of documents each year, and regulations require some correspondence to be certified. Without the contract, staff had to spend their days stuffing envelopes themselves. The contract was worth only around $220,000. In recent years, HUD’s annual discretionary budget has topped $70 billion.

Compliance reviews and discretionary investigations have also been affected. Typically that involves examining the policies and practices of developers, public housing authorities and other recipients of HUD funding to ensure that they abide by civil rights laws. Officials said such efforts have all but ceased, including an investigation into a housing authority that appeared to have a disproportionately low number of Latino tenants and applicants compared to the surrounding area. Larger, systemic investigations are similarly on ice.

The apparent retreat in fair housing enforcement extends beyond HUD. At the Department of Justice, which prosecutes many fair housing cases, staffers received a draft of the housing section’s new mission statement, which omitted any mention of the Fair Housing Act. (The DOJ declined to comment.) At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump appointee Russ Vought has sought to vacate a settlement with a company called Townstone Financial, which CFPB alleged had effectively discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. The agency is now proposing to return the settlement funds to the company. “CFPB abused its power, used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them,” Vought has said to explain the decision. (CFPB did not respond to a request for comment. Townstone’s CEO said that he welcomed the move to vacate the settlement and that the prior allegations were meritless.)

The federal government’s fair housing efforts are supported by a broad ecosystem of local nonprofits. They, too, have been destabilized. In February, HUD and DOGE canceled 78 grants to local fair housing organizations, saying each one “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” The funding represented a minuscule fraction of HUD’s budget but was essential to grant recipients. That includes groups like Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Greater Cincinnati, which was forced to pause investigations into racist mortgage lending practices and apartment buildings that may flout accessibility laws, according to Executive Director Elisabeth Risch. Four of the organizations filed a class-action lawsuit, arguing HUD and DOGE had no authority to withhold funding approved by Congress. The litigation is ongoing.

Many states do not have their own substantial fair housing laws, leaving little recourse for housing discrimination victims in large swaths of the country if HUD’s retreat continues. “In the state of Missouri, HUD was it for housing protections,” said Kalila Jackson, an attorney in St. Louis. “It’s a terrifying situation.”

Fighting housing discrimination was once seen as so imperative that President Lyndon Johnson described the Fair Housing Act as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. “With this bill, the voice of justice speaks again,” he said when signing the legislation. “It proclaims that fair housing for all — all human beings who live in this country — is now a part of the American way of life. “

But advocates and HUD officials say that ambition never became a reality. “The fair housing laws were never fully implemented,” said Erin Kemple, a vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance. “If you look at segregation throughout the country, it is still very high in most places.” And the Fair Housing Office has been chronically understaffed and underfunded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The office has long struggled to clear its docket.

In recent years, segregation has been on the rise by some measures. One study found that most major metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than they had been in 1990. Another found that the Black homeownership rate is lower now than it was at the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And more housing discrimination complaints were filed in 2023 than in any other year since the National Fair Housing Alliance began tracking the figures three decades ago.

Some advocates fear that a four-year federal retreat from the issue could send the country sliding back toward the pre-civil rights era, when landlords and mortgage lenders could freely reject applicants because of their race, and when federal agencies, local governments and real estate brokers could maintain policies that perpetuated extreme levels of segregation.

HUD officials interviewed by ProPublica echoed those concerns, foreseeing a growing national underclass of poor renters suffering discrimination with little hope of redress. They can always file lawsuits, but, for those at the bottom of the housing market, costly litigation is hardly an option.

Even if today’s policies are undone by future administrations, there will be at least four years in which it may become easier for local zoning boards to block affordable housing, for mortgage lenders to retreat from nonwhite neighborhoods, and for developers to flout accessibility requirements in new buildings, HUD officials fear. The consequences of those changes could stretch far into the future. “Housing cycles are long,” one HUD official said. “This decimation will set us back for another several decades.”

April is Fair Housing Month, when HUD usually announces high-profile cases and holds events celebrating the Fair Housing Act. This April came and went without fanfare. HUD Secretary Scott Turner did release a two-minute video, in which he vowed to “uphold the Fair Housing Act so every American has the opportunity to achieve the American dream of homeownership.” He added: “A more fair and free housing market is truly part of President Trump’s golden age of America.”

Beyond that, Turner has had little to say about housing discrimination or segregation, beyond weakening a measure known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. HUD even eliminated the Fair Housing Office’s old website. The URL now redirects to HUD’s homepage, which features a photo of a suburban cul-de-sac with a heavenly sunset behind it and a quote from Turner, a former NFL player and Baptist pastor.

“God blessed us with this great nation,” it reads. “Together, we can increase self-sufficiency and empower Americans to climb the economic ladder toward a brighter future.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are scrambling to defund Medicaid, food assistance, and other vital programs that millions of Americans depend on during economic downturns so the GOP can pass another round of tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy. Groundwork Collaborative’s Chief of Policy and Advocacy Alex Jacquez reacted with the following statement:

“Budgets reveal priorities, and it’s clear that President Trump doesn’t care about making life more affordable for working families. He is driving the economy into a recession and gutting the programs that Americans will need to weather the storm. Americans want relief from Trump’s economic doom-loop, not another billionaire tax giveaway.”

Email press@groundworkcollaborative.org to speak with a Groundwork expert about today’s jobs report and President Trump’s handling of the economy.

THIS WEEK IN THE TRUMP SLUMP: New polling and economic indicators continue to show that President Trump is deliberately engineering a recession.

Economic Indicators:

• GDP showed a 0.3% decrease in the first quarter of 2025, landing below expectations. This is the first negative GDP reading since Q2 of 2022.
• Consumer confidence, measured by the Conference Board, showed a fifth straight month of decline, the worst since the COVID-19 pandemic, with consumer expectations at a 13-year low. Additionally, the Expectations Index dropped to 54.4, the lowest level since October 2011, and well below the threshold of 80 that usually signals a recession. Expectations of inflation over the next year have climbed to 7.0%, the highest since November 2022.
• The latest Manufacturing ISM report found the manufacturing sector contracted in April for the second month in a row. The ISM Manufacturing PMI® registered 48.7% this month, down 0.3 points from March.
  • Exports declined by 6.5 points (the largest drop since 2020), imports dropped by 3 points, and production fell by 4.3 points compared to last month. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs are sending prices through the roof. The ISM Prices Index registered 69.8%, the highest reading in nearly three years, driven mostly by increases in steel and aluminum prices.

Polling

• 72 percent — including 51 percent of Republicans — say it’s at least “somewhat” likely that Trump’s economic policies will lead to a recession, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
• Polling from Reuters/Ipsos found that Trump’s economic approval rating dropped to 36%, the lowest point of either of his presidencies.
• Navigator Research found that Trump’s economic approval ratings are 16 points underwater, after being +1 at his inauguration. This is below even his overall approval.
  • Navigator also found that nearly 70 percent of Americans view the current state of the economy negatively, and a majority believe Trump’s policies are contributing to the rising cost of living.
• A CNN poll found that almost 6 in 10 Americans think Trump’s policies are making the economy worse.

Expert Commentary

• Mark Zandi, Chief Economist for Moody’s Analytics, warned of a “recession dead ahead” if Trump continued his trade war. He tweeted, “The Conference Board consumer confidence survey fell sharply to 86 in April. It is off 19.3 points in the past 3 months. Just shy of the recession threshold of 20. Unless the trade war cools off very (very) soon, recession appears dead-ahead.”
• Goldman Sachs said that Trump’s tariffs will increase inflation and halt economic growth. “We continue to believe the risk from April 2 tariffs is greater than many market participants have previously assumed,” they wrote.
• Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist for Nationwide, warned that the economy will slow down in the upcoming months as tariffs kick in and businesses are hesitant to spend. Bostjancic said, “Once everything kicks in, we’ll have a slower economy, the labor market slowing. Hiring has already stalled, and we expect the unemployment rate to start to rise.”
• According to Bloomberg, economists are projecting a 45% chance of a recession, up 30% from March.
• Jamie Dimon reportedly told investors that a mild recession would be the “best-case” scenario from Trump’s trade war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The Gardens, as it’s commonly referred to, stands closer to the Indiana border than Chicago’s downtown and is wedged between toxic landfills, old steel mills, chemical factories, and an oil refinery. The housing development was built for Black veterans returning from World War II. 

It’s unclear exactly how the memorial wall first began. 

“People just started putting up names on the wall for the people who died of cancer and other respiratory problems,” said Cheryl Johnson, who runs the local nonprofit People for Community Recovery.

Environmental justice was born here. Johnson’s mother, Hazel Johnson, originally from New Orleans, is celebrated as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” Her lifelong fight to make city and federal officials confront how poor, Black and Latino communities face disproportionate exposure to pollution turned Altgeld Gardens into a launchpad for the national movement.

When President BIll Clinton signed the first executive order recognizing “environmental justice” in 1994, Johnson was standing right next to him. Now, 30 years later, Johnson’s legacy is under siege. 

President Donald Trump struck down Clinton’s executive order on his first week in office. In the 100 days since, as part of a plan to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, from the federal government, the Trump administration has launched a campaign to dismantle environmental justice protections and programs across the United States.

Changes have included an emergency order making it easier to fast-track fossil fuel projects while sidelining community opposition, challenges to congressionally appropriated funding for climate and environmental initiatives, elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice, and deep cuts to the federal workforce responsible for protecting communities from pollution. 

According to Debbie Chizewer, an attorney with the nonprofit environmental legal group Earthjustice, the Trump administration’s message to environmental justice communities across the country is loud and clear:  “We’re not going to do this work anymore.”

Chizewer added that the Trump administration isn’t just making it harder for the federal government to respond to environmental racism, but also for communities to advocate for themselves. 

It’s targeting bedrock civil rights protections, Chizewer said, going after Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin under any programs that receive federal funding.

In the past, environmental justice groups fighting industrial pollution have used the provision to get the federal government to intervene in local issues. In Chicago for example, Cheryl Johnson was part of a civil rights complaint that resulted in a 2023 settlement agreement requiring the city of Chicago to fix zoning policies that concentrated heavy industry in poor and minority communities. 

The national success of the legal tool may be fleeting. 

Earlier this month, Trump’s Department of Justice terminated a 2023 settlement agreement that required Alabama’s officials to update a failing septic system which released raw sewage onto lawns in Lowndes County, Alabama. The Justice Department said it was ending the settlement as part of its mandate to end “illegal DEI and environmental justice policies.”

“The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a press release.

“I was not surprised,” said Catherine Colman Flowers, a Lowndes County environmental justice activist who helped file the civil rights complaint that secured the 2023 settlement, given the Trump administration’s track record. Alabama’s Department of Public Health agreed to continue funding the septic replacement program until funds run out. 

In the long term, Colman Flowers said the decision to end the settlement means “a lot of families will not get sanitation and will still be living in America with sewage on the ground.”

President Joe Biden had appointed Colman Flowers to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, or WHEJAC, whose mission was to provide poor and minority communities a direct line of communication with the White House and a mechanism for raising awareness of environmental justice issues in their local communities. Earlier this month, she received an email from the EPA notifying her that the Trump administration had disbanded the council.

The ongoing silencing is increasingly evident in the Great Lakes region, where Trump’s “national energy emergency” has fast-tracked federal review of the controversial Great Lakes Tunnel, a massive fossil fuel project that would replace a segment of the Line 5 pipeline that crosses the Straits of Mackinac separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

Nearby Indigenous communities have voiced concern for years that any potential leaks from the proposed pipeline tunnel, which is projected to traverse their land, could irrevocably impact their life on the Great Lakes. 

“There is no national emergency,” said Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, noting that the United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. Critics of the project maintain that only about 10 percent of the natural gas products that run through Line 5 stays in Michigan, while the overwhelming majority continues on back to Canada. 

“To see it steamrolled ahead effectively silences the tribes vocalizing their concerns or sharing any of that reasoning with the decision-makers,” said Gravelle. 

Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin invited industrial polluters to seek exemptions from federal rules on air pollution, a move Ana Baptista, an environmental policy professor at The New School in New York, called “a cue to industries that they have free reign.” 

President Trump will then decide whether heavy industry, oftentimes located near environmental justice communities, will be able to leapfrog standards for toxic pollutants like mercury, arsenic, and ethylene oxide.

“It feels like we’re going back to the era where people denied the existence of environmental injustice and communities were really on their own,” she said. The only difference this time around, Baptista added, there’s now more than 30 years of empirical evidence documenting how poor and minority communities are stuck with the brunt of pollution and its dangerous health effects. 

Back on the South Side of Chicago, where the environmental justice movement took its first steps, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson surveyed the Altgeld Gardens Memorial Wall on Earth Day, calling it a potent reminder that the ultimate goal of any good policy is “to create equal environmental protection for everyone.”

Mayor Johnson introduced an ordinance named after Hazel Johnson to the Chicago City Council earlier this month that would require the city to investigate the pollution impacts of new industrial projects before approving them.

“Even with the attacks coming from the federal government, we’re going to do everything in Chicago to protect working people.” Johnson said. “It also is an effort to double down in our work to ensure that environmental justice prevails.”  

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 30 years of environmental justice, dismantled in 100 days on May 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco.

More than 640 million acres, including national parks, forests and wildlife refuges, as well as lands open to drilling, mining, logging and a variety of other uses, are managed by the federal government — but owned collectively by all American citizens. Together, these parcels make up more than a quarter of all land in the nation. 

Congressman John Garamendi, a Democrat representing California, has called them “one of the greatest benefits of being an American.” 

“Even if you don’t own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and many other natural treasures,” he wrote in 2011.

Despite broad, bipartisan public support for protecting public lands, these shared landscapes  have come under relentless attack during the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term. The administration and its allies in Congress are working feverishly to tilt the scale away from natural resource protection and toward extraction, threatening a pillar of the nation’s identity and tradition of democratic governance. 

“There’s no larger concentration of unappropriated wealth on this globe than exists in this country on our public lands,” said Jesse Duebel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, a conservation nonprofit. “The fact that there are interests that would like to monetize that, they’d like to liquidate it and turn it into cash money, is no surprise.”

Landscape protections and bedrock conservation laws are on the chopping block, as Trump and his team look to boost and fast-track drilling, mining, and logging across the federal estate. The administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are eyeing selling off federal lands, both for housing development and to help offset Trump’s tax and spending cuts. And the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, is wreaking havoc within federal land management agencies, pushing out thousands of civil servants. That purge will leave America’s natural heritage more vulnerable to the myriad threats they already face, including growing visitor numbers, climate change, wildfires, and invasive species.

The Republican campaign to undermine land management agencies and wrest control of public lands from the federal government is nothing new, dating back to the Sagebrush Rebellion movement of the 1970s and 80s, when support for privatizing or transferring federal lands to state control exploded across the West. But the speed and scope of the current attack, along with its disregard for the public’s support for safeguarding public lands, makes it more worrisome than previous iterations, several public land advocates and legal experts told Grist. 

This is “probably the most significant moment since the Reagan administration in terms of privatization,” said Steven Davis, a political science professor at Edgewood College and the author of the 2018 book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer. President Ronald Reagan was a self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel. 

Duebel said the conservation community knew Trump’s return would trigger another drawn out fight for the future of public lands, but nothing could have prepared him for this level of chaos, particularly the effort to rid agencies of thousands of staffers.

The country is “in a much more pro-public lands position than we’ve been before,” Duebel said. “But I think we’re at greater risk than we’ve ever been before — not because the time is right in the eyes of the American people, but because we have an administration who could give two shits about what the American people want. That’s what’s got me scared.” 

The Interior Department and the White House did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.

In an article posted to the White House website on Earth Day, the Trump administration touted several “key actions” it has taken on the environment, including “protecting public lands” by opening more acres to energy development, “protecting wildlife” by pausing wind energy projects, and safeguarding forests by expanding logging. The accomplishment list received widespread condemnation from environmental, climate, and public land advocacy groups. 

That same day, a leaked draft strategic plan revealed the Interior Department’s four-year vision for opening new federal lands to drilling and other extractive development, reducing the amount of federal land it manages by selling some for housing development and transferring other acres to state control, rolling back the boundaries of protected national monuments, and weakening bedrock environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act.

Meanwhile, Trump’s DOGE is in the process of cutting thousands of scientists and other staff from the various agencies that manage and protect public lands, including the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. Nearly every Republican senator recently went on the record this month in support of selling off federal lands to reduce the federal deficit, voting down a measure that would have blocked such sales. And Utah has promised to continue its legal fight aimed at stripping more than 18 million acres of BLM lands within the state’s border from the federal government. Utah’s lawsuit, which the Supreme Court declined to hear in January, had the support of numerous Republican-led states, including North Dakota while current Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was still governor. 

To advance its agenda, the Trump administration is citing a series of “emergencies” that close observers say are at best exaggerated, and at worst manufactured. 

A purported “energy emergency,” which Trump declared in an executive order just hours after being inaugurated, has been the impetus for the administration attempting to throw longstanding federal permitting processes, public comment periods, and environmental safeguards to the wind. The action aims to boost fossil fuel extraction across federal lands and waters — despite domestic oil and gas production being at record highs — while simultaneously working to thwart renewable energy projects. Trump relied on that same “emergency” earlier this month when he ordered federal agencies to prop up America’s dwindling, polluting coal industry, which the president and his cabinet have insisted is “beautiful” and “clean.” In reality, coal is among the most polluting forms of energy.

“This whole idea of an emergency is ridiculous,” said Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “And now this push to reinvigorate the coal industry seems absolutely crazy to me. Why would you try to reinvigorate a moribund industry that has been declining for the last decade or more? Makes no sense, it’s not going to happen.” 

Coal consumption in the U.S. has declined more than 50 percent since peaking in 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, largely due market forces, including the availability of cheaper natural gas and America’s growing renewable energy sector. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff war threatens to undermine his own push to expand mining and fossil fuel drilling.

The threat of extreme wildfire — an actual crisis driven by a complex set of factors, including climate change, its role in intensifying droughts and pest outbreaks, and decades of fire suppression — is being cited to justify slashing environmental reviews to ramp up logging on public lands. Following up on a Trump executive order to increase domestic timber production, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed a memo declaring a forest health “emergency” that would open nearly 60 percent of national forest lands, more than 110 million acres, to aggressive logging. 

Then there’s America’s “housing affordability crisis,” which the Trump administration, dozens of Republicans, and even a handful of Democrats are pointing to in a growing push to open federal lands to housing development, either by selling land to private interests or transferring control to states. The Trump administration recently established a task force to identify what it calls “underutilized lands.” In an op-ed announcing that effort, Burgum and Scott Turner, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote that “much of” the 500 million acres Interior oversees is “suitable for residential use.” Some of the most high-profile members of the anti-public lands movement, including William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during Trump’s first term, are championing the idea.

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Without guardrails, critics argue the sale of public lands to build housing will lead to sprawl in remote, sensitive landscapes and do little, if anything, to address home affordability, as the issue is driven by several factors, including migration trends, stagnant wages, and higher construction costs. Notably, Trump’s tariff policies are expected to raise the average price of a new home by nearly $11,000. 

Chris Hill, CEO of the Conservation Lands Foundation, a Colorado-based nonprofit working to protect BLM-managed lands, said the lack of affordable housing is a serious issue, but “we shouldn’t be fooled that the idea to sell off public lands is a solution.” 

“The vast majority of public lands are just not suitable for any sort of housing development due to their remote locations, lack of access, and necessary infrastructure,” she said.

David Hayes, who served as deputy Interior secretary during the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and as a senior climate adviser to President Joe Biden, told Grist that Trump’s broad use of executive power sets the current privatization push apart from previous efforts. 

“Not only do you have the rhetoric and the intentionality around managing public lands in an aggressive way, but you have to couple that with what you’re seeing,” he said. “This administration is going farther than any other ever has to push the limits of executive power.” 

Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a Colorado-based conservation group, said Trump and his team are doing everything they can to circumvent normal environmental rules and safeguards in order to advance their agenda, with no regard for the law or public opinion. 

“Everything is an imagined crisis,” Weiss said. 

Oil, gas, and coal jobs. Mining jobs. Timber jobs. Farming and ranching. Gas-powered cars and kitchen appliances. Even the water pressure in your shower. Ask the White House and the Republican Party and they’ll tell you Biden waged a war against all of it, and that voters gave Trump a mandate to reverse course.

During Trump’s first term in office, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke repeatedly boasted that the administration’s conservation legacy would rival that of his personal hero and America’s conservationist president, Theodore Roosevelt — only to have the late president’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, and the conservation community bemoan his record at the helm of the massive federal agency. 

Like Zinke, Burgum invoked Roosevelt in pitching himself for the job.

“In our time, President Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda can be America’s big stick that will be leveraged to achieve historic prosperity and world peace,” Burgum said during his confirmation hearing in January, referencing a 1990 letter in which the 26th president said to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

The Senate confirmed him to the post in January on a bipartisan 79-18 vote. Some public land advocates initially viewed Burgum, now the chief steward of the federal lands, waters, and wildlife we all own, as a palatable nominee in a sea of problematic potential picks. A billionaire software entrepreneur and former North Dakota governor, Burgum has talked at length about his fondness for Roosevelt’s conservation legacy and the outdoors.

Whatever honeymoon there was didn’t last long. One-hundred days in, Burgum and the rest of Trump’s team have taken not a stick, but a wrecking ball to America’s public lands, waters, and wildlife. Earlier this month, the new CEO of REI said the outdoor retailer made “a mistake” in endorsing Burgum for the job and that the administration’s actions on public lands “are completely at odds with the longstanding values of REI.”

At an April 9 all-hands meeting of Interior employees, Burgum showed off pictures of himself touring oil and gas facilities, celebrated “clean coal,” and condemned burdensome government regulation. Burgum has repeatedly described federal lands as “America’s balance sheet” — “assets” that he estimates could be worth $100 trillion but that he argues Americans are getting a “low return” on.

“On the world’s largest balance sheet last year, the revenue that we pulled in was about $18 billion,” he said at the staffwide meeting, referring to money the government brings from lease fees and royalties from grazing, drilling, and logging on federal lands, as well as national park entrance fees. “Eighteen billion might seem like a big number. It’s not a big number if we’re managing $100 trillion in assets.”

In focusing solely on revenues generated from energy and other resource extraction, Burgum disregards that public lands are the foundation of a $1 trillion outdoor recreation economy, nevermind the numerous climate, environmental, cultural, and public health benefits.

Davis, the author of In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer, dismissed Burgum’s “balance sheet” argument as “shriveled” and “wrong.”

“You have to willfully be ignorant and ignore everything of value about those lands except their marketable commodity value to come up with that conclusion,” he said. When you add all their myriad values together, public lands “are the biggest bargain you can possibly imagine.” 

Davis likes to compare public lands to libraries, schools, or the Department of Defense. 

“There are certain things we as a society decide are important and we pay for it,” he said. “We call that public goods.”

The last time conservatives ventured down the public land privatization path, it didn’t go well. 

Shortly after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, then-Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican representing Utah, introduced legislation to sell off 3.3 million acres of public land in 10 Western states that he said had “been deemed to serve no purpose for taxpayers.”

Public backlash was fierce. Chaffetz pulled the bill just two weeks later, citing concerns from his constituents. The episode, while brief, largely forced the anti-federal land movement back into the shadows. The first Trump administration continued to weaken safeguards for 35 million acres of federal lands — more than any other administration in history — and offered up millions more for oil and gas development, but stopped short of trying sell off or transfer large areas of the public domain.

Yet as the last few months have shown, the anti-public lands movement is alive and well. 

Public land advocates are hopeful that the current push will flounder. They expect courts to strike down many of Trump’s environmental rollbacks, as they did during his first term. In recent weeks, crowds have rallied at numerous national parks and state capitol buildings to support keeping public lands in public hands. Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who voted to confirm Burgum to his post and serves as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has taken to social media to warn about the growing Republican effort to undermine, transfer and sell off public lands.

“I continue to be encouraged that people are going to be loud. They already are,” Deubel said. “We’re mobilizing. We’ve got business and industries. We’ve got Republicans, we’ve got Democrats. We’ve got hunters and we’ve got non-hunters. We’ve got everybody speaking out about this.” 

In a time of extreme polarization on seemingly every issue, public lands enjoy broad bipartisan support. The 15th annual “Conservation in the West” poll found that 72 percent of voters in eight Western states support public lands conservation over increased energy development — the highest level of support in the poll’s history; 65 percent oppose giving states control over federal public lands, up from 56 percent in 2017; and  89 percent oppose shrinking or removing protections for national monuments, up from 80 percent in 2017. Even in Utah, where leaders have spent millions of taxpayer dollars promoting the state’s anti-federal lands lawsuit, support for protecting public lands remains high. 

“Even in all these made up crises, the American public doesn’t want this,” Hill said. “The American people want and love their public lands.” 

At his recent staffwide meeting, Burgum said Roosevelt’s legacy should guide Interior staff in its mission to manage and protect federal public lands. Those two things, management and protection, “must be held in balance,” Burgum stressed. 

Yet in social media posts and friendly interviews with conservative media, Burgum has left little doubt about where his priorities lie, repeatedly rolling out what Breitbart dubbed the “four babies” of Trump’s energy dominance agenda: “Drill, Baby, Drill! Map, Baby, Map! Mine, Baby, Mine! Build, Baby, Build!” 

“Protect, baby, protect,” “conserve, baby, conserve,” and “steward, baby, steward” have yet to make it into Burgum’s lexicon. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration’s push to privatize US public lands on Apr 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Chris D'Angelo.

The Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering is designed to be a turnkey program that makes it financially feasible and logistically approachable for households of all income levels to adopt solar panels, heat pumps, and batteries, and to realize the amplified benefits of using the resources together. These technologies slash emissions, reduce utility bills, and increase a home’s resilience during power outages, but are often only adopted by wealthier households due to their upfront cost.

“We are going to be advancing this as a model that should be emulated by other states across the country that are trying to achieve decarbonization goals,” said Todd Olinsky-Paul, senior project director for the Clean Energy Group, a nonprofit that produced a new report about the program.

In total, the program is providing free or heavily subsidized solar panels and heat pumps to 55 participating households, 12 of which also received batteries at no cost. Work should be completed on the final participating home this month.

“This is the first and only instance where solar and battery storage are being presented in combination with electrification and traditional efficiency,” Olinsky-Paul said. ​“Instead of having several siloed programs, it’s all being presented to the customer in a package, which makes everything work together better.”

It’s a strategy that program planners hope can help address the disproportionate energy burden felt by lower-income residents of the region, where households making less than one-third of the area median income spent an average of 27 percent of their income on energy as of 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. (The updated figure is unavailable because the federal tool that provided this data is no longer live.)

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The initiative is a project of the Cape Light Compact, a unique regional organization that negotiates electric supply prices and administers energy-efficiency programming for the 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. The compact first proposed the pilot in 2018, but regulators rejected the idea. The organization submitted a revised version in 2020 and 2021, but it wasn’t until 2023 that the state finally gave the program the green light.

An energy-efficiency contractor partners with each program participant to assess their home, then coordinates the necessary work, including any preparations that need to be completed before solar panels, heat pumps, or batteries can be put in. The batteries installed through the program are enrolled in ConnectedSolutions, a state program that pays battery owners who send power to the grid when needed. Because the pilot footed the bill for the batteries, these payments will go to the Cape Light Compact, rather than residents, to help defray the cost of the program.

Bringing the program to life was not always a smooth process. The original proposal called for 100 homes to participate in the pilot, but the final number fell well short of that target. Some homeowners who originally expressed interest were put off by the requirement to remove all fossil fuel systems from their homes, particularly if they had recently invested in new gas or propane heating, said Stephen McCloskey, an analyst with the Cape Light Compact and the program manager for the pilot.

In some cases, homeowners balked at upfront costs. Moderate-income households that did not live in deed-restricted affordable housing had to pay 20 percent of the cost for heat pumps and any cost over $15,000 for solar panels. If a roof was too shady for solar, homeowners were responsible for removing trees and branches.

“At the end of the day, each customer and their decision-making process is different,” McCloskey said.

The original plan called for installing batteries in 25 participants’ homes, but unexpected limitations lowered that number, McCloskey said. Houses without basements, for example, couldn’t receive batteries. In some cases, the combined capacity of solar panels and a battery would have exceeded the local utility’s threshold for connecting a system to the grid.

The compact also had not fully accounted for the array of barriers that needed to be addressed before weatherization could be done. Some homes had mold or needed electrical upgrades. Others required roof work before solar panels could be installed.

These challenges are not dealbreakers but lessons learned for utilities or organizations that attempt to emulate the program in the future, McCloskey said. And Olinsky-Paul sees great potential for similar plans to be pursued nationwide. Nearly half of U.S. states have adopted 100 percent clean energy targets, he said, and distributed-energy programs like the Cape and Vineyard’s can make those goals more achievable by reducing the cost and strain electrification can create for the grid.

“If you’re going to do decarbonization, you have to do electrification,” Olinsky-Paul said. ​“And so there is going to be a huge need for some way of doing this without inadvertently causing massive new fossil fuel use” to generate more power.

The Cape Light Compact intends to release a full report on the deployment of the pilot in August, but feedback so far has been very positive from participants who appreciate the turnkey approach to comprehensive electrification, McCloskey said.

“There are definitely things that whoever is facilitating that program would need to look at, to game plan for,” he said. ​“But this is a great model.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Massachusetts home-electrification pilot could offer a national model on Apr 12, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sarah Shemkus, Canary Media.

The post Documents Reveal Extent of Toxic Mold in Privatized Military Housing appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

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Three federal lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop any initiatives involving cryptocurrency and the blockchain, saying the scantly regulated technologies should be kept far away from the agency’s work overseeing the nation’s housing sector.

In a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Wednesday, Reps. Maxine Waters, Stephen Lynch and Emanuel Cleaver sharply criticized the agency for considering such experiments, given cryptocurrency’s volatility and vulnerability to fraud. The Democratic representatives, all members of the House Financial Services Committee, warned of repeating “the same mistakes of the past,” noting that the 2008 financial crisis was triggered in part by the proliferation of risky financial assets in the housing market.

“The federal government cannot allow under-regulated financial products to infiltrate critical housing programs, especially when they have already proven to be dangerous, speculative, and harmful to working families,” the lawmakers wrote.

The letter is a response to reporting by ProPublica that the housing agency recently discussed taking steps toward using cryptocurrency. The article described meetings in February in which officials discussed incorporating the blockchain — and possibly a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin — into the agency’s work. The discussion at one meeting centered on a pilot project involving one HUD grant, but a HUD finance official in attendance indicated the idea could be applied much more expansively across the agency.

“We are looking at this for the entire enterprise,” he said in that meeting, a recording of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We just wanted to start in CPD,” he added, referring to HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development. The office administers billions of dollars in grants to support low- and moderate-income people, including funding for affordable housing, homeless shelters and disaster recovery, raising the prospect that these forms of aid might one day be paid in an unstable currency.

Asked for comment on the letter, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett referred ProPublica to a prior comment by Turner, in which he said, “There’s no merit to it.” Lovett previously told ProPublica: “The department has no plans for blockchain or stablecoin. Education is not implementation.”

It’s unclear how a crypto project would work. But HUD officials alluded to the possible use of stablecoins, which are pegged to the U.S. dollar or another asset. That is supposed to protect stablecoins from the wild swings in value common among bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, although such fluctuations have happened with stablecoins in the past.

The HUD proposal raised alarm among some officials, with one comparing the idea in internal discussions to paying grant recipients in “Monopoly money.” At best, one HUD staffer told ProPublica previously, the idea was a waste of time and resources; at worst it was a threat to the stability of the housing sector.

“It’s just introducing another unregulated security into the housing market as though 2008, 2009 didn’t happen,” the staffer said, referring to the subprime mortgage crisis. “I don’t see any way this will help anything. I see a lot of ways this could hurt.”

The HUD official pushing the idea internally was Irving Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, a staffer said at one of the meetings. Dennis denied to ProPublica that HUD was considering any such experiment. He published a book in 2021 in which he wrote that HUD should use the blockchain.

The blockchain is a digital ledger most commonly used to record cryptocurrency transactions. Boosters of the technology depict it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks out of financial transactions and to make those transactions more transparent and secure. One such evangelist is Robert Judson, an executive at the consulting firm EY, who is listed in a document obtained by ProPublica as an attendee of one of the HUD meetings. Judson has written glowingly about the potential of blockchain to prevent aid money from being misused. (Dennis was previously a partner at EY.)

Judson and EY did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but Judson previously confirmed to ProPublica that EY had discussed the matter with agency officials.

In their letter, the three representatives requested extensive information from HUD about its consideration of crypto and the blockchain, including whether the agency had assessed the risks of using the technology. The House Financial Services Committee is scheduled to consider a bill Wednesday that would regulate stablecoins.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

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The findings were stark. In one investigation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded that a Texas state agency had steered $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and nearby communities of color after Hurricane Harvey inundated the region in 2017. In another investigation, HUD found that a homeowners association outside of Dallas had created rules to kick poor Black people out of their neighborhood.

The episodes amounted to egregious violations of civil rights laws, officials at the housing agency believed — enough to warrant litigation against the alleged culprits. That, at least, was the view during the presidency of Joe Biden. After the Trump administration took over, HUD quietly took steps that will likely kill both cases, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

Those steps were extremely unusual. Current and former HUD officials said they could not recall the housing agency ever pulling back cases of this magnitude in which the agency had found evidence of discrimination. That leaves the yearslong, high-profile investigations in a state of limbo, with no likely path for the government to advance them, current and former officials said. As a result, the alleged perpetrators of the discrimination could face no government penalties, and the alleged victims could receive no compensation.

“I just think that’s a doggone shame,” said Doris Brown, a Houston resident and a co-founder of a community group that, together with a housing nonprofit, filed the Harvey complaint. Brown saw 3 feet of water flood her home in a predominantly Black neighborhood that still shows damage from the storm. “We might’ve been able to get some more money to help the people that are still suffering,” she said.

On Jan. 15, HUD referred the Houston case to the Department of Justice, a necessary step to a federal lawsuit after the housing agency finds evidence of discrimination. Less than a month later, on Feb. 13, the agency rescinded its referral without public explanation. HUD did the same with the Dallas case not long after.

The development has alarmed some about a rollback of civil rights enforcement at the agency under President Donald Trump and HUD Secretary Scott Turner, who is from Texas. “The new administration is systematically dismantling the fair housing enforcement and education system,” said Sara Pratt, a former HUD official and an attorney for complainants in both Texas cases. “The message is: The federal government no longer takes housing discrimination seriously.”

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett disagreed, saying there was precedent for the rescinded referrals, which were done to gather more facts and scrutinize the investigations. “We’re taking a fresh look at Biden Administration policies, regulations, and cases. These cases are no exception,” Lovett said in a statement. “HUD will uphold the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act as the department is strongly and wholeheartedly opposed to housing discrimination.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Harvey case concerns a portion of a $4.3 billion grant that HUD gave to Texas after the hurricane inundated low-lying coastal areas, killing at least 89 people and causing more than $100 billion in damage. The money was meant to fund better drainage, flood control systems and other storm mitigation measures.

HUD sent the money to a state agency called the Texas General Land Office, which awarded the first $1 billion in funding to communities affected by Harvey through a grant competition. But the state agency excluded Houston and many of the most exposed coastal areas from eligibility for half of that money, according to HUD’s investigation. And, for the other half, it created award criteria that benefited rural areas at the expense of more populous applicants like Houston.

The result: Of that initial $1 billion, Houston — where nearly half of all homes were damaged by the hurricane — received nothing. Neither did Harris County, where Houston is located, or other coastal areas with large minority populations. Instead, the Texas agency, according to HUD, awarded a disproportionate amount of the aid to more rural, white areas that had suffered less damage in the hurricane. After an outcry, GLO asked HUD a few days later to send $750 million to Harris County, but HUD found that allocation still fell far short of the county’s mitigation needs. And none of that money went directly to Houston.

HUD launched an investigation into the competition in 2021, ultimately finding that GLO had discriminated on the basis of race and national origin, thereby violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and possibly the Fair Housing Act as well.

“GLO knowingly developed and operated a competition for the purpose of allocating funds to mitigate storm and flood risk that steered money away from urban Black and Hispanic communities that had the highest storm and flood risk into Whiter, more rural areas with less risk,” the agency wrote. “Despite awareness that its course of action would result in disparate harm for Black and Hispanic individuals, GLO still knowingly and disparately denied these communities critical mitigation funding.”

GLO has consistently disputed the allegations. It contends that many people of color benefited from its allocations. The Texas agency has also argued that the evidence in the case was weak, citing the fact that, in 2023, the Justice Department returned the case to HUD. At the time, the DOJ said it wanted HUD to investigate further. The housing agency then spent more than a year digging deeper into the facts and assembling more evidence before making its short-lived referral in January.

Asked about the rescinded referral, GLO spokesperson Brittany Eck told ProPublica: “Liberal political appointees and advocates spent years spinning false narratives without the facts to build a case. Four years of sensationalized, clickbait rhetoric without evidence is long enough.”

The other HUD case involved Providence Village, a largely white community north of Dallas of around 9,000 people. Purported concerns about crime and property values led the Providence Homeowners Association to adopt a rule in 2022 prohibiting property owners from renting to holders of Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, through which HUD subsidizes the housing costs of poor, elderly and disabled people. There were at least 157 households in Providence Village supported by vouchers, nearly all of them Black families. After the HOA action, some of them began leaving.

The rule attracted national attention, leading the Texas Legislature to prohibit HOAs from banning Section 8 tenants. Undeterred, the Providence HOA adopted amended rules in 2024 that placed restrictions on rental properties, which HUD found would have a similar effect as the previous ban.

Throughout the HOA’s efforts, people peppered community social media groups with racist vitriol about voucher holders, describing them as “wild animals,” “ghetto poverty crime ridden mentality people” and “lazy entitled leeching TR@SH.” One person wrote that “they might just leave in a coroner’s wagon.”

The discord attracted a white nationalist group, which twice protested just outside Providence Village. “The federal government views safe White communities as a problem,” flyers distributed by the group read. “The Section 8 Housing Voucher is a tool used to bring diversity to these neighborhoods.”

In January, HUD formally accused the HOA, its board president, a property management company and one of its property managers of violating the Fair Housing Act. The respondents have disputed the allegation. The HOA has argued its rules were meant to protect property values, support well-maintained homes and address crime concerns. The property management company, FirstService Residential Texas, said it was not responsible for the actions of the HOA.

The HOA and FirstService did not respond to requests for comment. The property manager declined to comment. Mitch Little, a lawyer for the HOA board president, said: “HUD didn’t pursue this case because there’s nothing to pursue. The claims are baseless and unsubstantiated.”

The Providence Village and Houston cases stretched on for years. All it took was two terse emails to undo them. “HUD’s Office of General Counsel withdrew the referral of the above-captioned case to the Department of Justice,” HUD wrote to Pratt this month regarding one of the cases. “We have no further information at this time.” That was the entirety of the message; neither email explained the reasoning behind the decisions.

The cases may have fallen victim to a broader roll-back of civil rights enforcement at the Justice Department, where memos circulated in January ordering a freeze of civil rights cases and investigations.

The development is the latest sign that the Trump administration may dramatically curtail HUD’s housing discrimination work. The agency canceled 78 grants to local fair housing groups last month, sparking a lawsuit by some of them. HUD justified the cancellations by saying each grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” (Pratt’s firm, Relman Colfax, is representing the plaintiffs in that suit.) And projections circulating within HUD last month indicated the agency’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity could see its staff cut by 76% under the new administration.

If HUD does not pursue the cases, the complainants could file their own lawsuits. But they may not soon forget the government’s about-face on the issue. “If there is a major flood in Houston, which there almost certainly will be, and people die, and homes get destroyed, the people who made this decision are in large part responsible,” said Ben Hirsch, a member of one of the groups that brought the Harvey complaint. “People will die because of this.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

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The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering taking a first step to using cryptocurrency, according to a meeting recording and other materials reviewed by ProPublica and three officials familiar with the matter. Two officials told ProPublica they believe the initiative may be a trial run for the use of crypto across the federal government.

The discussions have sparked concern among some at the department, especially about the prospect of paying recipients of major federal grants in cryptocurrency, an uninsured digital asset associated with financial speculation, dramatic swings in value and transnational crime.

The focus of the discussions so far has been experimenting with using the underlying technology that makes crypto possible — the blockchain — to monitor HUD grants. Blockchain advocates argue that the technology is valuable on its own for such purposes. But the primary use of blockchain, according to experts, is for crypto transactions.

“It’s just introducing another unregulated security into the housing market as though 2008, 2009 didn’t happen,” one HUD staffer said, referring to the subprime mortgage crisis. “I don’t see any way this will help anything. I see a lot of ways this could hurt,” said the official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The HUD discussions have covered the potential use of a stablecoin, a form of crypto that is pegged to another asset to avoid wild swings in value, although such swings have happened in the past.

The blockchain idea is being pushed, a HUD official told colleagues, by Irving Dennis. Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, is a former partner at the global consulting giant EY, also commonly known by its original name, Ernst & Young. EY itself is involved in the proposal as well: An executive of the firm discussed the idea with HUD officials last month.

The crypto industry has found an ally in President Donald Trump, whose administration has tapped industry boosters to lead federal agencies, backed off investigations into crypto firms and created a “strategic Bitcoin reserve.” (Bitcoin plunged $5,000 within an hour of the news of the reserve’s opening on Thursday.) Trump himself has significant financial interests in crypto. On Friday, the White House is scheduled to host a “crypto summit” with leading figures from the industry.

The proposal at HUD indicates a new way that the administration may seek to bolster the industry: by incorporating blockchain and possibly cryptocurrency into the routine spending and accounting practices of federal agencies. It’s a move that would align with the apparent desire of Trump adviser Elon Musk to use the blockchain to monitor federal spending.

Dennis and HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett both denied the accounts of their colleagues. “The department has no plans for blockchain or stablecoin,” Lovett said. “Education is not implementation.”

Robert Judson, the EY executive involved in the conversations, confirmed that they took place. “We as a firm were having discussions with select individuals at that agency,” he said when reached by phone. Judson told ProPublica he would seek EY’s approval for a full interview, then didn’t call back.

The White House, EY and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

HUD officials held at least two meetings about the blockchain proposal last month. A list of attendees to the first meeting included staffers from the offices of the CFO and Community Planning and Development. CPD administers billions of dollars in grants that support low- and moderate-income people, including funding to develop affordable housing, run homeless shelters, support disaster recovery, relocate domestic violence survivors and build parks, sewers and community centers. It was the CFO’s office that called for the meeting, one person told ProPublica.

Also listed as a meeting attendee was Judson from EY. For years Judson has advocated for the blockchain, a digital ledger of sorts that creates an immutable record of transactions saved across multiple computers. Boosters of the technology cast it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks and credit card companies out of financial transactions and make those transactions more transparent and secure. Judson has written that the blockchain can help organizations prevent money from being siphoned off for unintended purposes. “As digital assets such as stable coins or digital currencies take hold, more powerful applications will emerge for integrated value exchange,” he wrote. Dennis, who served as HUD CFO in the first Trump administration, also wrote, in a 2021 book, that the agency should use technology such as “blockchain, robotics, and next-generation financial management systems.”

Stablecoins are backed by reserves including traditional currency, commodities and Treasury securities. That is supposed to ensure that their value — unlike that of, say, Bitcoin — doesn’t fluctuate. However, on several high-profile occasions, the value of stablecoins has done just that.

At the HUD meeting, attendees discussed a “proof of concept” project in which CPD would begin to track the funding going to a single CPD grant recipient and possibly subrecipients on the blockchain. The need for the project was “not well articulated,” one attendee later wrote in meeting notes.

Following the meeting, a HUD official wrote and circulated a memo within the agency panning the idea. “Without exaggeration, every imaginable implementation of this at HUD appears dangerous and inefficient,” the memo reads.

HUD has no difficulty tracking grant spending, the memo contended, making the new technology unnecessary. Incorporating it would be time-consuming, complicated and require extensive training. And, if the project involved paying grantees in cryptocurrency instead of dollars, it would inject volatility and unpredictability into the funding stream, even if the currency was a stablecoin.

In subsequent discussions with HUD staffers, the memo’s author described the proposal as a “beachhead” at HUD for the introduction of cryptocurrency, which the author compared to “monopoly money.”

CPD officials continued to raise concerns in a follow-up meeting, a recording of which was reviewed by ProPublica. (Judson did not attend this one.) Some attendees saw merit in the blockchain idea, suggesting it could reduce inaccurate data from grant recipients and enable real-time reporting and monitoring of their spending.

“Maybe there is something that we could learn from it,” one said, “especially if we feel like the broader federal government is moving towards some sort of stablecoin option in the future.”

One official asked why the agency was considering the project. “Because it’s sexy,” someone replied. Another said, “Irv has asked us to pursue blockchain, so that’s why we are looking at it,” referring to Dennis.

Many details were left unexplained at the meeting, including, crucially, whether the proposal would involve paying grantees in cryptocurrency. But some signaled that it would.

“You can do it with what would be attached to a stable currency. That would be up to Treasury, and I think they’re already going that way, for what it’s worth,” one official said. “It would simulate the dollar.”

Another added, “It would basically be a cryptocurrency that is linked to the U.S. dollar on a one-for-one basis.”

A finance official suggested the idea could be applied more broadly across HUD. “We are looking at this for the entire enterprise. We just wanted to start in CPD,” he said. The agency is also considering the idea for the Office of Public and Indian Housing, he said, for “tenant eligibility and stuff like that.” That office serves the millions of people who live in public and federally subsidized housing.

This is not the first time that federal officials have considered incorporating the blockchain into the work of the government. Agencies including the Treasury Department, the Department of Commerce and even HUD have been involved in a study, a prototype and a working group in recent years. But those who monitor the crypto industry were not aware of as broad an application of the technology in the federal government as what HUD officials have recently discussed.

Some crypto experts were dubious. “It’s a terrible idea,” said Corey Frayer, a former official at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where he focused on the crypto markets and financial stability. “It is absolutely wild that anyone with any sense would consider this.”

Frayer, now at the Consumer Federation of America, warned that HUD grants paid in stablecoin could fall in value. He expressed greatest concern about the notion that the proposal could expand to other parts of the agency. If that included, for example, introducing stablecoin into the $1.3 trillion in mortgage insurance provided by the Federal Housing Administration, a fluctuation in the value of the stablecoin could have a major economic impact, he said.

“Imagine a world in which all of the government involvement in the housing industry, all of the funds circulating in that environment, dropped in value by 13%,” he said, citing a 2023 episode in which a stablecoin briefly fell 13 cents below the dollar. “It’s hard to imagine that wouldn’t be catastrophic.”

Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who researches financial regulation and technology, noted that some high-profile attempts to use the blockchain for purposes unrelated to cryptocurrency have failed. She expressed skepticism that the technology would fare better in the context of government grants, where bad outcomes could harm those who depend on HUD funding to survive.

“Blockchain technology has been around for 15 years. No one wants to use it. And so now we have an attempt to force the government to use it,” she said, with “the most vulnerable people” serving “as guinea pigs.”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has gained access to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development system containing confidential personal information about hundreds of thousands of alleged victims of housing discrimination, including victims of domestic violence.

Access to the system, called the HUD Enforcement Management System, or HEMS, is typically strictly limited because it contains medical records, financial files, documents that may list Social Security numbers and other private information. DOGE sought access, and HUD granted it last week, according to information reviewed by ProPublica and two officials familiar with the matter.

This is just the latest collection of sensitive personal information that DOGE has tried to access in recent weeks. It has also sought personal taxpayer data kept by the IRS and information on Social Security benefit recipients, and it attempted to enter the Treasury Department’s payment systems. DOGE’s stated mission is to modernize government technology and cut excessive or improper spending. The administration of President Donald Trump has argued that DOGE needs “direct access” to such systems to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.”

DOGE’s data-gathering moves at some agencies have sparked forceful pushback, including lawsuits over alleged privacy violations and opposition from career officials who have resigned or retired following access requests. Judges have temporarily blocked DOGE from gaining access to records at the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management and the Treasury Department. And, faced with resistance, DOGE agreed to view only anonymized taxpayer data at the IRS.

Few records in the HUD system are redacted or anonymized, and many contain deeply personal material about those who have alleged or been accused of housing discrimination. Domestic violence case files can list addresses to which survivors have relocated for their safety. Harassment cases can include detailed descriptions of sexual assaults. Disability cases can include detailed medical records. Lending discrimination files could feature credit reports and bank statements. The names of witnesses who offered information — in some cases anonymously — about landlords accused of discrimination are among the files as well.

HUD enforces numerous civil rights laws, including the Fair Housing Act and aspects of the Violence Against Women Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Such statutes collectively prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, disability and other characteristics.

HUD officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, voiced concern that DOGE’s access to HEMS could violate the privacy rights of discrimination victims and potentially put them at risk if their information is mishandled or leaked.

The episode is one of many roiling HUD, where the Trump administration is reportedly considering a 50% cut to the nearly 10,000-person workforce. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which combats housing discrimination, may see its roughly 500-person staff cut by as much as 76%, according to an unconfirmed projection circulating widely among HUD employees and viewed by ProPublica.

Civil liberties advocates expressed alarm about DOGE’s access to the HUD data, saying it may violate the Privacy Act. “It’s difficult to see why a system dedicated to civil rights complaints would have any impact whatsoever on a department looking for inefficiencies in governmental spending,” said Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Venzke suggested DOGE may use HEMS data as a basis for scaling back housing discrimination enforcement. “There is deep concern that DOGE is not there to identify government inefficiencies, but rather to shutter programs that the administration disagrees with,” he said.

John Davisson, director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is suing DOGE and other federal agencies and officials over DOGE’s access, contended that the department had gained access to HEMS and systems like it “under the false pretenses of identifying fraud and abuse, when what’s really going on is DOGE is trying to gain control over these databases to direct the activities of federal agencies.”

Spokespeople for HUD, the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment (including a question to DOGE about what it plans to do with HEMS).

HUD’s Fair Housing office receives tens of thousands of housing discrimination allegations or inquiries annually and investigates — or assigns to state or local agencies — around 8,000 of them each year. Those investigations can last months or years and lead to financial settlements, compliance monitoring and policy reforms by landlords, mortgage lenders, local zoning officials and homeowners associations.

Access to HEMS is usually limited to Fair Housing staffers, HUD attorneys and auditors, and state and local investigators. However, DOGE requested entry, and HUD granted read-only access last week to Michael Mirski, who has a HUD email address and whom officials at the housing agency have identified in internal discussions as being affiliated with DOGE. Mirski did not respond to a request for comment.

Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

For months they’d debated a Los Angeles County government plan poised to dramatically alter the character of the quiet community of just over 40,000 people, which sits at the edge of the Angeles National Forest. The plan limited construction in Altadena’s fire-prone foothills and simultaneously increased buildable density in its commercial corridors, allowing for hundreds of new housing units in the flat downtown area. It promised to both relieve the region’s critical housing shortage and also reduce wildfire risk accelerated by climate change.

In prickly public meetings and press statements, prominent residents staked out opposing positions. One side was represented by Michael Bicay, a retired NASA scientist who has for decades opposed construction in the Altadena hills on ecological grounds. When county officials arrived with their plan to add population density in Altadena, Bicay was in the middle of a campaign to stop a proposed prep school sports complex in the hills. He used the rezoning as an occasion to push for limits on future development on the community’s wildland edges.

Simultaneously, however, he recognized that Altadena had a role to play in mitigating L.A.’s sky-high housing prices — the county faces a shortage of about half a million affordable homes — which could be achieved by building more apartments along Altadena’s commercial corridors, many blocks away from the tinderbox in the hills.

On the other side of the debate was another longtime resident, Alan Zorthian, who owns a 50-acre artists’ colony in the foothills. Zorthian’s father Jirayr, a famous bohemian artist who hosted parties for luminaries like Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, built the colony into a local curiosity and tourist attraction in the decades before his death in 2004, constructing idiosyncratic homes and sheds out of colored stone and scrap metal.

Faced with the prospect of a downzoning in the hills, the younger Zorthian and other nearby landowners fought back against what they called “regulatory taking” that could devalue their property by limiting possibilities for future development. At the same time, though, the landowners argued that new apartments in the commercial areas would mar Altadena’s historic character. The community was home to Queen Anne-style mansions like the famed Andrew McNally House as well as several exemplars of mid-century modernist architecture.

After months of debate, Bicay’s side won. In December, the county voted the plan forward, signaling a retreat from Altadena’s foothills and a commitment to development in its more urban core. But the timing could not have been worse: Just a few weeks later, the Eaton Fire tore through the foothills, incinerating more than 9,000 homes and ravaging not only the town’s recognized fire zones but its commercial flatlands as well. The blaze was one of the worst urban firestorms in United States history: Together with the Palisades Fire that struck the western part of Los Angeles County simultaneously, it has caused at least $95 billion in damages. 

As Altadena begins to rebuild, residents and local officials are fearful that the once-affordable neighborhood will see rents spike and a hollowing out of its middle and working class. Real estate speculators have already descended on the area making lowball cash offers to fire victims, including Black families who lack the savings and insurance coverage to get back the homes they’ve had for generations. Some locals now worry that the county’s plan to open up Altadena for new construction, which was controversial even before the fire, could attract a rush of new development that will hasten this process of what some scholars call “climate gentrification.”

To thread this needle, local officials will have to look beyond the traditional housing debate in the United States. Most development debates in Los Angeles and other big cities pit NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) residents who oppose the disruption of new construction against YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) advocates who want to bring down housing costs by allowing the construction of as many new housing units as possible. Altadena’s divide is not so simple: Both the Bicay and Zorthian factions are simultaneously for and against new development in the town — they just have opposite views on where and how it should happen.

Sudden disasters fueled by climate change only complicate matters further. Altadena must now balance a need to shift its population away from its wildland edges, state and county policies pushing it to add housing capacity overall, and the demands of residents who want to return to their homes — homes that have burned down once and may well burn again in the future.

“We’re talking out of both sides of our mouth right now,” said Bicay. “I think it’s okay to [say] that we’re going to have a lower density in Altadena in the future. But the county, driven by the state, is allowing people to build. So there are going to be some tough decisions.”

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The county’s zoning revision in Altadena was part of a broader effort to promote new housing development and reduce hazard risk. (About 15 percent of the county’s land area is classified as vulnerable to wildfire.) Los Angeles County controls 2,600 square miles of land in the region — everything that isn’t part of an incorporated city like Pasadena, Burbank, or the city of L.A. itself. This patchwork unincorporated territory is home to around a million people and includes dense neighborhoods near the Pacific Ocean as well as huge swaths of undeveloped mountain range.

As county planners confront both a housing crisis and a climate crisis, they are facing a difficult paradox. California requires them to enable the construction of thousands of new homes under a decades-old planning law, but they can’t let people build in areas prone to fire or flooding, or in protected nature areas. The housing demand in the region is so great, and the risk of disaster so widespread, that the county has no choice but to loosen zoning rules in safe areas in order to comply with the law — a move that in the United States nearly always triggers protests and pushback from residents opposed to growth in their own neighborhoods.

In the summer of 2023, county officials announced that they would rework Altadena’s decades-old zoning restrictions, which only allowed for single-family homes and a handful of multi-story buildings, to further this housing mandate. After a series of meetings and hearings, none of which drew much attention, planners unveiled a two-pronged proposal. First, the plan would upzone to allow new housing in Altadena’s commercial corridors like Lincoln Avenue, a semi-blighted west end corridor home to little more than a few churches and Mexican restaurants. Second, the proposal would limit development in the fire-prone foothills, where subdivisions have crept up steep slopes alongside forest preserves and hiking trails.

The plan also included a light-touch version of what climate experts often call “managed retreat,” or the government-sponsored relocation away from areas vulnerable to disaster. Most places pursue managed retreat only once it’s too late, for example by buying out homes that flood repeatedly, but the county was hoping to reduce risk over the long run by nudging investment away from the hills and preserving undeveloped space.

At first, the community was warm to the idea of new housing on Altadena’s main streets, according to Amy Bodek, the planning director for Los Angeles County.

“Altadena is very accepting of density in appropriate locations, and is very accepting of new residential units,” she said, describing the community as more amenable to growth than other parts of Los Angeles where the county has worked. “That was a really big benefit to working with that community.”

But that may have only been true of the small subset of engaged residents who bothered to chime in on the zoning plan. A typical Altadena town council election draws a few hundred voters at most — hardly surprising in an unincorporated area that most people see as just another part of sprawling Los Angeles — and just a couple dozen people showed up to the county’s “visioning workshops” about rezoning in the summer of 2023. Bicay pushed other local preservation organizations to support the plan, and that was enough to get it to the final stages.

Only in the last months of 2024 did a few outspoken residents start to gin up opposition to the plan, saying the county was devaluing their property by depriving them of the right to build on it. Zorthian joined together with a few other large landowners who had contemplated new construction and a few business owners on commercial corridors who opposed new affordable housing, fearing it might worsen traffic and bring in low-income residents.

“We found out what the plan was doing to the handful of us left who still have larger property, and we don’t want people telling us what to do,” said Zorthian. 

The Eaton Fire changed everything. Tearing west through the San Gabriel Mountains toward Altadena, it burned almost the entirety of the Zorthian ranch, including several homes in the artists’ colony and much of Jirayr Zorthian’s remaining artworks. Embers from the fire then spiraled down into the denser flatlands and burned thousands of homes, including all but a few on Bicay’s cul-de-sac block, which sits right at the base of the hills. (The zoning on his own block has not changed, but the surrounding areas have been downzoned.) The blaze then continued west and destroyed a patchwork of homes and businesses along Lincoln Avenue, turning the northern stretches of the corridor into a moonscape.

The question now, in light of the fire, is whether the county’s pre-existing plan to bring fire-conscious growth to Altadena is the right path out of this devastation, or whether a surge of new development will hasten gentrification and displacement. The county plan proposed to build new apartments on commercial corridors and direct investment toward the city’s west side, but planners had assumed that these changes would happen over years or even decades. Now, as burned-out residents tangle with real estate speculators in every corner of the town, there’s a chance that this shift could happen in a matter of a year or two. Developers could take advantage of the new zoning to buy up fire victims’ damaged homes and develop large apartment complexes allowed under the new paradigm.

Some locals who supported the plan are now wary of the upzoning effort. The longtime manager of Mota’s Mexican Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue, Lupe, said she worried that a big developer could buy up multiple lots and build expensive new housing that the former residents of those lots couldn’t afford. (In an interview with Grist, Lupe only provided her first name.) Her own house suffered smoke damage in the fire, and she has been living there while waiting on a contractor to fix it.

“[The county plan] is a good idea, but only if they do it the right way,” she said. “But if people don’t have insurance, and they come and want to take your property to do whatever they want to do, I don’t like that way.” 

“Gentrification had already started, and I would think fire would speed it up,” said Veronica Jones, president of the Altadena Historical Society and former president of the Altadena town council who represents a census tract on the more disinvested west side of the town, home to many. She pointed to the fact that wine bars and yoga studios had opened in recent years, a change that residents referred to as the “Pasadena-fication” of Altadena.

“I think it’s a good idea to put more housing, but now it’s going to have to be rethought,” she added.

Bodek, the county planner, said she understood the fear of gentrification and vowed that the county will work to prevent developers from snapping up victims’ homes or buying out longtime businesses. 

But there’s also the matter of fire risk. The Altadena plan discouraged development in the foothills because the state of California classifies them as extremely vulnerable to wildfire, but the Eaton Fire burned almost the entirety of the town, reaching almost two miles south of the fire zone and destroying homes that had never been seen as risky.

That means it’s possible the county’s original plan didn’t go far enough. Bicay, who was a lead advocate for the plan, now says it might be necessary to reduce the density of Altadena’s flatlands by between 5 and 10 percent, which would require leaving many burned-out lots empty without rebuilding them. Nic Arnzen, another member of the town council, says the town might consider leaving vacant some lots that residents don’t want to rebuild, carving out a larger zone of open space near the hills. An analysis from the climate risks firm First Street Foundation, which home listers like Zillow use to inform prospective buyers of property hazards, shows a much broader area of fire danger than that shown on maps from CAL FIRE, the state firefighting agency.

Zorthian, who opposed the plan, acknowledges that the fire risk in the hills was greater than he had assumed. But he now sees the county plan as hypocritical: If almost the whole town burned down, why should he and a few other large landowners be the only ones with new limits on what they can build?

“It’s going to change the character of Altadena,” he said. “You’re going to have behemoth apartments like you have all over Los Angeles.” For his part, he’s trying not to let the new plan affect him. Once he’s finished cleaning up the scarred ranch, he plans to forge ahead with his vision to erect a museum in honor of his father, and he’s hoping to reacquire some of his father’s works to replace the ones lost in the fire.

Except for supporters like Bicay and opponents like Zorthian, not many Altadena residents engaged in the debate around the county’s original plan. Now, though, a larger agglomeration of residents and community groups have emerged to help steer the town’s rebuild. There are nonprofit associations like Altadena Strong and Rebuild Altadena, existing preservation groups like Altadena Heritage, plus a new foundation run by real estate magnate Rick Caruso and an informal recovery council that Bicay serves on. The county will also convene its own commission.

Other fire-struck areas in the Golden State have dealt with similar questions in recent years, with mixed results. The northern California mountain town of Paradise, for instance, saw a furious debate over where and how to rebuild after the deadly 2018 Camp Fire. It ended up imposing a strict barrier of undeveloped land that now functions as a firebreak. In Santa Rosa, meanwhile, the neighborhood of Coffey Park built back on its original footprint after the 2017 Tubbs Fire, with almost all residents returning to single-family homes that are still vulnerable to wildfire.

Nicole Lambrou, an Altadena resident as well as an architect and urban planner at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, said that local governments vary in their commitment to changing the built environment when they rebuild after a fire. 

In many cases, she said, governments bow to political pressure from fire victims, scrap planned reforms and try to get everyone back in their homes as soon as possible. But such a rushed recovery is often bad for the long-term resilience of a community in the wildland-urban interface. Residents end up rebuilding the same flammable homes in the same vulnerable areas, ensuring future losses and more displacement.

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“A lot of times the measure of success is, ‘is it a one-to-one rebuild?’ That emphasis on building back what was there as soon as possible makes bypassing existing plans much easier,” she said. On the other hand, she added, the scale of loss in a place like Altadena might force the community and its elected officials to reconsider the assumptions behind their previous commitment to more density — after all, the effort to build more homes is premised on the belief that Altadena is a safe place to live.

“The plan was put in place with a certain baseline of a built environment that is no longer there,” she said.

Bodek, the county planner, says she thinks that building more density in Altadena’s downtown core is still the right move. As she sees it, to declare Altadena too risky would be to write off huge sections of California’s exurban sprawl, much of which sits well within range of flying embers from mountain fires.

“I’m looking at this as a once in a lifetime, catastrophic event,” she said. “If this is going to be the new norm, then everyone, not just Altadena, but everyone in the entire state, is going to have to reassess their land use policies. That could mean the demise of, you know, 200 years of the way of life in California. And I’m not going to go there.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the Eaton Fire destroyed a delicate truce over Altadena’s future on Feb 26, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

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Four and a half years ago, a newly formed corporate entity purchased a low-income housing complex with 264 apartments in Phoenix. The property had received more than $4 million in federal tax credits and, in exchange, was supposed to remain affordable for decades.

The company then used a legal loophole that stripped the affordability protections from the apartments. The maneuver appears to have been lucrative for the company, which bought the property for under $20 million and flipped it two years later for $63 million. Today, advertised rents there have gone up by around 50%.

Similar stories have been playing out across the country for years, as developers and real estate investors take advantage of an obscure section of the tax code known as the “qualified contract” provision. It allows owners of low-income rental properties that have received generous tax credits to raise rents far sooner than the law typically requires.

Some 115,000 apartments in the United States have lost rent restrictions as a result, according to one estimate. Experts say these conversions are exacerbating the nation’s shortage of affordable housing, which has intensified in recent years. One report recently concluded that the country has nearly 5 million fewer housing units than it needs. The problem is most acute for those with low incomes.

The loophole has remained open for decades despite widespread agreement among regulators and advocates about its harm. Congressional efforts to repeal the provision have failed — most recently in 2023 — though state reforms have trimmed its effects. President Donald Trump has pledged to lower housing costs, but some advocates for reform are skeptical that his administration or a Republican-controlled Congress will strike a statute that can be lucrative to the real estate industry. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

“We have an affordable housing crisis just about everywhere in the country,” said Robert Rozen, a former Senate aide who helped draft the provision and now calls for its repeal. “We can’t afford to lose more affordable units, particularly as a result of a loophole in the law.”

The statute is part of the law defining the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which has become the primary catalyst for new affordable rental housing in the country. The program offers developers a tax subsidy worth potentially millions of dollars in exchange for keeping units affordable and renting them only to poor and working-class tenants. Typically that’s households making below 60% of the area median income. For a family of three to qualify in Phoenix last year, it would’ve had to make $55,560 or less.

Rent and income restrictions are supposed to last at least 30 years. But, after just 14 years, property owners may ask their states to find buyers. This opt-out clause was meant to offer wary investors an early exit from the program while retaining the affordability protections on the properties. But it included a critical unintended flaw: States can only sell at prices set by a formula that almost always overvalues the properties. As a result, buyers are rarely found. If states can’t find buyers within a year, owners are free to raise rents on vacant units and, a few years later, on existing tenants as well.

“It was obviously a mistake to include this in the law,” said Rozen, now an attorney specializing in affordable housing. “We didn’t know what we were doing when we constructed the buy-out formula.”

The beneficiaries of this maneuver are often shielded from public view. The Arizona property, previously called Sombra Apartments, was flipped by a Delaware limited liability company that incorporated under the name Sombra Apartments LLC shortly before the purchase and has a small online footprint. Through a public records request, ProPublica received the application that triggered the loss of affordability protections, which shows the LLC was controlled by a real estate investment firm in Scottsdale, Arizona, called ReNue Properties. ReNue’s website says the company specializes in “the acquisition and rejuvenation of underperforming multifamily properties” and has generated an average 81% return. Michael Christiansen, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as ReNue’s CEO at the time of the transactions, did not respond to requests for comment. (More than 5,700 low-income units in the state have lost affordability protections through the same opt-out method, according to a 2023 Arizona Republic report.)

Some companies exploiting the loophole appear to have done so with the indirect assistance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government-sponsored enterprises support the nation’s housing sector, typically by buying mortgages to inject cash into the mortgage market. Property records show that the enterprises were involved in loans to owners of low-income housing who then stripped the properties of affordability protections or are seeking to do so. The enterprises’ involvement appears at odds with their declared support for affordable housing. Spokespeople for Fannie and Freddie did not respond to requests for comment.

Two industry insiders defended the qualified contract process as a way to fight the shortage of middle-income housing. That’s the position of Charlie Moline, CEO of Moline Investment Management, who said he has used the mechanism to remove affordability protections from around 20 multifamily properties across the Midwest.

Typically, low-income housing tax credit properties are too old and worn to be converted into high-end market-rate units, he said. But, freed of the income and rent limits, the properties can become appealing to middle-income renters after some basic renovations. “No one’s displaced by what we’re doing,” said Moline, who contends that he keeps rent increases moderate. “Our goal is to expand affordable housing to the missing middle.”

That goal would be of little benefit to Lashunda Williams, a resident of a low-income apartment complex in Omaha, Nebraska, that Moline purchased last year and is taking through the opt-out process. Williams, 33, said she makes $17 an hour as a custodian at an Amazon warehouse and pays $899 for a one-bedroom apartment. “I can barely keep up with my rent half the time,” she said. If it increased, “I would have to move.”

Moline’s argument was similarly unpersuasive to Rozen, the former Senate aide. “The bottom line is the owner is increasing his rental income and tenants who the program was intended to serve are losing their affordable rents,” Rozen said. “And the federal government is being taken advantage of.”

Affordable housing proponents have long called for repealing the qualified contract provision. But congressional efforts to do so have fizzled, in part due to lobbying from developers and private equity firms with interests in low-income housing, according to a former congressional staffer involved in the repeal effort.

Advocates have had more success pushing for state-level reforms. A majority of states now incentivize or require applicants for low-income housing tax credits to waive their opt-out rights, according to Moha Thakur of the National Housing Trust. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service have also recently proposed or enacted policies to combat the problem. That includes a 2023 FHFA requirement that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac no longer invest in low-income housing eligible for early opt-outs. However, Fannie and Freddie can still back loans on such properties, which is more commonly how they are involved, according to Rozen. (Freddie has said it is studying the issue.) And given the Trump administration’s mass-scale attempts to demolish regulations, particularly those adopted under the Biden administration, it’s unclear whether the new policy initiatives will survive.

The state-level changes have had an impact, bringing the number of apartments lost annually through the opt-out from around 10,000 a year to between 6,000 and 7,000. Without congressional action, however, the loophole remains on the books and a threat to poor tenants. “That loophole shouldn’t exist,” said Joy Noll, a tenant of the Arizona property, who lives on modest housing and disability subsidies. If rents rise further, Noll fears she will have to move: “It made it impossible for those of us who are low income to stay.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

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“If we’re thinking long-term, this is a transformative solution,” said Akiksha Chatterji, campaigns director for the local nonprofit 350 Seattle.

Chatterji’s group, which advocates for climate and social justice as part of an equitable transition away from fossil fuels, has made social housing a core part of its advocacy platform since the proposal’s early days. It has recently rallied supporters around the ballot initiative to fund it through a new tax on wealthy corporations, which voters will consider on Tuesday. Sunrise Seattle, a branch of the national youth climate organization Sunrise Movement, has also endorsed the social housing initiative.

Seattle already has a few public housing developers, as well as programs that require new developments to include a minimum number of affordable units, provide assistance to first-time homebuyers below a certain income, and grant tax exemptions in exchange for the creation of low-rent apartments. But the city still faces a housing crunch, with the broader region expected to fall 140,000 units short of the 640,000 new homes needed to meet projected demand by 2044.

The broad goal of social housing is to equitably alleviate that housing crunch by creating apartments and townhouses that aren’t subject to market speculation. Under the new developer’s model, units would be publicly owned and would remain affordable indefinitely. Other forms of affordable housing developed by nonprofits are often built with expiring federal tax credits and revert to market rates after a period of 15 to 30 years.

If climate activists get their way on Tuesday, the Seattle Social Housing Developer — the organization that voters established in 2023 — will serve people across a wide income range: from those making 60 percent of the area median income to those making 120 percent of it. (The Seattle area’s median household income is about $106,000, so the social housing would be available to those making around $64,000 to $127,000 a year.) House Our Neighbors, the advocacy group that spearheaded the campaign to create the social housing developer, says this will create “cross-class communities” and also make it easier to fund building construction and maintenance.

Similar social housing experiments have proven successful in a handful of other places — most famously, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Vienna, Austria.

There are two broad reasons why Seattle advocates are describing their social housing model as climate-friendly. The more straightforward one is that the Seattle Social Housing Developer is required to build all new construction in line with “passive house” standards for energy efficiency. These standards involve high-quality insulation, air-tight seals, and other strategies to keep heat, cold, and moisture from entering (or exiting) buildings. 

Michael Eliason, founder and principal of the architecture firm Larch Lab, said these requirements can save a significant amount of energy on heating and cooling — which means fewer emissions from burning fossil fuels.  This is the case even though Seattle has fairly strict energy codes for all newly constructed buildings. Some of the city’s recently built passive house buildings use 30 to 35 percent less energy than affordable housing built to standard code requirements.

Passive house construction is also better adapted to climate disasters like wildfire, thanks to powerful air filtration systems that help keep embers outside. In one Los Angeles neighborhood that was recently razed by the Palisades Fire, the only house that remained standing was one built to passive house standards. And for those living downwind of wildfires, airtight ventilation keeps smoke from entering buildings, meaning less exposure to hazardous particulate matter.

The other climate argument for social housing is less obvious, and applies to many forms of affordable housing. Adding more housing to desirable urban areas allows more people to live near workplaces, schools, grocery stores, and other amenities, reducing car dependency and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it. According to one estimate, doubling urban density — the amount of people and development in a given square mile — could reduce travel-related CO2 emissions by 35 percent, and household energy-related emissions by about half. (This is largely because apartment buildings are typically more energy efficient than single-family homes.) 

Some of Seattle’s existing public housing developers, like Community Roots Housing, are already working to equitably increase density, and in some cases are exceeding the city’s baseline energy code requirements. Mason Cavell, Community Roots’ director of real estate development, said it wasn’t clear what “additional tools or benefits” the Seattle Social Housing Developer would have at its disposal to “surpass what the existing industry is able to do” on these fronts.

Proponents say that the answer depends on how the developer gets funded. On Seattle’s upcoming ballot, voters will be asked whether the Seattle Social Housing Developer should be funded at all. A second question asks voters to opt between two potential sources of funding. 

Proposition 1A would create a new excess compensation payroll tax that social and environmental justice advocates are backing. The tax would apply to companies that pay their executives more than $1 million a year, and supporters of the plan expect it to generate more than $50 million annually to create 2,000 new units over 10 years.

Having that revenue stream, said Julie Howe, a housing researcher at the University of Washington, would allow the Seattle Social Housing Developer to take on projects that aren’t as attractive to other affordable housing developers. More money could mean housing in smaller niches closer to existing transit infrastructure, instead of cheaper sites that are more remote.

Proposition 1B would leverage funding from an existing tax on large companies, which is already shared by the city’s other affordable housing programs. 

Al Levine, former deputy executive director of the Seattle Housing Authority, prefers 1B because it reflects an approach to housing that has had more time to prove its financial viability. He also questioned whether the pros of passive house construction outweigh the cons. “Obviously a passive house is a better building in the long run,” he said, but he thinks it could raise the cost of building by 10 to 30 percent. “In making it work, what are the tradeoffs?” he added. “If you spend more up front, you have to recoup that in rent.”

House Our Neighbors, 350 Seattle, and other advocacy groups oppose the 1B funding mechanism because it would lower the income cap on social housing residents to just 80 percent of median area, fundamentally changing the program and making less funding available. It “essentially forces social housing back into the same low-income system that the affordable developers are operating in,” Howe said. “It doesn’t give us the ability to be nimble and flexible.”

Chatterji said the climate justice vision of social housing is bigger than just emissions reductions from lower energy use and easier access to transit. A new tax on big businesses would boost equity, she said, by making healthy and eco-friendly building features available to everyday people.

“You see a lot of rich people making their houses super fireproof, or all of these amenities only being available to people who can afford it,” she said. “Passive house and social housing challenges that by saying, ‘No, these are all public goods, and they should be available to the public in perpetuity.’”

Plus, she added, high-quality construction enabled by the revenue from mixed-income tenants and the 1A tax could mean longer-lasting housing that won’t need to be frequently renovated or replaced. 

Tiffani McCoy, House Our Neighbors’ co-executive director, said social housing should be paired with other urban policies like increased transit and zoning reform to unlock further emissions reductions and make Seattle more equitable. Washington state recently banned single-family zoning statewide, though some of Seattle’s richest neighborhoods are exempted from the prohibition.

Seattle’s social housing advocates say that the decisions their city makes now could influence other urban areas contending with problems around housing, affordability, and climate resilience. In New York City, which faces a particularly dire housing crunch, recent zoning reforms are expected to enable the creation of 82,000 more homes over the next 15 years. California has also passed reforms allowing homeowners to divide their property into two lots, creating opportunities for new housing. Yet the country still has an affordable housing gap of about 7.3 million units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

McCoy said that funding affordable housing with a progressive revenue source, as proposed by Proposition 1A, could insulate cities from the vagaries of the federal government. As President Donald Trump attempts to slash spending on climate mitigation and social programs, she said it’s “even more prudent and incumbent for people at the local level to act now … to make sure that we’re still providing social services, environmental protections, and environmental programs.” 

Editor’s note: The author of this article was an intern at 350 Seattle in 2021. He was not involved in the organization’s housing campaigns.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Seattle, advocacy groups pitch ‘social housing’ as a climate solution on Feb 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Hocker lived on Maui when wildfires destroyed as many as 4,000 housing units in August 2023, leveling the town of Lahaina. But as an organizer with the Maui Housing Hui, a tenant advocacy group, she has been dealing with the ensuing rental crisis ever since.

After the fires, state officials moved swiftly to freeze most rents on the island and issued emergency orders halting evictions. But the measures failed to curb an alarming trend. Maui residents who lived or worked in the burn zone have seen rent increases of roughly 50 percent in the months following the disaster, according to research from the University of Hawaii. Some landlords took advantage of the crisis, evicting tenants to make way for higher-paying renters. A year later, homelessness in Hawaiʻi had nearly doubled.

Hawaiian housing advocates and researchers say Maui’s experience is a cautionary tale for L.A., highlighting the need to pass — and then enforce — renter protections after a natural disaster disrupts an already tight rental market. How Los Angeles leaders respond is still an open question, and a battle is currently being fought between activists and politicians over strengthening renter protections. L.A. tenant organizers, already skeptical of officials’ ability to enforce the state’s price-gouging law, have also begun cataloguing alleged violations themselves in a spreadsheet that now sports more than 1,400 entries. 

Hocker said the activists are right to be vigilant. “Unless there are aggressive teeth on price-gouging [laws], it will happen. People will do it,” she said.

The Palisades and Eaton fires, which broke out on Jan. 7, have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, left at least 29 people dead and razed more than 10,000 homes in a county with a severe homelessness crisis. Rents in L.A. County have since increased an average of 20 percent, the Washington Post found, with rents in some neighborhoods closer to the burned areas more than doubling. For years, Mayor Karen Bass has said L.A. needed a “FEMA-style response” to the homelessness crisis; now it needs two. (Pacific Palisades is part of the city of Los Angeles, though Altadena is not.)

The fires have spurred local leaders to protect L.A.’s renters. Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency the morning of the fires, activating a preexisting price-gouging law that imposes a 10 percent cap on most rent increases. The cap will remain in effect through March 8 unless it is extended. Landlords who break the law face up to a year in jail and fines of up to $10,000. They could also face civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation.

Attorney General Rob Bonta has already filed charges against an L.A. County landlord and sent warnings to 500 hotels and landlords accused of price-gouging. District Attorney Nathan Hochman, whose recent election campaign was backed by the real estate industry, has also pledged to prosecute violators and warned gougers that they would be “publicly shamed.” 

In Hawaiʻi, officials similarly promised to crack down on rent gougers. And in the wake of the fires, Gov. Josh Green took decisive action, freezing rents and prohibiting landlords from evicting Maui tenants for unpaid rent. Even threatening a renter with an illegal eviction could be a punishable offense, with civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day. (The Maui eviction moratorium is set to expire on Feb. 4.)

But Green’s emergency proclamations contained various loopholes. Tenants could not be evicted for nonpayment of rent, but landlords were not required to renew leases once they expired. Some tenants could also be evicted when an owner or their family member moved in, or if the property was sold. Meanwhile, landlords were free to raise rents as much as they wanted following an eviction. They could also pass “any additional operating expenses” on to tenants as rent increases as long as they were documented, though what an operating expense might be was not specified. 

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Rents have risen on Maui by 10 percent to 20 percent since the fires, according to University of Hawaii economist Justin Tyndall. The increases were even higher for people who lived, worked or owned a business in the burn zones, according to a survey conducted by researchers Trey Gordner and Daniela Bond-Smith, also with the University of Hawaii. New, unpublished data they shared with Capital & Main shows those rents rose by more than 50 percent. Like those who lived in the burn zone, people who worked there also experienced “substantial displacement” from their homes, Bond-Smith explained. 

Rent increases were even higher for fire-impacted families renting homes with three bedrooms or more, who saw increases of up to 80 percent or more, Gordner said. He attributed those increases to the pressure that the loss of so many single-family homes put on the rental market. A lot of single-family homes were also destroyed in the Palisades and Eaton fires, “so I would expect a similar pattern to occur” in Los Angeles, he said.

Natural disasters that destroy homes often lead to increased rents. Researchers with the Brookings Institute surveyed rental trends in major markets following natural disasters and attributed increases of between 4 percent and 6 percent directly to the disasters — an effect that “never fully went away,” one of the authors wrote. Other research found permanent rent increases too. Evictions also tend to rise.

Alan Lloyd and Alana Kay, who helped run a tenant complaint hotline after the fires with the Maui Tenants and Workers Association, said they received scores of calls from tenants whose landlords were using loopholes to raise rents or force them out and charge more to the next tenants. 

“When renters’ leases would [end,] landlords would say, ‘Well if you want to continue living here, you have to pay me $600 more a month,’” said Hocker of the Maui Housing Hui. “I call it ‘housing by extortion.’” 

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Some landlords even forced out tenants to instead rent to fire refugees, who could pay more because FEMA was covering the rent — and dramatically overpaying, ProPublica and the Honolulu Civil Beat reported. It was not the first time FEMA has incentivized evictions this way, but it typically does so in rural areas or islands with even more limited rental markets than L.A., said Noah Patton, disaster recovery manager with the National Low Income Housing Coalition. 

While advocates raised the alarm about evictions and illegal increases, Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez “held property owners accountable in relatively few cases,” ProPublica and the Civil Beat reported. The office still hasn’t issued any penalties for landlords found to have broken the emergency proclamations, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, Toni Schwartz, confirmed in an email. They received 247 complaints and found 35 violations, which were all corrected, she wrote. (Forty-one claims are still being investigated.)

In Los Angeles, tenant advocates were already frustrated before the fires with government agencies tasked with enforcing renter protection laws. Prosecuting hundreds of landlords for price-gouging “would be unprecedented,” said Faizah Malik, a housing attorney with the pro bono firm Public Counsel. 

And protections from price-gouging are weaker in Los Angeles than they are in Hawaiʻi. California’s price-gouging law caps rent increases at 10 percent (with additional restrictions on new listings), while Hawaiʻi officials froze rents. Furthermore, L.A. lawmakers have not halted evictions for nonpayment of rent. While Pacific Palisades and Altadena burned, L.A. County eviction courts stayed open.

Meanwhile, the city’s progressive organizers and politicians are trying to generate momentum for a rent freeze and an eviction moratorium. Last week, the L.A. Tenants Union disrupted a County Board of Supervisors meeting to demand the adoption of such measures. The City Council will vote Wednesday on a motion to freeze rents and halt nonpayment evictions for renters who claim financial or medical hardship from the fires. It’s unclear if the motion has the votes to pass. 

L.A. tenants have one advantage that renters in Hawaiʻi did not: a spreadsheet cataloging alleged incidents of price-gouging compiled by tenant activists with The Rent Brigade, a new collective organized by Chelsea Kirk and Philip Meyer. 

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The document is a tool rarely available to agencies charged with enforcing price-gouging law, according to consumer protection attorney Marissa Roy.

Roy worked on consumer protection lawsuits for the affirmative litigation division of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, which is one of the agencies tasked with enforcing the price-gouging law. 

“They’re asking the right questions and compiling extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive information to build these cases in a way that lawyers don’t necessarily have the capacity for,” she said.

For now, activists are operating under the assumption that the government won’t come through. A study by The Rent Brigade found price-gouging across the county, from affluent Malibu to working-class Koreatown.  

“Frankly, I have no faith that all the landlords who have committed price-gouging are going to face consequences, because historically they never do,” said Kirk. “I hope I’m wrong.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Maui’s post-wildfire housing crisis offers a warning for Los Angeles on Feb 1, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jack Ross, Capital and Main.

“If [Newsom] doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.”

In the wake of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles, which have destroyed thousands of homes and killed dozens of people over the past two weeks, Trump’s threat to withhold aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency has surfaced again. As the fires raged, the new president rushed to blame them on Newsom’s water policies, repeating his disproven claim that the state’s policy of limiting water deliveries out of the Sacramento Delta to protect a species of endangered fish has hobbled firefighting efforts. He then appeared to repeat his threat on Truth Social: “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA.”

As Trump takes office and prepares to visit Los Angeles this week, his allies in Congress are picking up the threat as they consider a supplemental bill that would provide billions of dollars in aid money to fire victims through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a representative from Louisiana, said that he believes there “should be conditions” on that aid.

“Obviously, there’s been water resource mismanagement, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems,” he said in a comment to reporters last week. Even some California Republicans, such as Representatives Doug LaMalfa and Darrell Issa, agreed that Congress should consider limiting long-term aid.

But disaster experts say these threats aren’t likely to bear fruit — or at least will be harder to accomplish than many of the new president’s other climate-related policies. 

“I don’t know how you stop it so much as you just make it a pain in the butt,” said Craig Fugate, who led FEMA under President Barack Obama. 

The difficulty for Trump is that the FEMA recovery process in California has already begun. President Biden issued a disaster declaration just hours after the fires began, giving FEMA the legal authority to spend money on emergency response, rescue, and shelter efforts in Los Angeles, and to begin doling out money to victims who have lost their homes and belongings. Even if Congress doesn’t send the agency any more money, FEMA has enough funding in the bank to address victims’ immediate needs, a. This is by design: when Congress set up FEMA in 1980, it gave agency officials flexibility to deploy money fast as new disasters happened. Lawmakers (usually) top up the agency’s budget before each disaster season takes place. 

But bigger costs are yet to come. FEMA itself doesn’t rebuild roads or water systems in disaster-affected areas. Instead, the agency reimburses states and cities for the money they spend on those rebuilding efforts. In order to get reimbursed, states have to submit cost estimates, and it’s far too early for California to assess the cost of recovery.

But once the state does submit those reimbursements, FEMA doesn’t have the authority to approve or deny them discretionarily, according to Fugate.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it would be really difficult for any administration to try to hold funds arbitrarily,” he said. “It’s just like writing a check, it’s kind of hard to cancel it after you’ve already written.”

The most Trump could do would be to delay the aid process through bureaucratic channels. The federal Office of Management and Budget has to review all FEMA projects with values over $1 million, and Trump could order that office to quibble with the details of every request before approving them. Later on this year, FEMA could also decrease the share of rebuilding costs it offers to pay, but it would still be on the hook for most of the money. Trump did not mention FEMA in his dozens of day-one executive orders this week, but he did sign an order seeking to revise federal policies for moving water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an issue he has inaccurately linked to L.A.’s recent fires. (The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for clarification on the president’s threat.)

Even if Trump does throw sand in the gears of reimbursement, California might be able to handle some delay. The state is the world’s sixth-largest economy, with a more than $300 billion budget, and lawmakers are already conferring about whether to pass supplemental state money to aid in the wildfire recovery. (California’s Office of Emergency Services did not respond to a request for comment.)

Wildfires also represent a lower share of FEMA’s disaster spending than do other disasters like hurricanes and floods. FEMA has spent an average of $345 million on infrastructure rebuilding per fire since 2015, compared to an average of almost $1 billion per hurricane, according to FEMA data compiled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Fire victims account for just 1 percent of FEMA’s individual aid applications since 2015. 

That’s in part because most fires tend to strike less populated areas — and because insurance tends to cover a larger proportion of wildfire destruction, said Sarah Labowitz, a nonresident fellow at Carnegie and an expert in disaster funding.

“It’s supposed to be a three-legged stool, where FEMA sits along insurance and private money,” she said. “For fires, typically people have some kind of fire insurance, so the level of uninsured loss could be lower than for a big water event.” But given the scale of the loss in these urban fires, and the fact that many insurers have pulled away from places like Pacific Palisades, FEMA may have a larger tab this time than it has in past fires.

Rather than the new Trump administration, it’s Congress that California should be worried about. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has over the past two decades allocated tens of billions of dollars toward long-term disaster recovery with Congress’ blessing, including after blazes such as the 2018 Camp Fire. Many states use this federal money to aid in housing redevelopment; for instance, California used the largest share of its Camp Fire money to build and acquire new multifamily properties. 

This housing money will be essential in L.A.’s strained real estate market, where median rents are over $3,000 per month and an average single-family home goes for close to $1 million. But unlike FEMA, which can start spending money out of its main disaster fund as soon as the president declares a disaster, HUD needs explicit permission from Congress to start a recovery program for each new disaster. Speaker Johnson is now suggesting he would like to see California agree to “conditions” before he gives HUD the nod, telling reporters earlier this month that “we have to make sure there are safeguards on the precious treasure of the American people.”

Without this supplemental HUD money, it will be hard for California to pursue the kind of long-term recovery that experts believe is necessary after climate disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires. The state might be able to find money in its own coffers to make up for delays in critical aid money from FEMA, but it will be much harder to come up with cash to build new homes or stand up a workforce development program, as California has sought to do with the $1 billion in recovery aid it received from HUD for the 2018 Camp Fire. Not only is Los Angeles one of the most expensive places in the country to build a home, but California just finished closing a more than $50 billion budget deficit, leaving it with little money to spare.   

Labowitz says that Congress has dithered on passing HUD aid before. For instance, lawmakers took until December 2024 to give the agency authority to spend money on the Maui wildfires, which occurred in August of 2023. But despite the threats from Johnson and other Republicans, she said it’s likely that lawmakers will send aid money eventually, if only to ensure that Democrats don’t withhold it from disaster-prone states like Texas and Florida in the future.

“We have a federal infrastructure that finds a way to make itself work most of the time,” she said. “Usually for the biggest disasters, the system does find a way to work to deliver aid.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What Trump can (and can’t) do to disrupt Los Angeles wildfire aid on Jan 23, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

If this estimate holds true, it will test insurers’ commitment to a market that has been teetering on the verge of collapse for the better part of a decade now. Over the past five years, California has become a poster child for what climate-fueled weather disasters can do to a state’s home insurance market. Following a rash of historic wildfires in 2017 and 2018, insurance companies have fled the state, dropped tens of thousands of customers in flammable areas, and raised prices by double-digit percentages.

Until recently, elected officials have taken few major steps to address the crisis. But late last month, after more than a year of drafting, California’s insurance commissioner unveiled a set of reforms that he claimed will bring companies back into the fold as they take effect this year. 

“This is a historic moment for California,” said Ricardo Lara, the state’s insurance commissioner, when he revealed the rules in December. “With input from thousands of residents throughout California, this reform balances protecting consumers with the need to strengthen our market against climate risks.”

The rules come after months of debate among state insurance officials, lawmakers, insurance companies, and consumer advocates. The biggest change is that California will now require many insurance companies to do more business in what the state calls “distressed areas,” the fire-prone scrubland and mountain regions where insurers are now hiking prices and dropping customers. Companies will soon have to ensure that their market share in these areas is at least 85 percent of their total statewide market share — in other words, if a company controls 10 percent of the state’s insurance market, it must control at least 8.5 percent of the market in fire-prone areas. 

This mandate should push big companies like State Farm and Allstate to pick up customers they’ve dropped in flammable regions like the mountainous north of the state. Some companies have already begun to offer new policies in burned areas in anticipation of the state’s new rules: the insurance company Mercury announced last week that it will be the first insurance company in the state to offer new policies in Paradise, California, which was destroyed in the catastrophic 2018 Camp Fire. The move recognizes the town’s work to mitigate future fires by clearing trees and hardening homes.

The requirement to expand coverage, coupled with recent announcements from companies like Mercury, “should give consumers hope that competition and options will be returning,” said Amy Bach, the head of insurance customer advocacy group United Policyholders, in a statement.

In return for this added coverage, the state is making a few big tweaks that will allow insurers to pass on the price of fire risk to their customers. California is the only state in the country that doesn’t allow insurance companies to use forward-looking “catastrophe models” when they set prices. It also prohibits companies from factoring in the rising costs of reinsurance, the insurance purchased by insurance companies to ensure they’re able to pay out big claims.

These two restrictions have kept prices artificially low for years, and also prevented insurers from planning for climate change impacts, creating a de facto subsidy for homeowners in risky areas. 

“This addresses the major stumbling blocks that companies have been identifying for a decade, so that’s a positive,” said Rex Frazier, the president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, the state’s leading insurance trade group. 

This trade-off has some residents in fire-prone areas worried. Insurance companies might now have to offer more policies in flammable zones, but they also have more latitude to increase prices. 

“I’m not optimistic that it will improve the experience of the consumer as the insurers can now pass certain costs onto consumers which I’m expecting will result in higher premiums,” said Jason Lloyd, who moved to mountainous Lake County last spring. He and his wife came to the area because they wanted to be closer to his wife’s family, but when they made an offer on a home, they learned that they would have to pay more than $8,000 a year for insurance, or else go to the California FAIR Plan, a state-run insurance program that offers minimal coverage. 

Lloyd and his wife later bought another home in Hidden Valley Lake, a town that has taken ambitious steps to reduce flammable vegetation, but their insurance premium is still more than $4,500 a year, more than triple what it was on their last home in Kansas. Lloyd is worried that his insurance company will hike his price further under the new rules.

Other states across the West such as Colorado and Oregon are also seeing insurance coverage gaps emerge after big wildfires, though their problems are less acute than those in the Golden State. In Colorado, for instance, officials just recently established a state fire insurance backstop like California’s FAIR Plan, since it’s only in the past few years that customers there have been dropped en masse. California’s grand bargain with the insurance industry provides a blueprint for those other states: If you want to address coverage gaps, you need to give insurers broader authority to set prices. 

Even this might not be enough. The past few years have seen a reprieve from major wildfires like the ones that struck in 2017 and 2018, but this week’s blazes in the Los Angeles area could cause billions of dollars of damage, on par with an event like the Camp Fire.

Joel Laucher, a former regulator and fire insurance expert at the consumer advocacy organization United Policyholders, said that the damage from the Los Angeles blazes could lead to further price hikes and more availability gaps.

“These are going to be major losses, certainly,” he told Grist. “Certain areas are definitely going to have new challenges, to the degree that insurers are going to be able to charge to the rate they believe those areas deserve to pay.” Laucher said that insurance companies may not decline to renew as many policies as they might have under previous state rules, but they could still avoid selling policies in some of the affected areas.

Frazier, of the insurance trade group, voiced similar concerns. He said that another round of monster blazes on the scale of 2017 and 2018 could drive the insurance industry away from the state once again, despite the commissioners’ reforms. 

“If we were to have a couple more unprecedented years, all bets are off,” he told Grist. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California overhauled its insurance system. Then Los Angeles caught fire. on Jan 8, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

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As Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner may soon oversee the nation’s efforts to build affordable apartments, protect poor tenants and aid the homeless. As a lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, Turner voted against those very initiatives.

Turner supported a bill ensuring landlords could refuse apartments to applicants because they received federal housing assistance. He opposed a bill to expand affordable rental housing. He voted against funding public-private partnerships to support the homeless and against two bills that called merely to study homelessness among young people and veterans.

Behind those votes lay a deep-seated skepticism about the value of government efforts to alleviate poverty, a skepticism that Turner has voiced again and again. He has called welfare “dangerous, harmful” and “one of the most destructive things for the family.” When one interviewer said receiving government assistance was keeping recipients in “bondage” of “a worse form to find oneself in than slavery,” Turner agreed.

Such views would seemingly place Turner at odds with the core work of HUD, a sprawling federal agency that serves as a backstop against homelessness for millions of the nation’s poor, elderly and disabled. With an annual discretionary budget of $72 billion, the department provides rental assistance to 2 million families, oversees the country’s 800,000 public housing units, fights housing discrimination and segregation and provides support to the nation’s 650,000 homeless. If Turner’s record indicates how he will direct the agency’s agenda, it is those clinging to the bottom of the housing market who have the most to lose, researchers and advocates said.

“It just doesn’t seem to me like this is someone who is at all aligned with what the values of that agency should be,” said Cea Weaver, director of the advocacy group Housing Justice for All. “It’s a deregulatory agenda, and it’s an anti-poor people agenda.”

Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, said Turner’s views, if translated into policy, could increase homelessness. “If, at a fundamental level, you believe that people getting assistance with their rent when they’re very poor and struggling, if you think that’s actually dependence and a bad thing, you’re going to try to undermine those programs,” he said.

One former colleague offered a more optimistic view of Turner’s stewardship of HUD. “My sense of him is he will try to help people,” said Richard Peña Raymond, a Democratic Texas House member who served on a committee with Turner. “I do think he’ll do a good job.”

Turner did not respond to detailed questions. A spokesperson for the nominee said: “Of course ProPublica would try and paint a negative picture of Mr. Turner before he is even given the opportunity to testify. We would expect nothing less from a publication that solely serves as a liberal mouthpiece.”

The Trump transition team and HUD did not respond to requests for comment. Trump’s announcement of Turner’s nomination praised him for “helping lead an Unprecedented Effort that Transformed our Country’s most distressed communities” as head of a White House council that promoted opportunity zones, a plan to spur investment in low-income neighborhoods by offering generous tax breaks, during Trump’s first administration. “Under Scott’s leadership,” the announcement went on, “Opportunity Zones received over $50 Billion Dollars in Private Investment!”

Turner is hardly the only Trump cabinet nominee to display skepticism or outright hostility toward the work of agencies they may lead. But, while other nominees have faced intense scrutiny in recent weeks, Turner has attracted little public attention and said even less about his intentions, beyond vowing to “bring much-needed change” to HUD, as he wrote on Facebook last month. ProPublica pieced together his views on housing through a review of legislative records and of Turner’s public speeches, podcast appearances and sermons at the Plano, Texas, megachurch where he is a pastor.

A possible HUD agenda for Turner can be found in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations for a conservative presidential administration. The report calls for cutting funding for affordable housing, repealing regulations that fight housing discrimination, increasing work requirements and adding time limits for rental assistance and eliminating anti-homelessness policies, among other changes. The Project 2025 chapter on HUD lists Ben Carson, the department secretary during the first Trump administration and a mentor to Turner, as its author. Carson, as secretary, was involved in efforts to end an anti-segregation rule, add work requirements for housing assistance and make it harder to prove housing discrimination.

Turner’s views appear to be deeply rooted in his upbringing outside Dallas, where he was, as he later put it, “a young kid from a broken home, from a poor family.” His parents’ relationship was “filled with violence, domestic violence, abuse, a lot of anger [and] alcohol.” Years later, as a legislator, Turner said that his sister had been “on state assistance and wasn’t feeding [Turner’s] nephew while she was on drugs.” (ProPublica was unable to locate Turner’s sister for comment.)

Football proved an escape. Turner received a scholarship to play for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and then he went on to a nearly decadelong career in the National Football League. He began transitioning into politics while still in the league, interning for California Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican who years later would be convicted of stealing from his campaign account. After an unsuccessful run for a California congressional seat in 2006, Turner moved back to Texas and was elected in 2012 to the state House of Representatives, where he served for four years.

There, Turner solidified his position as a deeply conservative member opposed to many government interventions into the housing market, legislative records show. He voted against supporting foreclosure prevention programs. He opposed legislation to help public housing authorities replace or rehabilitate their property (although he voted for a minor expansion of that bill two years later). He also sought to require drug testing for poor families applying for government assistance, the Houston Chronicle reported at the time. Turner did support some modest housing assistance measures, such as bills helping housing developments for seniors and in rural areas seek low-income housing tax credits.

During his time in office, Turner was the lead author of 17 substantive bills. None were related to housing, and none of them became law.

“He’s a very nice guy,” but “he didn’t really make much of a legislative impression,” said a former high-ranking Republican Texas lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a former colleague. “He didn’t leave a deep footprint.”

That did not stop Turner, however, from mounting an audacious bid for the House speakership, a move reportedly backed by Tim Dunn, a West Texas pastor and oil billionaire who has used his fortune to push the state Legislature far to the right. Turner’s speaker campaign failed, but it helped solidify his position within Texas’ deep-red Christian political milieu, where he has remained ever since.

Turner is an associate pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, a political force in Texas that has counted numerous statewide elected officials as congregants. Jack Graham, the church’s senior pastor, prayed over Trump at an event in October and praised his electoral victory from the pulpit in November. Turner’s skepticism about government assistance has found its way into his sermons there, where he has derided the “perverse incentives created by the government and the welfare system, which in turn creates an epidemic of fatherlessness in our country.”

Turner or his political staffers also used campaign money to attend three conferences held by WallBuilders, an organization that seeks “to reveal the historical truths” about the “Christian foundation of our nation,” campaign finance records show. In 2016, Turner gave a $10,000 gift to WallBuilders from his campaign account.

Turner’s allies on the Christian far right also include Ziklag, a secretive network of ultrawealthy Christian families and religious influencers that support Trump. As ProPublica reported, Ziklag has raised millions of dollars as part of a larger mission to help Christian leaders “take dominion” over key areas of American society, from education and business to media and government. This year, Ziklag spent millions of dollars to mobilize Republican-leaning voters in swing states despite being a tax-exempt charity that isn’t allowed to intervene in politics. (A lawyer for Ziklag previously told ProPublica that the organization does not endorse candidates for political office.)

In June 2019, Turner and his wife, Robin, attended a private Ziklag conference at the Broadmoor luxury resort in Colorado Springs, Colorado, according to photos of the event posted by an attendee. At the time, Turner was working in the first Trump administration as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, where he served as a public salesman for the opportunity zones initiative. Turner has praised the program as a way to improve neighborhoods with high poverty and unemployment rates. Previous reporting by ProPublica found that the program was exploited by wealthy, politically connected investors, which drew scrutiny from members of Congress.

Internal documents obtained by ProPublica and Documented show that Ziklag members sought to take advantage of the program; in May 2019, Ziklag said in one of its newsletters that members of the group had met with three administration officials about opportunity zones. “The administration informed the group they are in a state of listening and learning about the program,” the document reads. “Ziklaggers are exploring additional avenues to make an impact on the program moving forward.”

After leaving the Trump administration, Turner started a nonprofit that promotes “Christ-centered reading enhancement programs” for children and helps people get driver’s licenses. He also became “chief visionary officer” at the multifamily housing developer JPI.

Now, if confirmed, Turner will be in charge of an agency with some 10,000 employees at a critical time. “We’re dealing with a pretty terrible housing crisis all across the country,” said Roller, of the National Housing Law Project. HUD will be “essential to any effort” to solve it.

Jesse Coburn covers cities, housing and transportation for ProPublica. He’s interested in how the second Trump administration will reshape federal policy in those areas, particularly at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation. If you work for one of those agencies or are affected by their work, he’d like to hear from you. You can email him at jesse.coburn@propublica.org, or reach him via phone, Signal or WhatsApp at 917-239-6642. His mailing address is: Jesse Coburn, ProPublica, 155 6th Avenue, 13th Floor, New York, NY 10013.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn and Andy Kroll.

But Florida may also present Trump with one of his thorniest political challenges. He’ll have to oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has spent the past four years bringing down the hammer on Americans who live in disaster-prone regions like Florida’s populous coasts, rolling out a series of insurance hikes and enforcement actions that make it more expensive to live and rebuild in risky areas.

This ongoing effort is a direct threat to the boom of cheap coastal development that has fueled the Sunshine State’s breakneck growth. Florida accounts for a huge share of the nation’s total risk from hurricanes and floods: It has more than $2 trillion in residential property, almost all of which is vulnerable to extreme winds or flooding, and it accounts for more than a third of all policies in the federal government’s public National Flood Insurance Program. FEMA is now raising premiums in that flood insurance program by around 18 percent per year in parts of the state — based on a formula developed during Trump’s first term — and it’s also penalizing Floridians who rebuild their homes in dangerous areas.

In conservative Lee County, which lost more than 5,000 homes to Hurricane Ian in 2022, a backlash has reached a fever pitch. Last spring, FEMA accused the county and several of its cities, including Fort Myers Beach, of disregarding federal rules that require homeowners to elevate their homes when rebuilding after floods, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per home but lowers the amount that taxpayers will have to pay for future disaster relief in the area. Lee County towns allowed hundreds of homeowners to rebuild at ground level after Ian, according to FEMA, and in response the agency moved to take away their flood insurance discounts, which could raise average insurance costs by hundreds of dollars per year. County leaders accused the federal government of “revenge politics” and threatened to sue.

As Trump takes office, he and his FEMA director will have to choose how to approach these kinds of conflicts, which are brewing in every place where the real estate market is premised on government-subsidized disaster relief. Trump could let the agency stay the course, which would save the federal government money on future disaster relief but place financial burdens on some of his most stalwart supporters. Or he could let Floridians off the hook, forgiving the dangerous redevelopment and siding with Republican state officials who want insurance relief.

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The president-elect has tried to politicize the disaster relief process in the past. During his first administration, he diverted FEMA funding to beef up immigration enforcement at the southern border; last month, an outgoing agency official said that he feared Trump would do so again on a larger scale in his second term. Trump also vowed earlier this year to deny wildfire relief money to California unless the drought-prone state delivers more irrigation water to farmers. But Trump’s first administration also tried to fix long-standing issues that were driving the National Flood Insurance Program into insolvency by designing the very premium hikes that now draw so much ire from Florida Republicans. 

As of now, there’s little evidence about his intentions for his second term. The two members of congress who he’s reportedly considered to lead FEMA, Republican Garret Graves of Louisiana and Democrat Jared Moskowitz of Florida (who denies he’s interested in the job), are deeply engaged on disaster relief issues and currently represent constituencies who benefit heavily from subsidized disaster relief and flood insurance. Graves has blasted FEMA’s efforts to raise insurance premiums.

Despite the uncertainty, current FEMA officials say they don’t believe Trump will tamper with the agency’s efforts to stop development in flood-prone areas, if only because those efforts help cut federal spending in the long run.

“I think there’s been a shift in perspective since that last administration on investing in a way that’s built to last,” said Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s current head of resilience. “No taxpayer should want their money going into things that are clearly going to get damaged before their time is up.”

The conflict in Fort Myers Beach was over exactly this issue: Homeowners wanted to rebuild houses primed for future damage, despite federal regulations that prohibited them from doing so without elevating them above potential floodwaters. Local politicians appeared happy to let them do so.

“It’s very political,” said Bill Veach, a former Fort Myers Beach city council member who was in office during Hurricane Ian. “You’ve got people on the council who were elected at a time when people were tired of regulations, and so they kind of made an effort to be softer.”

After the initial spat with Lee County in April, the Biden administration tried to smooth things over, restoring insurance discounts in almost every town in the county. But last month, the agency imposed harsh penalties on Fort Myers Beach, where the risky rebuilding was most egregious, and it has faced a torrent of criticism from Florida officials ever since. 

The political divisions between the state and the feds only got worse in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, when a FEMA relief crew supervisor told her employees not to knock on the doors of homes with Trump lawn signs when distributing information about disaster aid. FEMA chief Deanne Criswell fired the employee and called her actions a “clear violation of FEMA’s core values,” but the incident created a frenzy among conservative politicians in Florida. The state’s attorney general sued the agency over the alleged bias, and Republican congressman Byron Donalds called for the agency to be “completely revamped.” The House of Representatives later called Criswell to testify about the incident. 

Some town residents are hoping the incoming Trump administration will restore Fort Myers Beach’s insurance discount, as well as clean house at the agency.

“I’ve worked with FEMA for about 20 years,” said Fred Mallone, a restaurant owner who also runs an emergency management business, at a Fort Myers Beach town council meeting earlier this week. “They’re all gonna get fired. So, don’t be scared of FEMA.”

FEMA’s problems go well beyond Lee County. The Trump administration also inherits nationwide blowback around attempts to raise flood insurance premiums for the riskiest homes. The shift to a new system of higher premiums for riskier properties, known as Risk Rating 2.0, was planned under the first Trump administration. The administration also sought to end insurance coverage altogether for new homes in flood-prone areas, part of a long-standing campaign by conservatives to wind down government-subsidized flood insurance. The Project 2025 agenda, which Trump disavowed during the presidential campaign and re-avowed after winning election, proposes to end the National Flood Insurance Program altogether.

But the politics of flood insurance have become scrambled since Trump’s first term. When the Biden administration rolled out Risk Rating 2.0, flood insurance rates started to soar in coastal states, rising to more than $10,000 a year for some households. A group of Republican state attorneys general, including those representing Florida and Louisiana, filed suit to block the program.

As costs keep rising and coastal households feel the squeeze, Trump will face pressure from multiple directions. The conservative policymakers behind Project 2025 will pressure him to go even further than Risk Rating 2.0 and wind down federal flood insurance altogether, while coastal politicians in Florida and Louisiana will pressure him to roll back FEMA’s insurance rate hikes, effectively restoring taxpayer-funded subsidies to the program. The latter may align more closely with Trump’s own self-interest: The president’s Mar-a-Lago estate is a customer of the flood insurance program and stands to see its premiums shoot up under the new system. 

But some FEMA experts doubt Trump will chart a drastic course in either direction.

When it comes to flood insurance, the first Trump administration “was sort of just a period of neglect,” said Rebecca Elliott, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics who has studied the flood insurance program. “Whether you think that was benign neglect or malign neglect, I think is open to interpretation.” Either way, she said, the administration is unlikely to revoke Risk Rating 2.0, which would return FEMA to a system that the agency has admitted was prone to miscalculating insurance costs. 

As for the more radical Project 2025 proposals to wind down subsidized flood coverage altogether, Elliott doubts they will find purchase, even in a very conservative administration. The program’s subsidized coverage helps prop up the value of floodplain homes in places like Florida, and as a result these homes are overvalued by as much as $237 billion, according to one estimate. Winding down the program would likely cause these home values to crater, and it would leave homeowners on their own to deal with flood damages, which now exceed $500 billion in the United States each year.

“I think natural disasters are one of those areas where people kind of lose their free market religion as soon as they need help,” Elliott said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Trump mulls his FEMA pick, a political land mine awaits in Florida on Dec 20, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

An analysis released Wednesday by the Senate Committee on the Budget found that the rate at which insurance contracts are being dropped rose significantly in recent years, particularly in states most exposed to climate risks. In all, 1.9 million policies were not renewed.

“Climate change is no longer just an environmental problem,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who chairs the budget committee, said at a hearing on the matter Wednesday. “It is an economic threat, and it is an affordability issue that we should not ignore.”

For those with insurance, premiums rose 44 percent between 2011 and 2021, and another 11 percent last year, according to a report the congressional Joint Economic Committee also released this week. A Democratic analyst on the Joint Economic Committee, or JEC, who requested anonymity to comment publicly, said, “The model of insurance as it stands right now isn’t working.”

The JEC report included a state-by-state breakdown of premium increases and risk ranking based on climate perils. Florida topped the list on both fronts, and saw a whopping $1,272 climb in annual premiums between 2020 and 2023. Michigan saw the smallest increase at $136. No state saw a decrease over that time. 

“This isn’t a red or blue state issue,” said the analyst. “It’s widely applicable across the nation.” 

Florida also topped the list when it comes to the number of non-renewals, according to the Senate committee report that examined state and county level data. The rate nearly tripled between 2018 and 2023. Nationwide, in 2023, 48 of the top 50 counties — and 82 of the top 100 counties — with the highest rates of non-renewal were either flood-prone, faced elevated wildfire risk, or both.

Climate-exacerbated disasters can batter insurance markets because those events create massive financial liabilities for insurance providers, and the companies, called re-insurers, that underwrite them. “Ultimately, all those groups are raising their prices and it’s the homeowners who have to pay in the end,” said Phillip Mulder, an economist and expert on risk and insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business. He was a co-author of the state-level dataset that helped underpin the JEC’s work.

Not everyone at the Senate hearing agreed on the role climate change plays in insurance markets. 

“The insurance industry is not in the midst of a climate-driven crisis, nor is it about to fall,” Robert Hartwig, an economist and associate professor at the University of South Carolina, told lawmakers. “Climate risk is an important determinant in the cost of insurance, but there has been a tendency, however, to over attribute the impact of climate change when describing the state of insurance markets.”

What is clear is that costly natural disasters are becoming more frequent, with the average time between billion-dollar events dropping from four months in 1980 to approximately three weeks today. As those risks grow, some insurers are pulling out states entirely. For example, State Farm and Allstate have left California, and dozens of smaller companies have collapsed or fled Florida and Louisiana. 

When that happens, homeowners must turn to government-backed insurers of last resort, which are available in just 26 states and typically cost more than private coverage. Enrollment in those state-run plans have skyrocketed, the JEC report notes, and they now cover more than $1 trillion in assets. 

“It all falls on the states,” Rob Moore, director of the Water & Climate Team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the current regulatory set up. “The federal government has very little role to play on the insurance market.”

The JEC report outlines a number of steps Congress could take to give itself a greater role in addressing the problem. For example, it highlights the need for more data collection through initiatives like the Wildfire Insurance Coverage Study Act to better understand the problem. It also points to the proposed Shelter Act, which would provide homeowners with a tax credit covering 25 percent of disaster mitigation improvements that bolster their property’s resilience, reduce the risk of catastrophic damage, and, consequently, lower their premiums. 

Moore agreed that adapting old homes, and future-proofing new ones, will be key to righting insurance markets. “The real long term problem is we’re trying to ensure structures that were never built for the risks and vulnerabilities that they now face,” he said. “If you want an insurable structure 30 years from now, we have to build it today.”

Another shift the report mentions is the possibility of the federal government becoming a re-insurer that backstops climate-stressed insurance markets, something the proposed INSURE Act calls for. France, Japan, and New Zealand have such programs, and the report argues that such a move in the U.S. “could simplify a complicated insurance sector and transfer risks associated with catastrophes to the Federal government.”

For now, though, none of those initiatives have progressed in Congress and all of them are sponsored by Democrats. With Republicans taking control of the House, Senate, and presidency, it remains unclear whether the bills have much of a future. 

“That’s a question everyone’s thinking about,” the committee analyst said, noting that taking a dollars-and-cents approach could make the issue resonate across the political spectrum. “Wildfires are raging and we’re seeing more and more flooding. This issue isn’t going away.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New data shows just how bad the climate insurance crisis has become on Dec 19, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Bangor Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Public housing helped bring an end to Linda Gallagher-Garcia’s three years of intermittent homelessness in her hometown of Presque Isle, Maine, in 2020. With $200 in secondhand furniture, she made the apartment feel like home for her and her dog, Tex.

But when she fell behind on her rent and was evicted two years later, the fact that she was in public housing made her future more dire: Maine public housing authorities’ rules bar evicted tenants from returning to government-subsidized units and from receiving other benefits that could help them relocate.

Gallagher-Garcia had moved back to her hometown in northern Maine in 2017 after her husband died. She was working as a home health aide and struggled to earn enough to afford a place to live; then, when she got COVID-19 and had to take time off from her job, she fell behind on her rent. The Presque Isle Housing Authority evicted her in 2022. “I was sick,” she said. “It didn’t matter to them.” Citing confidentiality rules, the housing authority said it could not comment on her case.

Last spring, Maine lawmakers had a chance to help public housing tenants at risk of losing their homes when they created a fund to prevent evictions. But instead of doing what nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut did, and making public housing tenants eligible for the program, Maine did the opposite and specifically excluded them. That left public housing residents — who are more likely than others to become homeless after eviction — ineligible for the aid.

Those who crafted the law said they didn’t realize people in public housing might need such help. Gallagher-Garcia’s story shows why they do.

She owed just $955 in back rent and utilities when she got her eviction notice — an amount the new eviction prevention program could have covered if it had been in place and if she had been living in a privately owned apartment. Instead, at age 59, Gallagher-Garcia checked into the local emergency shelter where she stayed for two years. In total, state and federal dollars paid about $55,000 for her to stay there.

Maine’s pilot eviction prevention program, called the Stable Home Fund, opened to applications in October. It provides eligible households with up to $800 a month for up to one year, with additional funds available to cover back rent.

The creators of the Stable Home Fund thought that public housing tenants already had enough aid. Public housing, which is funded with federal dollars, is supposed to be affordable for low-income families, the elderly and people with disabilities, with rent typically capped at 30% of household income. Public housing tenants, however, can still struggle to afford rent and be evicted just like tenants in private apartments.

In fact, in 2023, Maine’s public housing authorities filed a disproportionately high share of eviction cases, according to an analysis of court data obtained by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica. The eviction filing rate for public housing authorities was more than twice as high as the rate for all rental housing: 10 eviction filings per 100 units for public housing compared with four filings per 100 units for all rental housing.

The cause of most public housing eviction filings in Maine was nonpayment of rent, based on a separate review of court data collected by Pine Tree Legal Assistance, Maine’s largest legal aid group.

Because of public housing rules forbidding tenants from returning after an eviction, and because public housing tenants are generally poorer than other renters, both publicly and privately owned properties become out of reach. (By contrast, people who have been evicted from privately owned housing are still eligible to live in public housing.)

As a result, the consequence of being evicted from public housing “is almost certainly homelessness and extreme housing instability for already vulnerable families,” said Marie Claire Tran-Leung, director of the National Housing Law Project’s evictions initiative.

That homelessness comes with a financial cost to state and local governments. A 2009 Maine study found that governments spent about one-and-a-half times more in services for a homeless person in the six months before they were placed in subsidized housing and given supportive services than in the six months after.

Little is known about evictions in Maine, in part because the state’s paper-based court system makes it hard to obtain data. In 2023, Pine Tree Legal, a nonprofit that provides civil legal services to people with low incomes, spent a year traveling around the state to review eviction filings to understand why landlords try to remove tenants, how often renters don’t show up in court and how frequently they have representation. The Bangor Daily News and ProPublica analyzed the data, which covered about 40% of cases filed between 2019 and 2022. The newsrooms also obtained further data from the state court system on every eviction case filed by a public housing authority from January 2019 through August 2024.

Taken together, the data provides a window into a little-noticed aspect of Maine’s housing crisis. Since 2019, public housing authorities, which had a combined total of 3,299 units last year, went to court to evict low-income tenants about 1,300 times.

In 2023, their cases made up 5% of all eviction filings, despite the authorities having just 2% of the state’s rental units. Of the public housing cases, three-quarters were in the rural 2nd Congressional District, which covers most of the state outside the populous southern coastal region and includes Gallagher-Garcia’s hometown of Presque Isle.

The Presque Isle Housing Authority, where she lived, is in the geographically largest county east of the Mississippi River and has a population of just 67,000 residents. The housing authority filed nearly one eviction suit for every five of its public housing units in 2023, the highest rate of any housing authority in Maine, the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica found. The vast majority of cases in Presque Isle were for nonpayment of rent.

The housing authority said that a small minority of its cases resulted in actual eviction orders. (The state of Maine, however, does not track the number of people who leave after being threatened with eviction but before their cases are completed.)

The housing authority’s executive director, Jennifer Sweetser, explained that evictions are necessary because the agency’s budget relies on consistent rental payments. She also said that the housing authority doesn’t grant individual exceptions to eviction, which could be unfair or discriminatory. Instead, she said, the eviction process gives tenants a “neutral” way to resolve issues.

Farther south in the 2nd Congressional District, the Bangor housing authority filed more than twice as many eviction cases as the housing authority in Maine’s biggest city, Portland, located in the state’s other congressional district, even though Portland has many more public housing units.

This issue isn’t unique to Maine. Eviction Lab, a research organization based at Princeton University, has found that some public housing authorities around the country use evictions as a rent collection tactic, sometimes at higher rates than private landlords.

Victoria Morales runs the Quality Housing Coalition, based in Portland, and was the architect of the eviction prevention program that launched this year. She said she didn’t know how often Maine public housing tenants faced eviction until the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica shared their findings, as her organization doesn’t usually work with people in public housing. “I think it is hard to see that this exists if you’re not in it,” Morales said.

Morales excluded tenants in public housing from the fund because she said their rent is already supposed to be affordable. The goal was to help people facing eviction who were not already receiving some type of aid, she said. (In the end, however, the program allowed renters to apply who were receiving other types of housing assistance — just not those living in public housing or who had a federal Section 8 voucher.)

The program’s cost to the state was also a factor in limiting who was eligible, said state Rep. Rebecca Millett, D-Cape Elizabeth, who sponsored the legislation that spurred the fund. “We had to get it through the appropriation process when we were competing with all the other really important needs that our state is facing,” Millett said. Although Millett’s 2023 bill didn’t pass, a year later lawmakers decided to create and fund the rent relief program with $18 million through the supplemental budget process.

MaineHousing, a quasi-state agency that awarded a contract to Morales’ organization to run the program, estimated that 1,000 households could benefit over two years. In the first month, the program received 1,400 applications and had to start putting people on a waiting list.

Even with the high demand, two national housing experts said the Stable Home Fund could help more people if tenants of public housing could participate. That’s because monthly rent in public housing is much lower than on the private market.

Those experts said they don’t know of another eviction prevention program that excludes people in public housing. Kevin Connor, a spokesperson for the agency that runs Massachusetts’ program, said it is open to any household because the state wants to prevent homelessness, “whether they are in a house they own, an apartment they rent or a subsidized unit.”

Morales did not say whether she planned to advocate for public housing tenants to be included in the program in the future, but she said she would support the change if the state decided it was a priority.

Millett said she’d like to see the program expanded to help every Mainer who needs assistance, including people in public housing. But she will not be around when lawmakers convene in January; after 12 years in the Legislature, she didn’t run for reelection. Without Millett, and with no guarantee of future funding, the program’s longevity remains an open question.

Public housing delivered Gallagher-Garcia from homelessness. But being evicted from public housing pitched her right back into it.

One cool day in April 2022, her nieces and nephews helped her empty out her apartment, throwing her furniture into a dumpster. “Basically, I didn’t have anything,” she said, in the same matter-of-fact way that she described many of the other challenges she’s faced, including battling cancer. When she checked into the shelter, it ended her longest period of housing stability since 2017.

She couldn’t move in with her sister, Nancy Gallagher, who also lives in the housing authority, because the authority bars people who have been evicted from staying with other residents. She had to stay near Presque Isle because that’s where her job was. So Gallagher-Garcia went to the shelter. “I just didn’t have time to find anywhere else to go,” she said.

Her dog, Tex, went to the kennel in Caribou, the next town up the road. Under the shelter’s rules, Gallagher-Garcia had to leave her metal crochet needles behind at her sister’s apartment because they could be used as weapons. She also was required to leave the shelter every morning; when she didn’t have to go to work or see a doctor, she spent the day in her sister’s living room calling around for apartments.

In her second year at the shelter, in 2023, her health started to decline — first a hernia, then ovarian cancer. With that diagnosis came more tests, surgeries and chemotherapy. “January, February, March, three months behind each other, not even giving my body time to heal or anything, one surgery after another,” she said. She made frequent trips to see specialists as far away as Portland, four and a half hours away.

Living in a room at the shelter with three to four women, she had little privacy when nurses came to check on her surgical wounds. When other residents started asking what was going on, she decided to tell them. “I didn’t sugarcoat it,” she said about her discussion with a boy in the shelter. “I said, you know, I could go to sleep and not wake up.”

In July 2023, she returned to work part time despite continued chemotherapy treatments, so she could save up enough to leave the shelter. She didn’t like sitting around, she said: “I wanted to go back to work and have something to do for myself.”

Finally, in June, after two years in the shelter, she moved into a motel. She was glad to have a quiet place to stay, and she got her dog back after paying a fee. But it cost $1,000 a month, twice as much as her apartment at the public housing complex. After about nine months, she fell behind on her rent, and the motel kicked her out, too, she said.

As of early December, Gallagher-Garcia was still at the local homeless shelter, looking for a place of her own. Every week, she said, she called landlords, looking for someone to accept her despite her financial struggles and prior evictions.

Then, she found something: a hotel room for $1,200 a month. That’s more than the last place, which she couldn’t afford. But she just turned 62, and now she can draw Social Security. Between that and her job, she hopes she can make it work.

This story was supported in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Bangor Daily News reporter Sawyer Loftus may be reached at sloftus@bangordailynews.com.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Sawyer Loftus, Bangor Daily News.

“We’ll do our best to get more public money into education,” he tells one man in the neighborhood, before turning to the constituent’s kindergarten-age daughter to pat her on the head. “What grade are you in?”

“Why are you at our house?” the girl asks in return.

Seaman has knocked on thousands of doors as he seeks reelection this year. While his voters are fired up about everything from inflation to abortion, one issue doesn’t come up much on Seaman’s scorching tour through suburbia — even though it’s plainly visible in the parched cotton and alfalfa fields that surround the subdivision where he’s stumping for votes.

That issue is water. In Pinal County, which Seaman represents, water shortages mean that farmers no longer have access to the Colorado River, formerly the lifeblood of their cotton and alfalfa empires. The booming population of the area’s subdivisions face a water reckoning as well: The state has placed a moratorium on new housing development in parts of the county, as part of an effort to protect dwindling groundwater resources.  

Over the past four years, Arizona has become a poster child for water scarcity in the United States. Between decades of unsustainable groundwater pumping and a once-in-a-millenium drought, fueled by climate change, water sources in every region of the state are under threat. As groundwater aquifers dry up near some of the most populous areas, officials have blocked thousands of new homes from being built in and around the booming Phoenix metropolitan area. In more remote parts of the state, water-guzzling dairy farms have caused local residents’ wells to run dry. The drought on the Colorado River, long a lifeline for both agriculture and suburbia across the U.S. West, has forced further water cuts to both farms and neighborhoods in the heart of the state. 

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Arizona voters know that they’re deciding the country’s future — the state is one of just a half-dozen likely to determine the next president — but it’s unclear if they know that they’re voting on an existential threat in their own backyards. The outcome of state legislative races in swing districts like Seaman’s will determine who controls the divided state legislature, where Democrats are promoting new water restrictions and Republicans are fighting to protect thirsty industries like real estate and agriculture, regardless of what that means for future water availability. 

“Everybody’s running for re-election,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”

For these lawmakers’ voters, topics like abortion, the economy, and public safety are drawing far more attention than the water in their taps, and it will be these issues that drive the most people to the polls. But for the state officials who win on election day, their most consequential legacy may well be what they decide to do about the future of water in Arizona.

“They keep saying, ‘well, water is nonpartisan,’” Ferris added. “That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

It’s not hard to see why hot-button issues like immigration and the cost of living are on the minds of Arizona voters: The state sits on the U.S.-Mexico border and has experienced some of the highest rates of inflation in the country over the past few years. Meanwhile, its Republican-controlled state legislature has cut public education funding and allowed a nineteenth-century abortion ban to remain in effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state is at the center of almost every major political debate — “the center of the political universe,” in Politico’s words — and its nearly evenly divided electorate makes its swing votes key to determining who controls both the White House and Congress.

Even when the temperature doesn’t top 115 degrees F, the resulting campaign frenzy can make an out-of-state visitor light-headed. Lawn signs clutter gas station parking lots, highway medians, and front yards; virtually every other television commercial is an ad for or against a candidate for Congress, the presidency, or some state office. A commercial slamming a Democratic candidate as a defund-the-police radical will frequently air right after an ad condemning a Republican as a threat to democracy itself. Mailers and campaign literature clog mailboxes and dangle on doorknobs. 

This avalanche of campaign advertising seldom mentions water. During a week reporting in the state, I saw exactly one ad that focused on the issue. It was a billboard in Tucson announcing that Kirsten Engel, the Democratic candidate for a pivotal congressional seat, supports “Protecting Arizona from Drought” — not exactly a substantive engagement with the issue.

The reason for this avoidance is simple, according to Nick Ponder, a vice president of government affairs at HighGround, a leading Arizona political strategy firm. He said that while many voters in the state rank water among their top three or four issues, most don’t have a detailed understanding of water policy — meaning it’s unlikely that they’ll vote based on how candidates say they’ll handle water issues.

“They understand that we’re in a desert, and that we have water challenges — in particular groundwater and the Colorado River — but I don’t think that they understand how to best manage that,” he told Grist.

And how could they? Understanding Arizona water policy involves a maze of acronyms — AMA, GMA, INA, ADWR, CAWS, DAWS, DCP, CAP, and CAGRD are just the entry-level nouns — and complex technical models that track water levels thousands of feet underground. Even many elected officials on both sides of the aisle aren’t well versed in the issue, so they defer to the party leaders who have the strongest grasp on how the state’s water system works.

One upshot of this confusion — as well as the state’s bitter partisan divide — is that, even as Arizona’s water crisis has gained national attention, state lawmakers have failed to pass significant legislation to address the deficit of this critical resource. Over the past two years, the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, has been unable to broker a deal with the Republicans who control both chambers of the state legislature. Hobbs has put forward a series of proposals that would reform both agricultural water use in rural areas and rapid development in the suburbs of Phoenix, but she has come up a handful of votes short of passing them. Republicans have put forward their own plans — which are friendlier to the avowed water needs of farmers and housing developers — that she has vetoed.

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Once you cut through the thicket of reports and acronyms, it’s clear that this year’s election is pivotal for breaking this gridlock and determining the future of water policy in the state. Republicans hold one-vote majorities in both chambers of the legislature, so state Democrats only need to flip one seat in each chamber in order to gain unified control of the government. If that happens, Hobbs will be able to ignore the objections of the agriculture and homebuilding industries, which have kept Republicans from signing on to her plans.

Hobbs and the Democrats want to limit or prohibit new farmland in rural areas, while simultaneously making it harder for homebuilders around Phoenix and Casa Grande to resume building new subdivisions. This would slow down, but not reverse, the decline in water levels around the state — and it would likely diminish profits for two industries that are pillars of the state’s economy. If Republicans retain control of the legislature, they would reopen new suburban development and roll out more flexible rules for rural groundwater, giving a freer hand to both industries but incurring the risk of more groundwater shortages in decades to come.

Legislators came close to reaching agreement on both issues earlier this year. Republicans passed a bill that would relax development restrictions on fallow farmland where housing tracts could be developed — a compromise with theoretical appeal to both parties’ desire to keep building housing for the state’s booming population — but Hobbs vetoed it, saying it lacked enough safeguards to prevent future water shortages. At the same time, lawmakers from both parties made progress on a deal that would allow the state to set limits on groundwater drainage in rural areas, but the talks stalled as this year’s legislative session came to a close.

“We had so many meetings, and we’ve never gotten closer,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who is the party’s foremost expert on water issues in the legislature. “Now we’re in campaign mode.”

In Seaman’s district of Pinal County, where water restrictions have created difficulties for both the agriculture and real estate industries, many of those who are engaged on water issues see a stark partisan divide. Paul Keeling, a fifth-generation farmer in Casa Grande, framed the shortage of water on the Colorado River as a competition between red Arizona and blue California.

“We’re supposed to be able to get a part of that water, and now we can’t,” he told Grist. “It’s all going to California, to the f***ing liberals and the Democrats.” 

Keeling has had to shrink his family’s cotton-farming enterprise over the past few years, because he’s lost the right to draw water from the canal that delivers Colorado River water to Arizona. It’s one reason among many that Keeling said he’s supporting former President Donald Trump this year, as he has in the past two elections.

The Republican leadership of Pinal County has sparred with Governor Hobbs and state Democrats on housing issues as well, albeit in far less animated terms. In response to studies showing the county’s aquifer diminishing, the state government placed a moratorium on new groundwater-fed development in the area in 2019. Homebuilders and developers pinned their hopes on Republicans’ proposed reform allowing new development on former farmland, but Hobbs’s veto dashed those dreams.

Stephen Miller, a conservative Republican who serves on the county’s board of supervisors, told Grist that he views the Democrats’ opposition to new Pinal County development as motivated by partisan politics. The Republicans legislators who represent the area voted in favor of the bill that would restart development, but Seaman, the area’s lone Democratic representative, voted against it.

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“We’re just sitting back watching because the makeup of the House and the Senate will determine what happens here,” Miller said. “If they’re both taken over by the Democrats, I think there’s probably very little we can do [to relax the development restrictions].”

As Miller sees it, the restriction on new housing is part of a ploy by the state’s Democratic establishment to suppress growth in a conservative area — or even repossess its water.

“It shouldn’t be a partisan thing at all,” he said. “You’d think that they’d all want to pull this wagon in the same direction. But all they want Pinal County for is to stick a straw in here and take our water.”

Another reason for the relative campaign silence on water issues is that the regions where water is most threatened — areas where massive agricultural groundwater usage has emptied household wells and caused land to crack apart — tend to be represented by the politicians who are most dismissive of water conservation efforts, and vice versa. Cochise County, where an enormous dairy operation called Riverview has residents up in arms over vanishing well water, backed Trump by almost 20 points in 2020; La Paz County, where a massive Saudi farming operation has drained local aquifers, backed the former president by almost 40 points. The state representatives from these areas are almost all Republicans opposed to new water regulation; many have direct ties to the agriculture or real estate industries.

Meanwhile, the majority of pro-regulation Democrats in the state legislature represent urban areas that have more diverse sources of water, stronger regulations, and more backup water to help them get through periods of shortage. 

The state legislature’s two leading voices on water exemplify this divide. Democratic state senator Priya Sundareshan represents a progressive district in the core of Tucson, where city leaders have banked trillions of gallons of Colorado River water, all but ensuring that the city won’t go dry — and can even continue to grow as the river shrinks.

Sundareshan’s chief adversary is Republican Gail Griffin, a veteran legislator from Cochise County who chairs the lower chamber’s powerful natural resources committee. Griffin, a realtor, has blocked nearly all proposed water legislation for years, preventing even bills from members of her own party from getting a vote. Other legislators and water experts often cite her as the principal reason the state has not moved any major bills to regulate rural water usage — even though the county she represents faces arguably the most acute water crisis of them all. (Griffin did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.)

Sundareshan, for her part, admits that it’s awkward that urban legislators are trying to set water policy for the rural parts of the state. But she says that Republicans have stalled on the issue for too long.

“It doesn’t look great,” she said. “But right now, rural legislators are setting policy for urban areas. That’s why that’s why legislators like me are stepping up to say, ‘well, we need to actually solve these issues.’ Water is water, right? And the lack of availability of water in a rural area is going to impact the availability of water in our urban areas.”

The backlash to unsustainable groundwater pumping is not just coming from urban progressives, though — it’s also coming rural Republicans’ own constituents. In 2022, Cochise County voters approved a ballot proposal to restrict the growth of their water usage. (The strictness of the new rules is still being debated.) Even so, there’s no sign that any of these areas will endorse a Democrat. When Hobbs held a series of town halls in rural areas facing groundwater issues last year, she and her staff faced significant blowback from attendees who didn’t want the state meddling in their water usage. This year, elections in these areas are not even close to competitive. Griffin, the legislature’s strongest opponent of water regulation, is running unopposed.

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This means that the future of the state’s water policy depends on voters in just a few swing districts that straddle the urban-rural divide: suburban seats on the outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson, where new subdivisions collide with vestigial farmland and open desert. For many voters in these purple districts, Arizona’s water problems are far from a motivating political issue — and likely won’t be for decades to come, as aquifers silently diminish underground. Voters might hear about water issues in other parts of the state, or wince when they see their water bills, but the disappearing water under their feet is all but invisible, and may remain so for the rest of their lives.

This dissonance is best exemplified by the 17th state legislative district, perhaps the most pivotal swing seat in the legislature. The district extends along the northern edge of Tucson, roping in a mix of retirement communities, rural houses, and cotton farms that may soon be replaced by new tract housing. Many of the new developments in these areas, such as the sprawling Saddlebrooke neighborhood, rely on finite aquifers and get water delivered by private companies. To comply with Arizona law, developers have to prove that they have enough water to supply new homes for 100 years, but even that doesn’t guarantee that the aquifers won’t continue drying up. 

It’s difficult to interest voters in a groundwater decline that is happening out of view, in a crisis that almost nobody is talking about publicly. The best that local Democrats can do is make a general pitch that water security isa common sense, bipartisan problem that they are committed to solving — without needing to explain how they would resolve complex questions about the interplay between water regulation and economic growth, among other nuances. 

John McLean, a former engineer who is running against a longtime conservative legislator in an effort to flip the 17th district, has sought to position himself as a straight-down-the-middle moderate. His campaign literature doesn’t mention his party affiliation, but it does tout water as one of his three key policy issues, along with public education and abortion access. The campaign pamphlet he’s been leaving in the doorways of homes in Saddlebrooke argues for a “commonsense approaches to secure our water future” and declares that “we must stop foreign and out-of-state corporations from pumping unlimited water out of our state” — something that has happened in the conservative, rural parts of Arizona, but nowhere near Saddlebrooke and the 17th district.

When I joined him as he knocked doors in Saddlebrooke, McLean told me that he’s found that almost every voter he meets agrees with him on the need for sensible water regulations — a far cry from lightning-rod issues like public safety, abortion, and inflation. 

“Everybody is really serious about water independence, and I think that they’re concerned about partisanship,” he said. “I don’t think there’s really much of a partisan difference among citizens when it comes to water.”

That apparent consensus, however, does not extend to the state’s elected officials.

“My Republican opponent voted to relax groundwater pumping restrictions,” McLean, referring to a bill that would have eliminated legal liability for groundwater users whose water usage compromised nearby rivers or streams. “So he was on exactly the wrong side of that one.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One issue will decide Arizona’s future. Nobody’s campaigning on it. on Oct 22, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

“You’re so lucky you live there,” they told her. Powell thought so, too. The Northeast tends to have big summer thunderstorms and frigid winters, but it’s rarely beset by hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, or tornadoes — the cataclysmic natural disasters other parts of the country have to navigate regularly. And, unlike nearby New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — states where acreage is a hot commodity — Vermont, the most rural state in the U.S., has ample open space. 

After renting for a few years, Powell and her husband bought an old farmhouse just outside of the state capital Montpelier in 2019. Their town is known for its dirt roads, spring-fed wells, and old-school New England appeal. When she moved there, Powell remembers thinking that it was the closest thing she’d be able to find to a place safe from the effects of climate change. 

Soon, Powell would be dealing with a set of issues reminiscent of the state she had left behind.

In early 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading across the country and many people began working from home, middle- and upper-class Americans started trading dense urban areas for rural ones. Vermont towns whose populations hadn’t changed in a hundred years, towns that the state was desperate to fill before 2020, were startled by an influx of new residents. Abandoned houses were quickly sold, renovated, and resold. The state’s housing stock was thoroughly gleaned, and the cost of housing increased close to 40 percent between 2019 and 2023. 

As affordable housing became nearly impossible to come by, the homeless population grew. There were rumors of traveling nurses forced to sleep in tents near the hospitals they were treating COVID patients in. Some companies hiring out-of-state applicants gave their new employees 12 months to move to the state, to account for the difficult housing market. 

And then, last July, heavy rain started to fall on central Vermont — and kept falling. Flash floods swept across the state. Trickling rivers roared to life, swelled, and burst into the towns and cities clustered by their banks. More than 12 inches of rain fell on Montpelier that month, breaking a rainfall record set in 1989. The Winooski River, the artery that runs through the capital, crested to its highest point in close to a century. 

At 7 p.m. on the night of July 10, as rain poured, Powell and her husband checked their basement and saw that it was dry. Twenty minutes later, there was three feet of water in it. They didn’t know it yet, but the road drainage culvert above their house had failed, sending a wave of water onto their property. They were soon plunged into darkness, as thousands of customers in their area lost power. When the sun came up and the flooding had receded, 6 inches of mud lined the floors of their basement. Even with help from their coworkers, friends, and neighbors, it took the couple weeks to clean it out. The flooding ruined their HVAC system and required $25,000 in repairs. Powell’s house wasn’t in a flood plain, so she hadn’t bought flood insurance. But after months of filling out paperwork, she got reimbursement from federal disaster relief programs. 

On July 10 this year, a year later to the day, another bout of heavy rain flooded Powell’s house again. The damage was just as bad the second time. The couple considered moving, but quickly realized that the real estate market had changed drastically since they’d purchased their house in 2019. The cost of buying a new home aside, Powell, like many of her fellow climate-conscious Vermonters, doesn’t know where she would go. “We thought we were in this climate change haven,” she said. “Then you realize that that doesn’t really exist.”

Listen to former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris stump on the campaign trail, and they’ll tell you that America has a housing crisis of epic proportions. It’s one of the only issues Republicans and Democrats in Congress agree needs to be fixed, and fast. 

The problem dates back to 2008, when the Great Recession caused real estate developers to cut back dramatically on the number of new homes they were building. The rate of new homes coming online has lagged ever since, adding up to a deficit of 3.8 million housing units across the country as of 2020. 

What’s more, many of the cities where Americans want to live have strict zoning laws on the books that restrict new developments and stifle the constriction of multi-family homes in particular. Even as states have tried to make it easier for developers to build new homes, local governments and residents have conspired to stop the flow of new housing. Meanwhile, as everything has become more expensive over the past half-decade, the cost of building new homes has skyrocketed.  

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Now, extreme weather events are squeezing already-limited housing options. Climate change-driven disasters have been hitting the U.S. with more intensity over the past quarter-century, creating tens of billions of dollars worth of damage every year, as global average temperatures climb. Last year, 2.5 million Americans were displaced, either temporarily or permanently, by extreme weather. And much of America’s existing housing stock is not built to withstand the consequences of climate change, which means that tens of millions of renters and homeowners are vulnerable. 

Climate change isn’t the root cause of America’s housing crisis, but it is an erratic compounding factor that officials from the smallest towns in New England to the biggest cities in California are being forced to reckon with. This summer alone, Hurricanes Helene and Milton temporarily displaced millions of people across the South and caused hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure, businesses, and properties. 

A year out from the devastating flood of 2023, which killed two people and damaged 4,800 homes and businesses, Vermonters are confronting the difficult reality that extreme weather is shoving the state deeper into a housing deficit. Vermont’s historic downtowns, clustered along the rivers that once served as vital transportation corridors and provided power for mills and factories, are being drowned by the very arteries that once gave them life. “People want to stay in the community, but there’s a close to 0 percent vacancy rate,” said Lauren Hierl, a nonpartisan member of the Montpelier City Council. “When you have an event like the flood come in that takes offline even 50 units, there’s just nowhere for people to go.” 

A recent report conducted by Vermont housing officials found that Vermont needs to build between 24,000 and 36,000 new homes by 2029 to accommodate its growing population. The cost of building a small home or apartment rose from $370,000 in 2022 to $500,000 a year later. Half of renters in the state spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing — widely considered the threshold between affordable and unaffordable. 

Seth Bongartz, a Democratic member of the Vermont House of Representatives, sees the housing shortage in his state as a “little microcosm” of larger national housing and climate trends. Bongartz recently introduced a bill that makes it easier for Vermont municipalities to approve new housing developments in the state’s most populated areas, the idea being that building denser housing where amenities like gas, water, and sewage already exist simultaneously expands housing stock and prevents sprawl into the state’s revered wilderness. The state’s Republican governor vetoed the bill, but Democratic majorities in the state legislature overrode him, and the law was enacted in June. The loosened restrictions will help jumpstart more development, Bongartz said: “It’s coming.” But so are more floods. 

In Vermont’s capital, city leaders, nonprofits, business associations, and tourism boards are trying to take on the city’s twin housing and climate crises. And they’re doing it with community input. A series of public meetings held in the months after the 2023 floods, attended by hundreds of concerned residents, spurred the development of a new commission dedicated to figuring out how to protect the city from the effects of climate change. Working alongside the city council, the coalition is racing against the clock to make Montpelier more resilient before the next heavy rainstorm. 

To the passing leaf peeper, hiker, or skier, Montpelier, the smallest state capital in the U.S., is the picture of Vermont charm. Brick houses line the Winooski River, which runs parallel to Main Street. Small businesses sling lattes, pizzas, and secondhand flannels. The gold-domed capitol building, on State Street, stands sentinel over a city that’s home to just 8,000 residents. 

But things have changed since the event the National Weather Service dubbed the Great Vermont Flood of 2023. Close to 100 buildings in the capital, many of them businesses, were damaged. Some shops never reopened, and the ones that did are struggling to recoup losses from closures forced by the disaster. The only federal post office in Montpelier has been shuttered for more than a year, meaning that residents of Vermont’s capital city have to go to a nearby town to mail their packages. On the far side of State Street, a mother is still camping out with her two teenage sons in the shell of their former house. A small number of houses have been abandoned permanently — their owners are in the process of getting buyouts from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or FEMA, the federal government’s disaster relief arm. 

To those in the know, it’s obvious that the floods sparked the beginning of a precarious new era in Montpelier, one that has not yet come into full focus.

Melissa Whittaker and her husband, Carlo, own a pizza restaurant called Positive Pie in downtown Montpelier. On the morning of July 10, 2023, water started rushing into their basement faster than they had ever seen — and soon, into the first floor, too. Keeping the water out was futile; they had to close the restaurant and speed home before the roads washed out. When they came back the next morning, Positive Pie was utterly wrecked. Prosciutto and mozzarella were scattered on the floor in indistinguishable black piles. In the basement, the wall separating their building from the neighboring building had been blown into bits by the force of the water. Gobs of pizza dough hung like stalactites from the rafters. 

The federal flood insurance they had only covered the first floor of the restaurant — the national flood insurance program doesn’t cover basements in flood zones. In order to reopen the restaurant, they needed new floors, walls, plumbing, electric wiring, and a mezzanine steel loft to store the goods they had previously kept downstairs. The upgrades and repairs cost them $800,000 over the course of more than 12 months. Melissa and Carlo got a little over $100,000 from their insurance company and $200,000 from a Vermont state business assistance program. 

They applied for a small business loan from the federal government to cover the remaining $500,000. The money came with an unthinkable price: their house as collateral. “If we go bankrupt, we lose everything,” Melissa said. 

Melissa and Carlo aren’t the only homeowners in central Vermont who are one disaster away from homelessness. After more floods hit the region this summer, city and state leaders are desperately trying to find answers to a question thousands of other American communities, from Florida to North Carolina to California, are also struggling to address: How do you help affected citizens in the short term and prepare for next year at the same time? Two projects underway in Montpelier hint at the magnitude of the challenge ahead.

Ben Doyle is president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont, a nonprofit organization that works to safeguard old buildings and other heirlooms of Vermont’s long history. In his spare time, he volunteers on the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience — an agency that was created after the flooding last year at the urging of Montpelier residents. Since he began volunteering, the commission has taken up just about every spare minute he has. “I can’t coach basketball,” he told me on a drive around Montpelier in September. “But I can do this.” 

The Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience was born of a series of well-attended public meetings, organized by three local organizations, that took place in the months following the 2023 flood. Paul Costello, a local with an uncanny knack for mediating tough conversations, led the discussions. The conversations were focused on climate resilience, Costello told me: how to build better communications and early warning systems ahead of disastrous floods; whether the city’s water treatment facility, which almost flooded, needs to be hardened; and, crucially, how to direct water away from houses and businesses downtown. 

Many of the roughly 1,000 people who attended the meetings had just lived through their first climate-driven disaster and were struggling to navigate the slow, bureaucratic, and confusing federal disaster relief process. Less than 2 percent of Vermonters had flood insurance before the floods hit.  

The effect of the flooding on the state’s housing stock was a hot topic at the public meetings. People who had never considered moving before started looking around for new places to live and were startled, like Brittany Powell was, to discover that there was virtually no affordable real estate to be found in the entire state. Addressing the multifaceted problems driving the housing shortage in Montpelier, Costello said, wasn’t something the meetings were aimed at fixing, but the issue was inescapable. “It weaves through everything in our community,” he said.  

At the last of the meetings, more than 300 people crowded into the auditorium of the local High School. Its basement had been steeped in four feet of water just months prior. Attendees were given six blue stickers, which they could put on more than a dozen resilience projects they had come up with over the course of the previous two meetings. The most popular initiatives fell into three buckets: establishing an emergency response system, restoring the floodplain, and creating a more resilient downtown. Soon after, the city, in collaboration with two local nonprofits, officially established the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience, a group of 14 volunteers and one paid executive director, which would be tasked with working in parallel with the city to accomplish the goals the community put forth.

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For the past year, Doyle has been trying to make one of the most important of those directives — establish areas that can serve as giant sponges for flood water around Montpelier — happen. The project that’s closest to coming to fruition is called 5 Home Farm Way, an 18-acre parcel and the site of a historic home owned by the founding family of Montpelier. Doyle took me to the site, which the Preservation Trust, in collaboration with the resilience commission and the city, aims to turn into a natural containment area that can hold water that would otherwise flow from the Winooski River into Montpelier during a flood event. If the Great Vermont Flood hadn’t happened, the decrepit house on the property might have been turned into a museum or the headquarters for a nonprofit. But after the rain fell last summer, Doyle — who had dedicated his career to historical preservation — knew the house had to go. “The idea of more public investment going into a building that is no longer sustainable because of climate change is a bad idea,” he said. 

Removing the house and creating a channel connecting the property to the Winooski river will take roughly two years, Doyle said, and the engineering studies haven’t been completed yet, which means that no one knows exactly how much flooding in Montpelier will be averted by the project. But once it’s done, 5 Home Farm Way will serve as natural flood protection for the town, hopefully preventing more homes from being destroyed in future years. “The idea behind it is that maybe it drops the floodwater in Montpelier down by six inches,” he said. 

Still, Doyle knows the scale of the flooding to come can’t be stopped by a single, 18-acre parcel. “There’s a bunch of other parcels in this region that if you could coordinate them all and have it all be floodplain restoration you’re starting to actually do something,” he said. “But it’s going to take like 20 of these projects to make a difference. That’s tens of millions of dollars and decades of work.” 

Right across the street from 5 Home Farm Way, the city is embarking on a project that tackles Montpelier’s climate and housing predicament from the other direction. There, the local government is building a new affordable housing development on the site of an old golf course formerly owned by a fraternal social club called The Elks. For years, the Montpelier City Council hoped developers would buy the vacant property and turn it into an affordable apartment complex — something Montpelier desperately needed even before the floods hit. But there was little appetite among developers for such a project in Montpelier, said Hierl, the city council member. Developers were more interested in building more lucrative single-family condos in Stowe and other areas of Vermont where wealthy people tend to buy expensive second homes. 

So in 2022, the city took matters into its own hands, purchasing the 138-acre property with a $2 million bond with plans to turn it into a recreational site and a housing development. “We felt like we needed to take a more active stance, as our local government, because housing is such a crisis,” Hierl said. “We need to be proactive.” After the floods hit Montpelier and dozens of houses by the river were inundated, Hierl and other members of the council realized just how important their investment was. 

The former Elks Club is located just a few miles from downtown, but it’s a world away in elevation, located at the top of a hill that’s never been touched by flooding. The aim is to eventually build approximately 300 units of housing on the site, which would significantly alleviate the housing shortage in Montpelier. But there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before the city can break ground. The property still needs sewage, water, and electricity lines put in. It needs a road with two exit points, per Vermont state law. It also needs a developer on board to cover most of the upfront costs of building. The city has $500,000 in FEMA funds to use, left over from 2023, but that’s a drop in the bucket. Hierl estimates it’ll be three years before the city breaks ground on the project, and a couple years after that before the new housing comes on the market. Still, she said, the simple reality is that there is no one else in Montpelier committed to providing affordable housing opportunities for residents. 

“In some of the towns in Vermont that are successful in the development of new housing units, it’s often taken an intervention from the municipality to make it happen,” said Doyle, standing in front of the old Elks Club and looking out over the acres of sloping lawn that surround it. “Some people don’t believe that’s the role of government, helping facilitate the development of affordable housing. And yet, if the city didn’t step in, that’s not what would’ve happened here.”

It’s one thing for a city like Montpelier to take steps toward building a single affordable housing development, but it’s quite another to build enough affordable, climate-resilient housing to meet the need across Vermont — and across the country. Alex Farrell, Vermont’s top housing official and a Republican, said that, while Vermont has made strides in becoming more climate resilient, he doesn’t know how his state will address the toll extreme weather is taking on housing across Vermont without outside help. “To ask states to take this on alone, it’s just not doable,” he said. 

This year, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Senator Tina Smith, of Minnesota, both Democrats, introduced a bill that would create a $30 billion social housing authority within the federal government aimed at financing affordable units across the U.S. The bill pulls from green housing legislation that AOC and Bernie Sanders, the left-wing senator from Vermont, introduced in 2019 that would have directed billions toward making existing public housing stock climate resilient, had it passed. 

The new legislation is a long shot — congressional Republicans want less social safety net spending, not more. And record-high inflation has led to a situation in which new federal spending, in general, is increasingly frowned upon by voters who will be casting ballots this fall. But in Vermont, where extreme weather events are just starting to affect communities, local and state officials — both Democratic and Republican — say out-of-the-box thinking is exactly what’s needed. 

“It’s not like this kind of disaster is a one-off thing that’s really unusual or that we might not see again,” said Hierl. “Our federal, our state, and our local government all need to be better equipped to help people through these challenging climate disasters that we know are just going to continue growing. We need to do better.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The flood that forced a housing reckoning in Vermont on Oct 22, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

Janine Jackson interviewed author and UC/Santa Barbara research professor emeritus George Lipsitz about the impacts of housing discrimination for the October 11, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Grist (3/10/15)

Janine Jackson: Some 10 years ago, food delivery service FreshDirect got more than $100 million of incentives to place a warehouse in a populated, poor, largely people of color community in the South Bronx, to bring heavy diesel truck traffic to asthma-inflicted neighborhoods already affected by waste treatment plants and high-traffic highways.

Groups like South Bronx Unite, like Good Jobs for NY, opposed these further health harms to the community, as well as the notion that a handful of insecure, poorly waged jobs could serve as compensation. South Bronx Unites’ Mychal Johnson said: “Of course we want jobs, but we should not have to choose between having a job and having clean air. If you can’t breathe, you can’t work.”

Now we understand that folks are working to reclaim pieces of the affected community called the Harlem River Yard, including allowing access to the Harlem River waterfront, access that’s been cut off to the public for a long time.

That’s just one of thousands of stories that exemplify the ways that racism inflects all kinds of decisions, policies, laws, that we’re told are, nowadays anyway, indifferent to race. That’s a mistaken notion that hobbles our ability to respond effectively to the interconnected harms of white supremacy and myriad US institutions that, to be real, harm everyone, and not just Black and brown people.

UC Press (2024)

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. He’s the author of many books, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place among them.

His most recent book, that we’re here to talk about, is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth. It’s out now from University of California Press.

I will note that George was, for years, the chair of the board of the African American Policy Forum, where I also serve as a board member. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, George Lipsitz.

George Lipsitz: Thank you. So glad to be here.

JJ: Your new book addresses the interconnectedness of laws, policies and practices around housing that, without needing to be overtly coordinated, reinforce one another to produce and reproduce discriminatory outcomes. So we could really pull an opening thread anywhere here.

But when we talk about housing discrimination, I know that many folks’ minds go to redlining, where officially sanctioned protocols meant Black families just couldn’t buy homes in certain neighborhoods, and the thinking is, while certainly that had lasting impacts, it was years ago, and it’s been legally remediated by now.

So while the book talks, importantly, about the inadequacies of the ways that harms have been diagnosed and responded to, maybe we could just start with a breakdown of some of the multiple forms of discrimination in housing that that takes. Why is it that housing is at the center of the spider web of so many other discriminatory dangers?

George Lipsitz: “A lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.”

GL: When I say the “danger zone is everywhere,” housing discrimination raises in peoples’ minds a direct act of discrimination, a refusal to rent or sell to a person of a targeted race, or the long effects of redlining. And these are still in effect, and they have an enormous impact on peoples’ life chances and opportunities. But a lot of housing discrimination is enacted through things that don’t overtly appear to be about race, and may not even directly appear to be about housing.

I talk in the book about the ways in which low-ball home value appraisals of property owned by Black people hurt their ability to sell and refinance. And those same houses have artificially high property tax appraisals, which makes them pay a disproportionate share of taxation, makes them subject to tax lien foreclosures and auctions, which have been a massive transfer of wealth, especially in the last 10 years.

Housing discrimination puts people from aggrieved groups in what Tricia Rose calls “proximity to toxicity,” close to incinerators, toxic waste dumps, diesel fuels, pesticides.

CNN (3/6/15)

It also is enacted through a tax system that functions as an engine of racial inequality. Property tax relief in some cities for homeowners has meant that renters—and the city of Ferguson in Missouri is an example of this—are harassed by predatory policing that imposes arbitrary fines, fees and debts on them as a way to raise municipal revenue, to make up for the subsidies that are given to people who’ve been able to profit from housing discrimination.

And there’s also mass incarceration, a disabling process, a disease-spreading practice. It affects people’s nervous systems, and anxiety produces hypertension.

Even something like insurance, which appears to be race-neutral because it’s determined by algorithms, the algorithms are created by humans, and they basically make the success of past discrimination an excuse for continuing and extending it by equating Black people with risk.

I’ll give an example. One of the things that affects your credit score is the kind of loan that you got. And so if you got a subprime loan, even if you qualified for a prime loan, you’re considered to be a credit risk, but there was nothing wrong with your behavior. It was the discrimination of the loan that was given to you.

So I say that the danger zone is everywhere, that housing discrimination harms health and steals wealth. And as you said, it not only harms its direct victims, it also squanders the skills and abilities of the people whose lives are shortened because of it, misallocates resources, and it basically increases costs of insurance and healthcare, policing, for everyone.

JJ: Let’s spell just a couple of things out, first about health: Housing discrimination harming health is not limited to polluters, like I talked about FreshDirect, being placed in aggrieved communities. The impact of housing policy on health—there’s a number of other pieces to that, yes?

GL: You can be in an area that has no medical services. We found that areas that have concentrated poverty, and concentrated populations of people who can’t move elsewhere because of housing discrimination, have more pedestrian accidents. The street lighting is worse.

People who are renters in this age of incredible shortages of housing—and part of that is because of a massive buy-up of homes by private equity firms—can’t really bargain with their landlords. If your landlord is somebody you know, that’s one thing. If it’s a private equity company that has 20,000 or 30,000 residences, you may not even be able to find out the identity of that landlord. And then it becomes very difficult to say, “Repair the furnace, make sure that the electricity is safe, make sure that the water is OK, deal with the pests and rodents that are in this place.” So it creates health hazards inside the houses. It creates hazards outside the houses.

CBS (9/19/22)

Also, people who live in places where a lot of houses have been torn down—especially in a city like Detroit, where private equity firms have been buying them up and tearing them down—that produces dust, which young children bring into their homes from playing in the street, and it increases their likelihood of asthma and many other deadly diseases.

Farm workers constantly live in housing that is close to pesticides, close to pollution, but they also suffer from being in places that are food deserts, where you can’t get nutritious food, or food swamps, where you can only get non-nutritious food. And they also suffer from the lack of medical insurance, some of that caused by the high cost of housing. It means that rather than be evicted from their homes, they’ll forego necessary medicines and remedies that they would otherwise buy.

JJ: I don’t believe that people understand the interconnectedness of this, and I think that’s part of the way that we talk about things: Healthcare problems are one thing, housing problems are another thing. And if you disconnect those things, then you don’t get what’s happening. And that’s exactly what I think this book is getting at, is the way that these things are immediately connected. They have everything to do with one another.

For example, stealing wealth, which is the other part of the title: People think owning a home is central to the American dream, and it’s not just because you have a roof over your head. It’s because you have hereditary wealth. You now own a thing that you can transfer to your children, and that has everything to do with your sense of confidence in your life, and your ability to provide for folks, and your absence from, your distance from, precarity. All of these things are connected, which I think the book is trying to get at.

GL: Yeah, well, certainly these impediments to being able to inherit assets that appreciate in value, can be passed down across generations, it’s a massive transfer of wealth, and a tremendous injury that goes across generations. But it’s also a matter of: housing and healthcare are talked about separately, but they’re also talked about separately from education, from incarceration, from transportation, and yet they’re mutually constitutive.

Even within some of these fields, when people are trained in law, they focus on the tort model of injury. And this teaches them that discrimination has to be individual, intentional, interpersonal, and that it’s an aberrant practice in an otherwise fair market.

But, actually, this has nothing to do with the way housing discrimination works most of the time. Although there are 4 million instances of intentional, individual, interpersonal injuries every year, housing discrimination is also collective, cumulative, continuing. It produces inequalities that can’t be remedied one at a time.

Guardian (2/26/20)

And similarly with health, that we have an individualized model of health that imagines that people’s genetics, and whether they exercise and whether they eat healthy food, is the key thing in determining their health. But there are also collective issues, like sewage management, garbage collection, coal-burning furnaces and incinerators, lead in paint and gasoline.

All of these things have an impact on health, and they not only need to be studied together, but people involved in fair housing law have to think about health justice. People who are dispensing medical care need to think about the neighborhoods that their patients come from and return to, and the impact that those neighborhoods have on their health, and on the relations between parents and children, and on even whether people are considered valued in this society.

You live in a place that tells you you’re everybody’s lowest priority, you may not have a reason to want to be healthy. And then, if you add to that, the lack of physicians, the high cost of healthcare, the way in which pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies jack up the cost of healthcare, you’re basically engaged in a calculated cruelty in the organized abandonment of large numbers of people.

And this harm is most egregious on children, because they can’t defend themselves, because their physical systems are less able to deal with health menaces. And so we’re basically squandering a large part of the next generation in a country that is increasingly made up of people who are not white, and we’re basically setting those children up for failure. It’s like a time bomb that will go off in the future, and there’s a lot of foreseeable harm that could be prevented.

A key theory of pediatric care is that you don’t just remedy illnesses after they happen. You foresee them in advance and prevent them from happening. We could do that with the environment, we could do that with nutrition. We could do that with giving people a safe, affordable living environment. But we don’t do it, because there’s so much money to be made from injustice.

JJ: I do want to put folks onto the book The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, because there’s no way that we can address all of this in the time that we have. But I want to say, the book is enlightening about many things, and one of them is the importance of just the way that we look at, the way we see societal inequities, and the way we talk about them. And what you’re saying is we’re talking about rejecting this approach that addresses individuals as though they were divorced from community. We’re looking at individual actions by individual landlords, and not looking at systems, and that’s part of the problem.

GL: And this is what the law assumes, that an injury interrupts an otherwise just situation. You sue the individual perpetrator, you’re then made whole, and you go back to being fine.

But what if you’re not fine to begin with? What if there isn’t one individual perpetrator? What if it’s a conjuncture of obstacles in your way? Once you punish that one corporation, they declare bankruptcy, and they open up the next day with a different name.

And once the injured person wins a fair housing settlement, they go back into an innately unfair housing market, where they are disadvantaged in getting loans. They’re disadvantaged in getting insurance. They’re disadvantaged in their relations with the police. They’re disadvantaged in relation to the schools that their children are able to go to.

So multi-axis problems need multi-axis and intersectional solutions. And that means we need to work together. It means that there’s a limit to what any one of us can do as an individual to have good health or housing for ourselves, much less for the whole society.

And that’s why I try to stress in the book the emerging active and engaged public sphere constituency for good health and fair housing, and fair housing councils throughout the country, and advocates and attorneys who take on those cases, public health collectives, environmental justice organizing, community gardens, food co-ops, arts-based health projects like Building Healthy Communities in Boyle Heights, a whole series of community land trusts where people pool resources to take speculation out of the market.

And so people are mobilizing precisely because they realize that as an individual, there’s very little you can do. In the courtroom, the boardroom or the banker’s office, there are limits to what can be done.

Now there should be justice in all of those places, and individuals are entitled to good health, good housing, to the full benefits of civil rights law. But we also need to have an understanding that race itself is a political, not a biological, category, that it functions because people see things a certain way. Racism persists because people believe that people are members of different races, and we need to see racism as structural, systemic, collective.

And good health and good housing can’t just be left to be private commodities to be purchased. They’re public resources, and they need to be protected by the public, and nurtured and sustained.

LA Times (5/29/22)

JJ: I’ll only ask you one final question about news media, because we do see coverage, sometimes, about the difficulties of homelessness, or the problems of companies like Blackstone buying up homes. We see coverage. It’s just that it’s not connecting the dots. The story about why people are homeless is not connected to the story about venture capitalists buying up homes. It’s not connected.

And so to me, it’s what I call “narrating the nightmare.” Something terrible is happening, and look at these harmed people, but somehow we can’t name who’s behind it, or how it could be stopped. “But,” media say, “you can’t say we’re not acknowledging it because look at this one story where we said how harmful it is.”

And it drives me up a wall, because I know that reporters aren’t stupid, and I know that they’re not incapable of thinking systemically. I know they don’t think structural problems are boring, and I know that they don’t understand that regular people could grasp them.

So I guess what I’m saying is that corporate news media suffer from some of the same ailments that you are diagnosing in healthcare and housing, and could benefit from some of the same medicine, I guess.

New York Times (11/2/22)

GL: Yeah, and some of this has to do with the demographics of the news media industry, which is similar to the demographics of the legal profession and the medical profession. There aren’t enough people who have experienced discrimination directly.

But it’s also that a good plot has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so last year there were a number of stories about bias in home appraisal, in which Black families got a low appraisal for their home and they then got a white friend to sit in for them, and they took down the Jacob Lawrence paintings and the Toni Morrison books. And when it appeared that the home was owned by a white person, it was as much as $500,000 more.

I’m glad they covered this, and this is a good story. And Fair Housing groups have sued about appraisal discrimination, and the National Fair Housing Alliance has a whole campaign about it.

But nobody connected those instances to the systemic problems in the appraisal industry, which Elizabeth Korver-Glenn has written about in her book Race Brokers. They haven’t related that the low home value appraisals are connected to high property tax appraisals, as Andrew Kahrl points out in his great book The Black Tax. So the information is out there, but it’s just that they end the story too soon, and they assume things are going to be all right.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play called A Raisin in the Sun, which is about a Black family moving into a white neighborhood. And at the end of the play, the Black people are in the neighborhood, and critics said, “Oh, this is a happy ending.” And Lorraine Hansberry said, “Well, if you think that’s a happy ending, wait until they wake up the next morning and have bricks and rocks thrown at their house, and the neighbors don’t talk to them, and the police harass them.”

And so you can’t end the story too soon. We have to think about all these interconnections.

JJ: Absolutely. And we could and will continue this conversation much further.

But I just want to tell folks that we’ve been speaking with George Lipsitz. He’s research professor emeritus of Black studies in sociology at the University of California/Santa Barbara. And the book we’re talking about is called The Danger Zone Is Everywhere, and it’s available now from University of California Press. George Lipsitz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GL: Thank you, Janine. I really appreciate the conversation.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

They contacted a few contractors, who provided quotes in the $28,000 range for the solar system. But each bid came with a caveat: photovoltaic panels can last 25 years or more, but the roof on their 2,000-square-foot home had about 10 years left in it. This made for a difficult decision: Pay for a replacement now, which would nearly double the cost of the project, or install all that hardware knowing they’d need to remove and reinstall it when it came time to reroof — a job that can cost hundreds of dollars per panel.

“At that point we froze,” said Bryan Stubblefield. “The fact that we had one more decision to make caused pause.”

The Stubblefields are far from alone in this dilemma, said Amy Atchley, one of the contractors the couple contacted. Among the first questions her company,Amy’s Roofing and Solar, asks a customer is the age and condition of their roof. About half need work done to accommodate solar and, she says, the path forward can be particularly vexing for those who still have five, 10, or even 15 years to go before needing a reroof.

“It’s really hard to counsel people,” she said. “Most people just decide to wait.”

Residential solar systems usually provide 5 to 11 kilowatts of power, which, with some 5 millions homes tapping the sun, adds up to over 38 gigawatts nationally. That’s the equivalent of more than 11,000 wind turbines. Aside from helping mitigate climate change, photovoltaic panels can also help provide resiliency against outages. But when homeowners have to align their desire to go green with the age of their roof, those benefits can be delayed — or frightfully expensive. 

Read Next

They thought getting their home off fossil fuels would be straightforward. Chaos ensued.

Tik Root

One reason the question can be so vexing is because unlike solar panels, tax incentives don’t help offset underlying roof issues — even when addressing them is done while going solar. The Internal Revenue Service makes clear that the federal tax credit that can cover as much as 30 percent of a photovoltaic system does not include “traditional building components that primarily serve a roofing or structural function.” 

The Stubblefields said the lack of assistance “absolutely” influenced their decision to wait. But Bryan Stubblefield said he understands that it would be quite expensive for the government to subsidize such a major expense.

The potentially good news is that — regardless of roofing incentives — the residential solar market is nascent enough that it may not yet need to worry much about losing customers like the Stubblefields. The half a million or so residential solar systems that come online each year is far short of the 5 million or so homes that need a new roof each year. That means that there are still plenty of potential solar customers who need a new roof anyway — and it’s a demographic that many companies are targeting.

“The best time to go solar is when you’re getting a new roof,” said Kealy Dewitt, vice president of marketing and public policy at the roofing company GAF. The organization recently designed a product it calls Timberline Solar, which incorporates a photovoltaic panel into a shingle that is installed much like a conventional shingle. If GAF can get more people who need new roofs to convert to solar shingles, Dewitt said it would be “a massive deployment opportunity for clean energy.”

Atchley agrees. Although there may be some situations where it makes financial sense to install panels and dismantle them later to reroof, waiting to do it all at once makes the most sense. Many of her customers find her while seeking bids for a roof and end up installing solar, too. It rarely happens the other way around, she said.

Like Dewitt, she thinks the government could do more to incentivize integrated roofing and photovoltaic technologies. Her company, for example, sells a metal roof designed to easily accept solar and have a lifespan almost twice that of the average panel. It doesn’t currently qualify for clean energy incentives. 

“You’re getting the roof and solar,” she said. “It should count.”

Lawmakers have tried to address this issue. In 2021, democratic members of Congress introduced the “RAISE the Roof Act” that would have expanded the solar tax credit to include these integrated solutions. Such efforts have gone nowhere, however, leaving many would-be solar adopters with difficult calculations to make about their roof. That includes the Stubblefields, who have since moved.

“It looks like we have about 5 to 10 years left on the roof,” said Bryan. “We’re faced with the same question again.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Thinking of going solar? Wait until you need a new roof. on Oct 17, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

 

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

UC Press (2024)

This week on CounterSpin: For many people and for media, the idea of “racial discrimination in housing” invokes an image of individual landlords refusing to rent or sell homes to Black and brown people. But that understanding is so incomplete as to be harmful. A new book doesn’t just illuminate the thicket of effects of systemic racism as it affects where people live; it reframes the understanding of the role of housing—connecting housing injustice with health inequities and wealth disparities, as well as lifting up work that connects those “mutually constitutive” elements of what the author calls an “unjust, destructive and even deadly racial order.”

George Lipsitz is research professor emeritus of Black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and How Racism Takes Place, among other titles. He joins us to talk about his new book: The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the port strike.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

The next morning, as the worst of the winds died down, they emerged to find that Hurricane Helene had left behind a world of damage: Fragments of one neighbor’s walls littered the grass, roof panels had been ripped clean off a communal building, and a trailer just a few dozen feet from her own had been flipped entirely upside down. In the distance, a sea of downed power lines and felled trees covered the mobile home park’s 8 acres. Her trailer sat amid the calamitous scene, miraculously unscathed. 

Robison was relieved. She had lost everything the year before when Hurricane Idalia, another Category 4, bore down on Taylor County and caused a tree to crash through her manufactured home. That’s how she ended up at Paradise Park in the first place, living in a temporary trailer issued to her by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s just a little bit of damage. It ain’t too much. It ain’t like Idalia,” said Robison, which crushed her trailer “like a can.” “We just living, man. I just hope ain’t nothing else gonna come through here.” 

Not even two weeks later, Florida’s Big Bend communities are now preparing for Hurricane Milton, a rapidly intensifying system forecasted to bring life-threatening storm surge and winds later this week to many of the same areas devastated by Helene.

Florida’s Big Bend is nestled into the crook of the state’s Gulf Coast, largely underdeveloped and lower-income. A huge share of the region’s residents live in manufactured housing. In Taylor County, where Helene made landfall and where Milton is expected to inflict damage, more than a third of the housing stock consists of prefab units, according to census data. Many of the counties in southern Georgia, where Helene’s eye moved next, have a similar mix. And in western North Carolina, where the storm’s heavy rain caused mass flooding and landslides, around 15 percent of housing stock is manufactured — nearly triple the national average.

Communities like Robison’s — littered with crumpled trailers, scraped-off aluminum siding, and waterlogged campers — now serve as acute examples of how the climate and housing crises in the United States overlap. 

Because of how mobile home units are anchored and the materials typically used to build them, manufactured houses are among the most vulnerable types of housing stock in climate disasters. They aren’t rooted as deeply into the ground, which means they can flip or collapse during wind events, and they tend to have thinner exteriors and insulation than site-built homes, which mean they are more vulnerable to leakage and the spread of mold. These problems are far more common with “mobile homes,” or manufactured homes built before the launch of 1970s-era construction guidelines, but they also exist in more recent models. 

A ballooning shortage of affordable housing has pushed more people into manufactured homes at the same time that extreme weather like hurricanes are becoming more severe. Victims of climate disasters also often find themselves turning to manufactured homes in the absence of other housing stock — perpetuating a cycle of substandard living and displacement. Making matters even worse is that many mobile home residents, like those at Paradise Park, don’t own the land underneath their house. 

“Families who live in manufactured home parks, their rate of poverty is about three times as much as people who have conventional housing,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies household and community risk to hazards and climate change. They also either lack insurance, or are underinsured, further magnifying their chance of long-term economic disruption from a hurricane like Helene. People in these situations additionally often confront “really complicated issues” in financing a home, he noted. 

“You can’t get a conventional mortgage on a manufactured home in most states, including Florida, because it’s not ‘real property.’ It’s what we call ‘chattel property’ or personal property,” he said.  

This key distinction makes it harder for those trying to rebuild a manufactured home after a disaster, because it can be more difficult to get aid, particularly when such properties are purchased informally through private sales, Rumbach said. People living in mobile home parks across the nation also often find themselves ineligible for recovery programs like buyouts because they don’t own the land below their structures. 

Florida has more manufactured homes than almost any other state in the country. An estimated 12 percent of the housing stock in Helene’s path in Florida, spread across 21 counties, is made up of mobile or manufactured homes, according to an analysis provided to Grist by researchers at the Urban Institute. More than a third of those are rentals. The proportion is far higher in the Big Bend, where the storm made landfall, and in South Carolina, where it also brought damaging winds.

These homes once provided an alternative for those who couldn’t afford traditional housing, but climate change is stripping them of being this lifeline, a refuge. The cost of the average manufactured home has risen alongside the cost of building materials like wood and aluminum, and many people who lost their mobile homes during 2023’s Hurricane Idalia have struggled to purchase or rent new ones.

“The prices of mobile homes [have gone] up significantly since COVID,” said Leon Wright, the building director for Dixie County, where more than half of the housing stock consists of manufactured homes, one of the highest rates in the nation. “It’s not as affordable as it once was.” Dixie lost 130 houses to Idalia last year, and it still has yet to repair many of them. Wright said Helene destroyed far more. 

One of the largest providers of manufactured homes in the Big Bend is none other than FEMA itself, which deploys them to house storm victims like Robison. The agency tends to use these units, known colloquially as “FEMA trailers,” when it cannot find enough traditional housing in a given disaster area.

FEMA has drawn criticism in the past for relying on travel trailers rather than relocating disaster victims into standard homes or apartments, and for being too slow to provide these trailers. States like Louisiana have begun to buy and ship in their own manufactured homes after big storms in order to avoid federal red tape, and Florida’s top emergency official said that he would seek to do the same after Helene.

Hundreds of these trailers have become a part of the Big Bend’s manufactured housing ecosystem since Idalia, and more will arrive soon following Helene, and likely Milton. Todd Mikola, the owner of Paradise Park, told Grist two days after landfall that he is planning to clear trees and crush damaged trailers to make room for more FEMA trailers — he was in the midst of moving trees away from the former home of a woman who had lost her job and fallen behind on rent.

“I want to beautify the place,” said Mikola, who lives in Germany and bought the trailer park three years ago. He had flown in from Germany just a few days before the storm and was planning to leave town a few days later. He told Grist that Helene hadn’t damaged the park — omitting mention of the flipped and damaged trailers or the transformers that burst in Helene’s immediate aftermath.

FEMA only rents its mobile home units to storm victims for 18 months, but trailers often become a dead-end for displaced people, who in many cases cannot find affordable housing long after the disaster. A 2022 analysis by The New York Times found that a large share of victims from recent hurricanes, such as 2020’s Laura and 2021’s Ida, remained in trailers even as FEMA wound down its aid for those storms.

Tony Lacey, who also lives in a FEMA trailer just next door to Robison in Paradise Park, said he had no idea what he would do if the agency kicked him out of his home in February, the 18-month anniversary of Idalia. That storm had destroyed his home in the coastal town of Keaton Beach, landing him in Paradise Park. In the year since, he has been unable to find a job in the area, and his car permanently broke down. The agency hasn’t been receptive to his attempts to purchase the structure.

“They didn’t even talk to me about it,” he said. “[FEMA] said, ‘You don’t have income.’ And they’re intimidating when you talk to them.” A spokesperson for FEMA did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment by publication, citing the demands of the agency’s ongoing emergency response to Helene.

Robison has also been stuck in a waiting game with the agency ever since she moved in last November, unsure when or if it will force her out of her home, out of Paradise Park.

“I don’t know if they ain’t getting it, or they don’t understand, or I don’t know,” she said, “but I would like for them to give us these campers, because we don’t have homes to go to.” 

Campers and mobile homes are an affordable backup for many families in areas with scarce housing, but some residents in disaster areas are starting to see them as a permanent solution — a way to avoid the high cost of building to flood and wind standards. 

When a home suffers significant damage during a storm, federal regulations require the homeowner to rebuild it to a higher flood standard. For coastal homeowners on the Big Bend, that can mean elevating as much as 18 or 20 feet in the air — an expensive and lengthy process. 

Those who can’t afford to elevate are turning to manufactured housing. Coastal residents can bring campers onto their land and erect “pole barns,” or rudimentary roof shelters, to protect them from the elements. Because these homes aren’t permanent structures, they aren’t subject to local building codes or insurance mandates. When big storms come, the owners can just drive them to higher ground for a few days.

Wright said more coastal residents in his county are turning to campers and that he understands why, given the stringency of state and federal building codes designed to protect against flood and wind damage.

“You always see it,” he said. “People lose freedoms in the name of security or safety.” He went on to refer to the building codes as “borderline communism.” He added, however, that the conversion of many homes to camper parking spaces could deal a big hit to the Dixie County budget, which relies to a great extent on property tax revenue from coastal homes. The taxable value of a pole barn lot is much lower than that of an actual house.

Rumbach, the hazard and housing expert, worries about more residents utilizing this sort of largely unregulated manufactured housing. The financial strain of hurricanes, he said, compounded by a shortage of affordable housing, could force people to make decisions that put them at greater risk during future disasters.

“I worry about [this] being maladaptation,” he said. “I’m concerned that the outcome of this storm could be that we are more vulnerable next time, not less.” 

Clint and Brooke Hiers, longtime residents of Horseshoe Beach, a town of just 170 people, are considering a transition to this tentative form of housing. After evacuating to higher ground ahead of Helene, they drove back to their seaside community in Dixie County on Friday to find it reduced to a maze of splinters and debris. Their home, which was elevated around 5 feet, had been pushed off its pilings by storm surge and fallen into a neighbor’s yard. Brooke’s sister’s house next door had been sheared apart by the water.

“You can’t rebuild down here, because if you do, you got to go to code,” said Clint, staring at what remained of his house, stuck in a stand of waterlogged trees. He estimated that elevating his house to 18 feet would cost a few hundred thousand dollars. Even then, he would still have to pay more than $10,000 a year for flood and windstorm insurance, assuming insurance companies would sell it to him.

Given those costs, it seemed far easier for him and Brooke to adopt a more tentative form of residence on the coast.

“I could take that lot and build a pretty good-sized pole barn to put a camper on,” he said. “Then when the storm comes, you just pull it out. You don’t have to have insurance. That’s what everybody’s going to after Idalia — a lot of people already did that down here.” 

As Brooke examined the damage, she seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “Everybody’s bone-ass broke right now from everything we had to do for Idalia,” she said. “We are broke, broke. Spent all our savings. And now it’s just gone.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Floridians in mobile homes, Hurricane Helene was a disaster waiting to happen on Oct 7, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

In a preliminary damage estimate released on Thursday, the private forecaster AccuWeather pegged the financial cost of Hurricane Helene’s damages at $225 to $250 billion, more than double what it estimated in the first days after the storm made landfall in Florida last week — and far more than recent major hurricanes like 2012’s Sandy and 2017’s Harvey. That massive number includes the cost of rebuilding homes, businesses, roads, and infrastructure in the storm’s path from Florida to Tennessee, as well as the wages and economic output that will be lost during the yearslong rebuild.

Another fact that makes Helene’s devastation so unprecedented is that almost none of those hundreds of billions of dollars in losses will be paid out by insurance. While the storm caused most of its damage through flooding, which is covered under a government-run flood insurance program, very few residents of the southern Appalachian mountains hold flood policies — even those who live in federally designated flood zones. As of now, these storm victims in North Carolina and Tennessee have no guarantee of comprehensive public or private assistance as they try to piece their lives back together. The situation stands in stark contrast to other recent deadly storms like Hurricane Ian in 2022, where wind damage was paid out by standard homeowner’s insurance and flooding was limited to low-lying coastal areas where residents typically hold government flood insurance.

“A whole bunch of these [mountain] communities don’t have access to any of these things that can help you rebuild,” said Carolyn Kousky, an expert on disaster insurance who is the vice president for economics and policy at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s going to be really heartbreaking. It’s going to be a very long time before they can rebuild.”

Helene will likely cause around $6.4 billion in insured damages, according to the catastrophe modeling firm Karen Clark & Company — a tiny figure for a direct hit from a Category 4 hurricane where winds reached 140 miles per hour. It’s barely half the total of insured damages from the 2018 wildfires in California, and only 10 percent as much as the damage from Hurricane Ian. 

Homeowner’s insurance premiums are rising almost everywhere in the United States as insurers deal with costly disasters, rising construction costs, and new development in vulnerable areas. They’re likely to continue to rise in states such as North Carolina, where the insurance commissioner just approved a double-digit premium rate hike.

But recent disasters such as Ian and the California wildfires have also seen many insurers go bankrupt or stop selling coverage in affected states. These market collapses have forced many homeowners to go without insurance or buy it from state-backed “insurers of last resort.” Despite Helene’s historic damage, states like North Carolina and Tennessee will likely not see a similar collapse in insurance availability.

“I’m not sure it’s going to have a big impact on the insurance market, because from an insurance industry perspective, this is not a very large loss,” said Karen Clark, the co-founder of Karen Clark & Company and one of the pioneers in the modeling of catastrophe risk.

That’s for the simple reason that most private companies stopped offering flood coverage around a century ago, following a series of devastating floods on the Mississippi River. The federal government then stepped in to try to protect America’s many waterfront homes from flood losses. As a result, insurance companies today pay out damage claims for wildfires in California and windstorms in the Midwest, but not for major rainfall events like Hurricane Helene.

The federal National Flood Insurance Program is supposed to serve as a public replacement for lost private coverage, but it isn’t working. The 5 million homes in the program tend to be very vulnerable to flooding, which has led to repeat loss events and driven the program billions of dollars into debt. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has been trying for decades to enroll more people in the program, including those who live far from the coasts, but even its subsidized rates are out of reach for many homeowners. As a result, participation remains limited: in Asheville, the hardest-hit large city in North Carolina, fewer than 1 percent of residents have flood insurance.

Even given the huge coverage gaps, Helene will still likely trigger one of the largest FEMA flood insurance payouts in recent years, perhaps to the tune of billions of dollars. But Swiss Re, the massive global reinsurance company that acts as a backstop for the national program, confirmed that most people who suffered damage during Helene won’t get anything at all.

“Sadly much of the damage from these devastating floods will not be covered by insurance,” said Monica Ningen, who leads the company’s property business in the United States. She added that the lack of coverage “will make the task of rebuilding the communities impacted all the more difficult.”

Without insurance, which is often the first line of defense against disaster damage, most homeowners who saw flood damage will be on their own as they rebuild. Some victims will receive a few thousand dollars from FEMA for repair costs, and some others will be able to secure low-interest rebuilding loans from the Small Business Administration. The Department of Housing and Urban Development also has a track record of spending billions of dollars on long-term recovery needs after big disasters, paying for home repairs and new housing development.

But this aid money could take months or years to reach hard-hit areas, said Kousky, and it won’t come close to covering the cost of reconstruction for most people, especially those in low-income households.

“These programs were intentionally designed not to replace insurance,” said Kousky. “It’s really limited.” 

Despite the massive amount of media attention Hurricane Helene has generated, and the historic scale of the uninsured losses, Kousky said she’s pessimistic that the storm will change much about U.S. disaster policy, whether by encouraging more people to purchase flood insurance or increasing aid for disaster victims.

“There’s been so many events, they get attention and seem to be wake up calls, and our response has been insufficient every time,” she said.

Editor’s note: The Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hurricane Helene could cost $200 billion. Nobody knows where the money will come from. on Oct 4, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

The city decides to buy out the block, using federal money to purchase residents’ homes and destroy them, leaving behind a vacant stretch of land that can absorb future floods. When officials approach residents and offer them cash payments to vacate the neighborhood, some of them agree to leave. But many others decline the offer and vow to stay put, arguing that they have a deep attachment to the neighborhood — and that the city should build flood walls or retention ponds to protect their neighborhood, rather than moving them out. If even a few homeowners stay, they will ensure that the city remains on the hook for future rescues and repairs. To break the deadlock, the city decides to use its eminent domain power to evict the holdouts from their homes.

Think about it for a minute. Whose side are you on?

After more than five years of reporting on the ways that the U.S. is adapting to climate change, I’ve encountered dozens of instances of this dilemma, where a government’s attempts to implement a “managed retreat” from a vulnerable area collide with the private property rights — as well as the deep, human attachments — of homeowners who don’t want to move. These fights have played out in diverse locales all over the country, from impoverished subdivisions along the bends of the Mississippi River to wealthy cliffside avenues along the California coast, from historically Black neighborhoods to new lily-white suburbs.

When I discuss these stories with readers and friends, I find that people’s reactions depend a lot on who lives in the flood-prone community in question. If it’s a case of a coastal city trying to buy out wealthy beachfront homeowners, readers tend to side with the government trying to force residents to take a payout; if it’s a city trying to buy out a low-income or middle-class neighborhood, readers instead tend to side with the residents. In some cases, in other words, we decide that private property rights trump the public interest, and in other cases we decide the opposite, even when the underlying risk from climate change is the same. Your reaction to the thought experiment above was likely influenced by what kind of community you imagined the hypothetical buyout neighborhood to be.

The U.S. government has funded tens of thousands of home buyouts nationwide, and dozens of local governments across the country have pursued so-called managed retreat efforts with varying degrees of controversy. Even after all these test cases, there exists nothing close to a rubric for deciding when it’s right for a government to force someone to leave their home for the sake of climate adaptation — or when the government has a moral obligation to protect a community that wants to remain in place.

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This question involves so much more than managing government budgets and political blowback. The goal of climate adaptation is not only to avert future suffering, but also to build more resilient and better-functioning communities. When residents in vulnerable areas protest against retreat, they’re arguing that relocation would cause them more suffering than staying put in a vulnerable area, and that the only way their community can thrive is if they remain where they are. As the United States and other countries grapple with worsening extreme weather events and the political crises they create, governments need to be sure that their proposed solutions are alleviating the damage of a warming world rather than making it worse. 

“You can’t read the fairness of [a retreat] only in the one action,” Linda Shi, a professor of urban planning at Cornell University, told me. “It’s always relative to what is being done in another community.”

Debates over retreat often seem to be clashes between public and private good, where the question is whether the interests of one community are more urgent than the interests of the general public. But retreating from vanishing coasts and other vulnerable areas at the scale that climate change demands will require moving beyond this framework, and instead considering individual relocation as part of a larger adaptation strategy. In order to make moral evaluations of an adaptation effort, we first need to know what that adaptation effort is trying to accomplish — not just for an individual neighborhood or even a city, but more broadly for that community’s state, region, nation, and maybe even the world. In other words, we need to know more about what kind of society we are trying to build once we make it to higher ground.

There is a very simple fact lurking beneath every initiative to adapt to climate change: Even the United States, the richest country in the history of the world, does not have enough money to protect every existing community from climate disasters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency grant programs that currently finance most climate adaptation efforts are funded at just a fraction of demand. Some states and cities fund these projects with local revenue, but most simply don’t have enough cash. Few local governments pay for more than a fraction of the cost of any shoreline defense or buyout initiative. There are finite resources available to build sea walls, firebreaks, and water recycling plants for the vulnerable households that want to stay in harm’s way. In almost every case, buyouts are a more cost-effective solution than capital projects like these.

But the funding available for buyouts is limited, too. Most managed retreat efforts are paid for by competitive federal grant programs, which means that local governments must submit an application and make the case that they should be chosen over other jurisdictions. FEMA and the federal agencies that fund these efforts only care about the individual costs and benefits of each project, not the larger trends that emerge from which projects they choose to support, and where. Buying out one town leaves less money to buy out towns around it with similar risk profiles. When money is finite, in other words, each adaptation project makes every other project more difficult.

The basic fact of this scarcity incentivizes inequality when it comes to adaptation efforts. The U.S. and its local governments have been moving people away from climate harms for decades now, and the vast majority of those relocations have been voluntary buyout agreements between willing homeowners and public agencies. The government enjoys broad legal authority to move people out of their homes to promote the public interest, so long as it provides property owners with what the U.S. Constitution calls “just compensation.”

This seemingly universal doctrine is unfair in a fundamental sense, however, since it makes it far easier for a government to buy out and relocate a poor neighborhood than a wealthy one. The cost of relocating an area like Houston’s Allen Field, a majority-Latino neighborhood where many homes cost less than $100,000, is a fraction of what it would cost to relocate a wealthy community like those in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where the kind of beachfront vacation home at risk of simply collapsing into the sea can cost a million dollars or more. Even if the latter community is at greater risk, cost considerations alone disincentivize bureaucrats from trying to strong-arm wealthy homeowners out of their property.

Wealthy residents are also more likely to have not just the money but also the time and connections that it takes to fight the government. Indeed, some wealthy Outer Banks homeowners have spent years waging legal battles against government efforts to limit coastal construction and remove precarious homes, often with assistance from conservative law groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation. Even the threat of these lawsuits can scare off governments attempting to pursue managed retreat: When I wrote about California’s attempts to limit coastal development, a Malibu city council member told me he was terrified that residents would sue if the city imposed construction limits on coastal areas.

The uneven legal landscape around eminent domain is one reason why past managed retreat patterns have been so unequal in the United States. One study of adaptation actions in North Carolina, for instance, found that “[property acquisitions] are found to correlate with low home values, household incomes, and population density and high racial diversity.”

An even more vexed issue is what counts as “just compensation.” If the government gives a homeowner the pre-flood market value of her home, is that enough? That’s the way most courts have ruled, but it’s easy to argue otherwise. If the government is razing a low-income neighborhood, residents may well not have enough money to afford homes in nearby areas. This happened in Kinston, North Carolina, one of the first places where FEMA attempted a major buyout around the turn of this century. Residents of a historic Black neighborhood relocated to wealthier white areas only to enter foreclosure when they fell behind on mortgage payments down the road. 

There are emotional and spiritual considerations, too. After all, a community is not just a collection of houses but a tangle of social relations and cultural practices. In uprooting the residents of a fishing village from their homes and scattering them around a city, the government destroys those relationships and traditions. Relocated residents can lose their friends, their social support systems, their favorite spaces to play, their proximity to their jobs and sources of income, and even their connection to land and nature. These are huge losses, and they often can’t be captured in a dollar amount.

“It’s very limiting to conceptualize retreat in terms of property and possessions, rather than asking, ‘What kinds of relationships with my community I am able to maintain?’” said Simona Capisani, a political philosopher at Durham University in the United Kingdom who has studied the ethics of climate migration. 

Many governments have recognized that Indigenous communities have an inviolate right to maintain communal bonds and cultural forms, though they have seldom made good on that recognition. When the state of Louisiana used federal money to relocate the eroding Indigenous community of Isle de Jean Charles starting in 2016, officials promised to build a new community with a fishing bayou and homes built in the island’s architectural vernacular. Instead, they ended up building an ordinary-looking subdivision that tribespeople from the island decried as shoddy and foreign. Some residents pulled out of the relocation effort altogether, opting to move elsewhere or in some cases to stay put on the eroding island.

It seems inarguable that Indigenous nations who have been dispossessed of their land in the past should enjoy ample support to stay or move from at-risk areas as they choose. Beyond that, however, it’s hard to figure out where to draw the line between communities that merit similar consideration and those that don’t. The residents of Malibu and the Outer Banks could argue that their ways of life carry intangible value for them, too, but it would be absurd to claim that the government should have to provide residents of those areas with compensation for the culture they would lose by relocating (in addition to the compensation already forthcoming for their million-dollar homes). 

A strategy that designed adaptation efforts around local consensus would work in some communities, especially those like the neighborhoods on New York’s Staten Island where residents rallied around buyouts after 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, but it would quickly run up against questions about how to define community consensus, not to mention massive funding constraints. Residents of rural villages will want flood-proofing infrastructure just as much as city dwellers, but building rural infrastructure provides far fewer benefits per dollar spent. If you take an approach designed to optimize bang-for-buck, you’ll end up building sea walls to protect wealthy cities and buying out poor towns, or maybe even leaving rural areas with no protection whatsoever.

Underlying all these considerations are further questions with no easy answers: What values or criteria could we use to decide whether a community should have to relocate, even if its residents don’t want to leave? Is it about a certain length of land tenure in a given place, or a place’s aesthetic or cultural uniqueness compared to the areas that surround it? And if marginalized communities have a claim on this kind of compensation, then how do we decide what forms of marginalization merit compensation? There has to be another calculus beyond the dollar. But what? 

The stakes of coming up with good answers to these questions are high. If we admit that managed retreat has a moral dimension — that it isn’t just a logistical question of relocating people from unsafe areas to safe ones — then we should have a clear sense of which acts are justified and which ones aren’t, beyond a feeling in our collective gut. The moral quandary of managed retreat is not only that public and private interests conflict, but also that every adaptation effort in a vulnerable area implies a hierarchy of value and need. 

The way out of this conundrum may be counterintuitive. Instead of avoiding the idea of a hierarchy, what if we embraced it? It’s tempting to think about each retreat effort as a separate moral question, one that involves weighing the interests of individual homeowners or communities against a collective “public” represented by the government and its taxpayers. Instead, we could think about each individual relocation as part of a broader nationwide effort to reduce vulnerability to climate change, and evaluate the justice of that effort as a whole, rather than trying to decide between competing interests in any one community.

There is some precedent for such an approach. During the Obama administration, the National Park Service started to outline a policy for how to respond to climate disasters, acknowledging that global warming would make it impossible to protect every sliver of the nation’s immense natural, historical, and architectural heritage. Marcy Rockman, the archaeologist who led the effort, imagined that rather than creating a hierarchy of heritage sites based on some criteria of worth, the government could prioritize diversity. The success of this climate program would not rest on identifying the “worthiest” or “most at risk” places, but instead on finding a way to consider and address the needs of as many types of heritage in as many different environments and communities as it could.

“[We need] that ability to sit down with a community … one that is facing some sort of relocation, and say, ‘You know, we can’t hold back the sea. We cannot keep things as they are,” said Rockman. But after acknowledging this threat, she added, residents could be asked exactly what it is that they want to save from their longtime communities, and public policy can follow that lead.

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The Trump administration halted Rockman’s effort at the National Park Service, and the Biden administration has not resumed it. When it comes to adapting to climate change, U.S. policy involves nothing like Rockman’s vision of a comprehensive evaluation. Even though the government has been funding climate adaptation in one form or another for decades now, we have no nationwide or even regional strategy that guides our efforts. 

As a result, there’s no intention behind the distribution of managed retreat efforts. Instead, relocations happen because disasters strike and local officials secure grant money, or because coastal homes suddenly start falling into the sea — not because any larger entity has decided that relocations should happen in those places as opposed to others. The government is required to conduct cost-benefit analyses for every adaptation project, but these analyses only consider the costs to the government for funding the project and the benefits to the community where the project takes place — not any larger questions about how a relocation or a sea wall might fit within the broader dynamics of a shoreline, a regional economy, or a national culture.

One can imagine bringing a holistic approach like Rockman’s to a nationwide adaptation strategy that is centered on the needs of people, rather than the cultural artifacts that are the purview of the National Park Service. This would shift policy away from the current focus on localized costs and toward the broad characteristics of a relocation program across a region or even the entire country. If the government articulated a clear unifying purpose for its managed retreat efforts, it would be easier to evaluate the justice of any specific buyout or land seizure, and easier to debate those acts in the political sphere.

To create such an adaptation plan would be the work of generations, but it’s possible to imagine agreement on a few basic principles for how it might work. Because the federal government will remain by far the largest funder of adaptation efforts, a national climate adaptation initiative would need permanent financing from Congress. The initiative could be housed under the Department of the Interior, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or perhaps even an independent commission that would be better shielded from partisan interference.  

Though federal funding and coordination would be essential, a national adaptation plan might work best if divided into discrete regional efforts, treating broad areas like the Gulf Coast and the sinking shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay as the units of focus. Rather than parceling out money to a plethora of states, counties, and towns, a single council or commission could be formed for each region. These deliberative bodies would map vulnerable areas, conduct hearings and listening sessions with residents, compile catalogs of cultural and historical treasures, and estimate the cost of providing each community with the adaptation projects it needs — and the projects its residents desire.

In all likelihood, the cost of the resulting wish lists would exceed the available funding, so each commission would need to create a hierarchy of priority for where to build sea walls and shoreline protections, where to acquire and destroy homes, and where to do nothing. 

To be sure, any such hierarchy would have its critics, and even a conscientious and consensus-driven adaptation effort would fail to persuade some holdouts, which would entail litigation and the continued backstop of eminent domain. Even so, the deliberate articulation of such a hierarchy would enable the pursuit of a coherent social goal — one that could combine Rockman’s efforts to preserve cultural heritage with a reparative attempt to foster economic and racial equity. 

Rather than allocate funding based on a localized cost-benefit analysis — and in effect only protecting the densest areas with the highest property values — a regional commission could allocate its limited budget for levees and sea walls dedicated to marginalized communities, ensuring that they retain the social cohesion and property tenure that were denied to them under more prejudiced governments in the past. And in cases where middle-class homeowners are bought out and relocated, the government could still build new housing on higher ground to make up for the lost supply, or give residents moving stipends that are indexed to household income and the local property market, rather than the value of their lost property. The wealthiest coastal enclaves might receive little or no infrastructure aid in recognition of their existing advantages, and those who take buyouts on expensive second homes could make do with their market-value compensation, as they do today.

With a comprehensive strategy that would roll out over multiple decades, rather than a series of ad hoc land use decisions made to triage life-threatening risk, public officials could avoid many of the most difficult legal and political controversies that attend managed retreat today. Rather than try to relocate every holdout within a matter of a few years, a government could send clear advance signals to residents that their communities can’t stay as they are forever. It could buy a home from an elderly homeowner and rent it back to them until they pass away, for instance, or slowly reduce utility and road service to a neighborhood as its population declines. While even long-term consensus-building efforts would likely still face legal challenges, they would be easier and cheaper than fighting thousands of one-off fights over individual uses of eminent domain.

“What if we didn’t think about relocation as, ‘We’re going to move people out today’?” said A.R. Siders, a professor at the University of Delaware and one of the nation’s foremost experts on managed retreat. “What if we thought about it as, ‘Where are the places where the people who are in their homes right now are the last people to own those homes?’ That’s still going to be emotionally difficult and challenging, but you have years to prepare.”

On the preservation side, a regional commission could dedicate money to safeguarding representative samples of a region’s culture. On the Gulf Coast, for instance, funds could be directed toward protecting at least one shrimping village, one community of fishing camps, and one subdivision of bayou homes. In the fire-prone mountains of California, money might go toward preserving at least one historic mining town, one trailer park, and one ritzy cul-de-sac. In places where climate change and extreme weather have accelerated such that communities simply cannot be saved, the government could poll residents on what artifacts most represent their community, then preserve them in a museum, much as the relics of Pompeii have long been housed in a museum in Naples, Italy.

Such an effort would take an enormous amount of forethought and transparency to be successful, and a just outcome is far from guaranteed. But even if this sort of comprehensive plan fails, at least its coherence allows people to agree or disagree with the overall way that their representatives decide to handle the task of adapting to climate change.

As Siders puts it, the process of adaptation in this case would look less like a series of confrontations between the state and private citizens, and more like a collective attempt — however imperfect and rickety — to sketch the contours of a new nation: “What if we flip it and we say not just, ‘Who are we going to make move?’ but, ‘What is the future we’re trying to build?’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change is destroying American homes. Who should have to move? on Oct 2, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Coastal towns and cities in Florida were devastated when the Category 4 hurricane made landfall, but communities inland bore a similar brunt as the storm carved a path through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.

“Turn around, don’t drown,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper urged drivers in a press conference. 

At least 42 people have died from the storm. As of Friday, Florida reported seven deaths. Georgia, meanwhile, reported 15, and South Carolina, 17. In both of the latter states, most of the known fatalities were from falling trees and debris. North Carolina reported two deaths, including a car crash that killed a 4-year-old girl after a road flooded. 

Atlanta received 11.12 inches of rain in 48 hours, breaking its previous record of 9.59 inches in the same time period from 1886, according to Bill Murphey, Georgia’s state climatologist. More than 1 million Georgia residents also lost power in the storm, particularly in southern and eastern parts of the state. 

In western North Carolina, officials sounded alarms and went door-to-door evacuating residents south of the Lake Lure Dam in Rutherford County after the National Weather Service warned that a dam failure was “imminent.” Emergency crews also conducted more than 50 swift water rescues across the region, with one sheriff’s department warning it could not respond to all of the 911 calls due to flooded roads. The North Carolina Department of Transportation warned on social media that “all roads in Western NC should be considered closed” due to flooding from Helene.

In Tennessee, more than 50 people were stranded on the roof of a hospital due to heavy flooding and had to be rescued by helicopter. Residents of Cocke County in Tennessee were also asked to evacuate after reports that a separate dam could fail, although officials later said the dam failure had been a false alarm. In South Carolina, the National Weather Service said the storm was “one of the most significant weather events… in the modern era.”

The hurricane’s widespread flooding was worsened by climate change, scientists told Grist. Hurricane Helene was an unusually large storm with an expansive reach. After forming in the Caribbean, it traveled over extremely warm ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico that enabled the storm to intensify more quickly than it may have otherwise. In fact, Helene went from a relatively weak tropical storm to a Category 4 in just two days. Warmer air also holds more moisture, supercharging the storm’s water content and leading to more rapid rainfall and intense flooding. 

“When that enhanced moisture comes up and hits terrain like the Appalachian Mountains,” said University of Hawaiʻi meteorology professor Steve Businger, “it results in very, very high rainfall rates, exceptionally high rainfall rates and that unfortunately results in a lot of flash flooding.”

Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at the scientific group Climate Central, said research has shown that the Gulf’s current extra-warm ocean temperatures were ​​made up to 500 times more likely with climate change. “One of the things that we’re seeing with these big storms, especially as they seem to become more frequent, is that they’re no longer natural disasters, but that they’re unnatural disasters,” Winkley said. “It’s not just a normal weather system anymore.” 

Hurricanes are naturally occuring, of course, but the conditions that led to Helene’s severity — its rapid intensification and heavy rainfall — were partially driven by warmer ocean and atmospheric temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels. “There is a fingerprint of climate change in that process,” Winkley said. 

“This summer was record warm globally and there was a record amount of water vapor in the global atmosphere,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA. Both factors contributed to what the Southeastern U.S. experienced this week. “This is one of the more significant flood events in the U.S. in recent memory.”  

Initial estimates for the storm’s damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure range between $15 billion and $26 billion, the New York Times reported. Businger said he expects the enormous loss to fuel more conversations about the precarity of the existing property insurance system. “The cost to society is becoming extravagant,” he said.

Scientists noted that the fact that the storm’s winds increased by 55 miles per hour in the 24 hours before it made landfall also made it deadlier.

“It was so strong and moving so fast it just didn’t have time to weaken very much before it made it far inland,” Swain said. Rapid intensification is particularly dangerous, he said, because people often make decisions on how to prepare for storms and whether or not to evacuate based on how bad they appear to be initially. 

“It was one of the faster intensifying storms on record,” Swain said. “This is not a fluke. We should expect to see more rapidly intensifying hurricanes in a warming climate.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After battering coastal towns, Hurricane Helene causes deadly flooding across five states on Sep 27, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

Tomlinson and her husband were racing to install plywood flood panels and sandbags on Wednesday as Shore Acres prepared for a historic storm surge from Category 4 Hurricane Helene. As she loaded a Peloton into her car, she said she was fed up with flooding over and over again.

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The following night, Helene delivered the largest storm surge on record to Shore Acres, pushing water not only into Tomlinson’s house, but into the houses of neighbors who had never flooded. Waiting out the storm on higher ground in downtown St. Petersburg, she kept up with reports from her neighbors who had stayed behind: The entire streetscape vanished as saltwater seeped in through sandbags and flood panels, filling up kitchens and living rooms.

“It’s just a really sad situation,” she told Grist. “We won’t rebuild, it’s not worth it.” 

Even before Helene, Shore Acres looked like a casualty of sea level rise and faulty development. The waterfront neighborhood had begun to flood multiple times a month, even when it wasn’t raining, and residents were paying some of the highest flood insurance rates in the country, with the median annual premium in the neighborhood set to reach around $5,000. The city was racing to mitigate the flooding, but almost every street in the neighborhood had at least one “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign on it. 

But Helene may turn out to be the neighborhood’s coup de grace: The hurricane pushed well over 6 feet of storm surge into Shore Acres on Thursday, the highest on record for the community. Based on early reports, the wall of water flooded hundreds of homes with 4 feet of water or more, dealing another hit to its already shaky real estate market. And as sea levels and flood insurance rates continue to rise throughout the eastern United States, from Florida to New England, Shore Acres may turn out to be not an outlier but a bellwether for future fragility in the real estate market and coastal economies more broadly. 

Shore Acres is one of numerous areas in the coastal United States that were built for a different climate than that of today: The area expanded in the 1950s on what one developer called “a pretty sorry piece of land” made up of pine forest and marsh, and much of it sits just a few feet above sea level. The area has always seen occasional flooding during the highest tides, but now parts of it go underwater several times a year as autumn tides slosh over bulwarks and gurgle up through storm drains. 

Even on sunny days, standing water is now a frequent occurrence in the neighborhood. When cars drive too fast through flooded streets, they create wakes that can splash up into driveways and damage other vehicles, or even rush into homes.

Tracy Stockwell, who moved to the neighborhood last year from Atlanta, has erected a series of signs and barriers in front of his house that read “Wake Stop” and “Slow Down, Watch Your Wake.” He said drivers have splashed through standing water multiple times and flooded his house — something he had no idea was possible when he bought it.

“The realtors did not disclose that,” he said, while preparing to ride out the storm on his second floor. “We knew that the street flooded, but we had no idea the history of the house.” Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a law that required home sellers to disclose past flood insurance claims, but the law doesn’t go into effect until next month.

As the flooding in the neighborhood gets worse, residents have seen their flood insurance rates skyrocket under a new federal policy. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which administers the national flood insurance program that serves around 5 million U.S. households, began to roll out this policy in 2022. The median cost of flood insurance in the neighborhood is around $2,000 per year, more than double the national rate, and may double again to around $5,000 as FEMA raises rates to phase in the new program. Many residents already pay far more than that.

Some neighbors have been able to save money on insurance costs by elevating their homes on stilts above flood level. Federal regulations require a homeowner to do this if their house suffers damage equivalent to more than half its value. But elevating a home requires a lengthy permitting process and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; moreover, FEMA’s new insurance pricing system offers a lower discount for doing this work than the old system did.

For people who can’t afford to elevate or can’t keep up with rising insurance rates, the only option is to leave, and as of Wednesday there were at least two dozen “For Sale” signs in the neighborhood. 

Even so, some local boosters are projecting confidence in the real estate market.

“I think people understand now that flooding is going to occur,” said Kevin Batdorf, a real estate agent and the head of the Shore Acres Civic Association. “Flooding in Shore Acres is well known. It’s not something that is a secret. Some people have sold, and the houses are selling, because we live in a great neighborhood.” He went on to say that the neighborhood has seen small selloffs in the past after flood events, but that the market always calms down after a few months as new people move in. 

But as Helene bore down, even those with deep connections to Shore Acres weren’t sure about their long-term future there. Tomlinson has said she won’t rebuild, and Stockwell said he planned to at least consider selling his home. They imagined their neighbors would be contemplating the same.

“That guy left, and that person left, and that person’s selling,” said David Witt, a furniture store manager, as he pointed at the houses on his street. He and his wife moved a few years ago into his wife’s childhood home, which is raised a few feet off the ground, and they’ve come within an inch of flooding several times. They are both attached to the home, Witt said as he lined his door with sandbags, but they aren’t sure if they want to stay for good.

There have been at least three other large floods in Shore Acres in the past 13 months, beginning with last year’s Hurricane Idalia and continuing this year with a no-name winter storm and Hurricane Debbie in August. The flood from Idalia damaged more than 1,200 homes in the neighborhood — close to half of all its structures. The neighborhood accounted for more than 80 percent of the damage St. Petersburg suffered during that storm. Helene traced a similar path to Idalia, scraping up the Gulf Coast and making landfall in the Florida Panhandle, but brought a storm surge several feet higher.

The city of St. Petersburg has invested millions of dollars over the past year to mitigate its flooding issue, installing backflow preventers that stop storm drains from overflowing onto streets when tides are high. It will soon begin construction on a $16 million pump station on the area’s lowest-lying street, Connecticut Avenue, replicating a strategy used in Miami Beach and New Orleans with money from the state government.

Batdorf, the civic association leader, said residents are working with the city to speed up these improvements and speed up grant programs that help residents elevate their homes.

“There’s so much more the city could do,” he said, “and there are other communities that have solved the issue of flooding.” He said that despite the city’s progress on installing backflow preventers, the sunny-day flooding issue hasn’t gotten better. Furthermore, there’s nothing the city of St. Petersburg could have done on its own to stop a storm the size of Helene. To mitigate such a surge would likely require a multibillion-dollar barrier of the kind the Army Corps of Engineers has contemplated building in Miami and New York City. 

“They’ve always had flooding here,” Witt said, “but it’s never been this bad.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Florida neighborhood recovered from flood after flood. Will it survive Helene? on Sep 27, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

“The insurance crisis that people and businesses are experiencing — not just in California, but across the United States — is the price that we’re paying for failure to more aggressively transition from a fossil fuel-based economy,” Jones said.

These rising costs are prompting voters to take a closer look at elected commissioners that regulate the industry in their home states — and it is forcing candidates to more thoroughly consider insurance shifts and climate change in their platforms.

States have been regulating their insurance markets for more than 150 years, with New Hampshire appointing the nation’s first commissioner in 1851. These regulators are tasked with setting reasonable limits on how much insurance companies can charge for home, car, health, and life insurance. They also oversee how insurers manage their money, so they have enough to pay their bills when disaster strikes. For the vast majority of their history, insurance commissioners haven’t thought much about climate change.

“When I came in, climate change was kind of a footnote,” said Mike Kreidler, Washington’s outgoing insurance commissioner, who was first elected to the office in 2000. “That was something that bothered me a lot, because I saw the risks.”

Kreidler’s early attempts at climate action were met with fierce resistance. As an early member of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ climate working group, he recalled some of his peers asking him to remove the word “climate change” from his proposals. “I took a lot of abuse back then on these issues,” Kreidler said. “It’s not something that a number of commissioners wanted to talk about.”

Even in progressive states, climate change was often overshadowed by flashier issues. In California, Jones first ran for office in the wake of the newly passed Affordable Care Act. He and his 2010 opponent both campaigned almost entirely on health care issues. 

But by Jones’ second term, it was clear things were changing. California was starting to see a worrying trend of expensive wildfires: Starting in 2015, California was hit with billion-dollar wildfires every year until 2023. One of the most tragic examples came in 2018, when the Camp Fire devastated the Northern California town of Paradise, leveling entire neighborhoods and displacing more than 50,000 residents. Jones spent his final year in office making sure fire victims received the claims they were owed, and writing recommendations to protect the system against future disasters. 

Soon, other states joined California in starting to feel the effects of climate change on the insurance market. In 2021, home premiums — which had remained relatively stable until then — dramatically started to spike nationwide. Insurance commissioners could no longer afford to ignore the impacts of worsening extreme weather. Some candidates, like Delaware’s incumbent insurance commissioner Trinidad Navarro, have called climate change one of the most concerning issues going forward. It’s “become a number one issue for insurance regulators across the United States,” Jones said.

It has become an important issue for voters as well. Over the last few years, major insurance companies have started backing out of high-risk parts of the country. California’s largest insurer, State Farm, stopped accepting new customers, and will not renew policies for roughly 30,000 homeowners and renters living in certain risky parts of the state. Meanwhile, in Florida, so many homeowners have been denied coverage that the government-created “last-resort” program is now the largest insurance provider in the state. This trend — of fewer and more expensive options — is leading some frustrated voters to turn their attention toward their elected leaders. 

This year, North Carolina has become the battleground of one of the nation’s first insurance commissioner races centered largely around climate impacts. Coastal storms and hurricanes are taking a worsening toll on the state — like Hurricane Florence, which caused over $16 billion in property damage in 2018. In response, North Carolina insurers requested a 42 percent increase in home insurance rates. In certain coastal neighborhoods, they asked for a rate increase of 99 percent. 

This proposal was met with fury: Insurance commissioner Mike Causey, a Republican, received more than 24,000 emails, and a public comment session held earlier this year was filled with roughly seven hours of angry testimony, from small town mayors to ordinary homeowners. Senior citizens feared that their social security income wouldn’t cover their new premiums, and local military families worried that their housing allowances would also fall short. Realtors worried the new rates would deal a devastating blow to the state’s housing market. Causey eventually rejected the initial proposal, calling them “excessive and unfairly discriminatory,” but has yet to settle on new insurance rates. Causey did not respond to multiple interview requests.

For Natasha Marcus, a Democratic state senator challenging Causey in the election this year, this public outcry has brought a lot of attention to the commissioner race. According to an August poll from the group Carolina Forward, Marcus and Causey are currently neck-and-neck. “It’s the sexiest race on the ballot,” Marcus said, half jokingly. “As soon as people realize how directly it impacts their wallets, they take an interest.”

Marcus is hoping for more transparency in the rate-setting process, to give customers a better sense of whether premium hikes are truly justified. Her vision is for a courtroom-like procedure, where insurers can make their case to the public, and her office can cross-examine their arguments.

While Marcus acknowledges the threat of climate change, she feels that North Carolina insurers are using extreme weather as a pretext to ask for unreasonably high rates, pointing to a New York Times investigation that shows the state’s insurers have made profits 10 of the past 11 years. She worries that large insurance companies are seeking easy profits from North Carolina to make up for the money they’re losing in other states.

A 2022 Federal Reserve analysis found that insurers are indeed quicker to ask for rate hikes in states with looser insurance regulations, and more hesitant in highly regulated states like California — even if those states experience frequent disasters. 

However, Ben Keys, an economist and professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says that this trend does not explain the recent hike in insurance costs. He and a colleague recently analyzed premiums from 47 million homeowners across the country, revealing an unprecedented view into the causes of the insurance crisis.

Over the past 40 years, Americans have been moving to more disaster-prone regions of the U.S. South and West. “A hurricane cutting the Gulf side of Florida now just encounters way more houses, way more businesses, way more roads, way more infrastructure than it did 40 years ago,” Keys said.

At the same time, climate change has been increasing the frequency and severity of extreme storms and wildfires in those fast-growing regions. Finally, when disaster strikes, inflation and labor shortages have driven up the cost of rebuilding. 

All of these factors have made disasters more expensive, and contributed to the rise in premiums. But the biggest factor behind the rise, according to Keys, is the way that climate change is reshaping a fundamental pillar of the insurance industry.

Insurance is built around the assumption that disaster doesn’t strike everyone at the same time. For many types of insurance, that assumption is mostly true — a car insurer, for example, knows that it’s unlikely that every driver will get into a fender bender on the exact same day. But when it comes to home insurance, climate change is causing this assumption to crumble. A major wildfire could easily burn down an entire town, or a hurricane could easily rip the roofs off all the homes in a neighborhood. For this reason, insurance companies in disaster-prone regions end up purchasing their own insurance policies, known as “reinsurance.” 

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Reinsurance protects regular insurance companies from going bankrupt from a string of major disasters. Since reinsurance companies cover the epicenters of extreme weather, they’ve recently become extremely sensitive to climate risk. Since 2020, premiums for reinsurance have doubled, and will likely continue to rise. In states that experience frequent extreme weather disasters — like Louisiana, Texas, and Florida — insurance companies end up purchasing a lot of expensive reinsurance, and those costs get passed down to customers. 

This is the biggest factor behind the recent surge in home insurance premiums, and Keys doesn’t expect it to stop anytime soon. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Jacques de Vaucleroy, the chairman of the major reinsurance firm Swiss Re, said that reinsurance premiums will continue to rise until people stop building in dangerous areas. 

This puts candidates like Marcus in a difficult position. Voters may hate high insurance rates, but they also love their state’s beautiful coastline. “It is not a solution to say, ‘Well, there will just be no houses on the coast anymore,’” Marcus said. “Nobody wants that.” 

Keys thinks that insurance commissioners will have to make some difficult and unpopular decisions going forward. He worries that elected commissioners might choose to please voters in the short term, instead of addressing the root causes.

“It’s very fraught to have an elected official in charge of regulating this market,” Keys said. “If you set prices too low, then you make voters happy — but at the cost of not reflecting the true risk. That’s going to encourage people to build more in risky areas.”

While Marcus believes the rate hikes proposed earlier this year in North Carolina were unjustified, she acknowledges that climate change will inevitably cause rates to increase in the future. “I never promise that I will never raise your rates if you elect me,” Marcus said. “It sounds really good on the campaign trail, but I tell the truth. And the truth is, sometimes rates do need to go up.”

Instead, Marcus hopes that more transparency would keep insurers honest, and her campaign pledges to push for more adaptation and resilience. For example, North Carolina’s high-risk insurance program offers grants to policyholders to storm-proof their roofs. Marcus would like to see more resources devoted to that program. “If the hurricane comes through and your roof stays on, you’re going to have a lot less damage,” Marcus said. “That helps reduce insurance costs for everybody.” 

This is something that insurance commissioner candidates in other states are pushing for as well. In Montana, a state that over the past decade has averaged 7.2 million acres burned annually, Republican candidate James Brown has called for insurance incentives for homeowners who implement fire resilience measures to their homes. In Washington, Democratic candidate Patty Kuderer has called for similar plans in her state.

Jones, now the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, has been advocating for similar reforms in California since leaving office. In recent years, the state and local governments have been spending millions on prescribed burning and thinning in order to make forests and communities more resilient to wildfires. Jones has been working with lawmakers to make sure California insurers take those investments into account when writing and pricing policies. 

In this way, insurance could serve as both a carrot and a stick, discouraging people from building in risky areas, and also rewarding people for making their homes and communities more resilient. But Jones also hopes that voters will put the pieces together.

“If the voters are connecting the dots, they should understand that what they’re experiencing — in terms of increased price and lack of availability of insurance — is driven by climate change, ” Jones said. “They should look to elect an insurance commissioner who’s going to be a leader in addressing the underlying driver of the problem, which is climate change.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate impacts put insurance commissioner races in the spotlight on Sep 24, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jesse Nichols.

Experts have portrayed this widespread risky construction as an intractable problem, alleging that “home sales in flood zones are booming,” that “more Americans are moving into flood…hot spots,” or pointing out “rapid urban growth in flood zones.” News coverage, including that of this publication, has largely followed this lead.

But new research from some of the country’s leading climate adaptation experts, which was published last week in the academic journal Earth’s Future, suggests that academics and journalists may have drawn the wrong lessons from the last few decades of coastal development. A national survey of floodplain development between 2001 and 2019 has found that the U.S. actually built fewer structures in floodplains than might be expected if cities were building at random. This means that, if anything, the average city now actively avoids floodplains, contrary to conventional wisdom. Indeed, in the 21st century most towns and cities in the U.S. built very little or not at all in flood-prone areas. The vast majority of floodplain construction — the kind that grabs headlines and feeds the pessimistic narrative — has taken place in just two states: Louisiana and Florida.

A separate paper just published by the same researchers in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change found that it doesn’t take a sea change for a town or city to effectively limit floodplain development. According to the paper, which is focused on New Jersey, more than three-quarters of Garden State towns reduced floodplain development after the turn of the last century, and around a quarter eliminated it altogether. They did this not by passing any big legislative reforms or climate policies but instead through what the paper calls “routine municipal practices” — things like zoning changes and permit denials.

The researchers argue that the findings should reframe the conversation around floodplain development. While risky construction remains a significant driver of flood damages and disaster recovery costs, it is not the intractable problem that experts and journalists often make it out to be. 

“We are building a lot in floodplains, but it’s not as bad as you think,” said Miyuki Hino, a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an author on both papers. “Avoiding development in floodplains is doable, and we can do even more of it.”

There are any number of reasons why a developer might want to build near the water. For one thing, many people like living near oceans and lakes, so homes and apartments built near those bodies of water can fetch higher sale prices and rents. Coastal states like Florida also depend on beach tourism to sustain their economies, so it makes sense to cluster housing and shopping near the ocean. Plus, many towns and cities in the United States were built along rivers for navigational purposes, so a disproportionately large share of urban land is likely to be in or near the floodplain.

All those factors might lead one to expect that an outsize share of recent U.S. housing development would be in floodplains. But at least since the turn of the century, the opposite has been the case, according to the new study: Developers have built 844,000 units of housing on 2.1 million acres of floodplain — but if they had chosen available parcels at random, they would have built even more than that. This was true for more than 75 percent of all jurisdictions studied, indicating that most governments make at least some substantive attempt to avoid coastlines and riverbanks.

It also indicates that the overall increase in flood risk is being driven by a few outliers, many of them clustered in Florida and Louisiana. A large share of available land in these states is located in either coastal or riverine floodplains, and both states’ economies largely depend on proximity to the water. A separate report published this week by the Natural Resources Defense Council confirms this contention from the study: Of the more than 250,000 properties in the U.S. that have filed multiple flood insurance claims, around half of them are in states along the Gulf of Mexico.

“When we tell the story that the United States is building a ton in the floodplain, we miss out on the fact that that’s not true everywhere,” said A.R. Siders, a professor of public policy at the University of Delaware and an author on both papers. “Some places are actually not building in the floodplain. And then there are some places that are doing so terribly that they make the whole whole country look bad.”

There are two ways of looking at the problem: A county on the Florida coast might build far more homes in the floodplain than a county in the Nevada desert, but the Nevada county may be building a larger share of new homes in the floodplain than the county in Florida. The storm damages, insurance claims, and rebuilding costs in the Florida county will be far higher, but the Nevada county has a lot of work to do as well, because it is placing new homeowners in harm’s way when there is ample other land available.

Politicians, academics, and climate activists have proposed a wide variety of sweeping policy changes that could help cut down on floodplain development. Some have suggested that federal housing finance agencies should no longer securitize mortgages in flood zones, or that the federally-run National Flood Insurance Program should stop insuring them, or that states should ban such development outright. Given that efforts to simply raise flood insurance rates to market levels have generated huge blowback, these strategies would likely create massive political controversy.

But when the researchers zoomed in on New Jersey, which developed most of its coastline in the twentieth century, they found that the solution may be simpler than that. In a survey of 500 towns, they found that more than 120 had eliminated floodplain development without any big policy change. The zoning commission just denied permits to developers, or the mayor told them to build on higher ground, and that was that.

“There are a lot of new and innovative ideas for how to deal with this, but they’re maybe not necessary for the majority [of risky development cases],” said Siders.

“It shows that when you regulate what’s going on in high-risk areas, you do see a perceptible impact on exposure and risk,” added Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom Global, a flood insurance mapping company owned by the reinsurer Swiss Re. “There are some very simple solutions that you can enact locally.”

What about the small share of jurisdictions that account for most floodplain development? The authors argue that these places need targeted intervention. The state or federal government could provide subsidies to encourage less risky construction, helping offset the economic lure of waterfront construction, or a state could just impose penalties on cities that allow for new builds near the water. According to Siders and Hino, the precise solution in any situation needs to be tailored to the reasons a given locality is developing in the floodplain in the first place Some towns may develop in the floodplain because they lack the capacity to plan for a shift to higher ground, as is the case in many rural areas, and others may do it to capture tax revenue from the wealthy owners of vacation homes. While designing such policy solutions might be tricky, the authors argue that the local nature of the solutions should be cause for optimism.

But Wing, who has led previous research that projected a nationwide increase in floodplain development, cautioned that there are limits to the progress that the new papers document. The researchers show that many governments are regulating floodplain development, but most of these regulations only apply to flood zones as delineated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which produces flood insurance maps for most of the country. However, these flood maps are old and often inaccurate, and a huge share of flood damage occurs outside of floodplain boundaries. This was the case during 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, when three-quarters of damaged homes in the Houston area were outside the lands that FEMA deems flood-prone.

In other words, while towns and cities may be acting to reduce flood exposure, they will likely have to go even further to eliminate flood risk altogether. This would entail even costlier trade-offs between the economic benefits of development and the economic risks of construction in climate-vulnerable areas.

“We have some excellent evidence here that when you have a flood map, it’s successful in restricting development,” Wing said. “Regulations have worked. But what about all the places that aren’t subject to those regulations?”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US is finally curbing floodplain development, new research shows on Sep 19, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and CEPR’s Algernon Austin about the Black economy for the September 6, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CEPR (8/26/24)

Janine Jackson: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called the “US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me.

A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic indicators, not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go, as a society that has yet to address deep, historical and structural harms.

A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We’ll hear from its co-authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That conversation is coming up on today’s show.

***

JJ: Corporate news media tend to report economic news like the weather. Yes, it affects different people differently, but the source, the economy, is just—stuff that happens.

But there’s really no such thing as “the economy.” There are policies and practices about taxes and lending and wages, and they are as historically embedded, preferentially enforced and as susceptible to intentional change as everything else.

So how should we read reports about the “best Black economy in decades,” particularly as one question news media rarely include in the daily recitation of numbers is: Compared to what?

A new research brief engages these questions; the title’s a bit of a giveaway: “The Best Black Economy in Generations—and Why It Isn’t Enough.”

We’re joined now by the brief’s co-authors. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Algernon Austin.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Thank you.

Algernon Austin:  It’s a pleasure to be with you.

JJ: Economic reporting can seem very dry and divorced from life as lived. We read that the country’s GDP is up, or that inflation is leveling off, and a lot of us just don’t know what that means, in terms of whether we are more likely to get a job, or a wage increase, or a home loan. If you can parse that data, though, it does tell us something, if not enough. So let me ask you first, what particular indicators are telling us or showing us that Black Americans are experiencing the most positive economic conditions in generations? What are you looking at?

Algernon Austin: “If you had an additional 1.4 million Black people working, you would…significantly reduce Black poverty, and would help Black households start to build wealth.”

AA: One thing that I pay a lot of attention to is the employment-to-population ratio, or the employment rate, and that’s simply what percent of the population is working. And that’s something that’s very concrete, that people can relate to. And the Black population, historically, has had a significantly lower employment rate than the white population.

So why we’re in the greatest economy on record is because, if you look at the prime age employment rate, that’s individuals 25-to-54 years old, the Black prime age employment rate, the annual rate for the first half of this year has been at a record high. So that is certainly quite positive news, and something that we should celebrate.

But as you pointed out, compared to what? Compared to the white prime age employment rate, it’s still below average. And when you do the full calculation of what I call the “Black jobs deficit,” we need about 1.4 million more Black people working to have the same employment rate as white people.

And what does that mean in terms of income for Black America? If you had an additional 1.4 million Black people working, you would have an additional $60 billion, that’s with a B, $60 billion going into Black America, which would significantly reduce Black poverty, and would help Black households start to build wealth.

So that’s the positive: We have a high employment rate. The negative is it’s still lagging, and that lag, that deficit, is still causing a great deal of poverty for Black people.

JJ: So Algernon, you’ve connected employment and poverty and income right there, which are the key indicators that I’m seeing lifted up in this report. Unemployment is one that is a complicated thing to report because, as we know, sometimes unemployment rates don’t include people who’ve stopped looking for work, and all of that. But you’re saying that unemployment and poverty and income are all connected here. What can you tell us about what those other indicators, the poverty rates, and the income and wealth indicators, what do they add to this picture about good news?

AA: We pay a lot of attention to the unemployment rate, which is valid; it’s an important indicator. But for populations that face persistent challenges finding work —and I just said that there are about 1.4 million Black people who should be working but who aren’t—you see the unemployment rate undercounts joblessness. Because if people have been repeatedly rejected by employers—so imagine someone who maybe was formerly incarcerated—that individual is less likely to be actively looking for work. And if you’re not actively looking for work, you’re not counted as being unemployed. Or if you’re in an economically depressed area and you look around and you say, “there’s no jobs,” and you’re not actively looking for work, you’re not being counted as unemployed.

So the unemployment rate is an important indicator, and the Black rate is typically about twice the white rate. Right now, it’s a little bit less than two times, so that’s, again, another positive sign. But it does undercount joblessness.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Yeah. And in terms of income and wealth, we’ve also seen some positive signs. So I think that’s why we’re saying it’s the strongest Black economy in generations, because we see in many of the major indicators that Blacks are at record high. Also in terms of median household income, Blacks in 2022 were at $53,000 median income for households. And so that is a record high for the African-American community. As well as wealth in 2022, where we have the most recent data, it’s at a record high of $45,000.

Now, just as Algernon had noted, record highs can be great, but relative to what, and what does that mean? The median income for white households is $81,000. So Blacks are still about $30,000 less in terms of median income. And I think most people would understand that $53,000 for a household is not a lot of money.

And we look at wealth. We also argue that $45,000 median wealth is actually a household that is asset poor, that does not have enough wealth to keep them financially secure. There’s been estimates, well, let’s just put forward that white median wealth is $285,000. So you have that $45,000, compared to $285,000, with past estimates of middle-class wealth beginning around $170,000.

So we can see that we’re hitting record highs, but we’re still leaving African Americans in spaces of economic insecurity, and that’s why it isn’t enough and we need to do more.

New York Times (5/30/24)

JJ: There’s been a phenomenon lately where reporters and pundits seem to say, “People are saying they’re not happy with the economy, but they’re wrong, because look at this chart.” It’s sort of like people are maybe too dumb to know how good they have it.

But people aren’t dumb. They know they have two jobs and still struggle. They know they have a fairly good income, but they could not survive one medical emergency. But reporting, and some politicking, seems to suggest that if you aren’t doing well, then maybe that’s a you problem, because, after all, “the economy” is firing on all pistons. But people’s opinion about their economic health and their economic situation, Black people’s opinion, comes from a combination of things, you found?

AA: A lot of the reporting is based on macroeconomic indicators, which are, I’m not disputing them, it’s just that the big picture, national average can mask a lot of variation on the ground, and can be distant from what people are feeling.

So we’ve been through, because of Covid, because of the lockdowns, because of the shutdown and supply chains, because of the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen a massive spike in inflation, I think probably more than we’ve seen in a generation. And that has been quite a shock. And I think that affects people’s views of economic conditions.

We’ve also seen very high interest rates, and that makes it very hard for people to borrow, or increases the cost of trying to get a mortgage, increases credit card debt. We’ve seen, in terms of housing, a real scarcity in housing, and a real spike in housing costs.

So there’s a lot of things for people to be worried about, to be anxious about. And of course there was the Covid recession, which was massive. So there’s been a lot of economic turmoil, and it’s an error to discount what these recent traumatic experiences are, and the fact that they’re not just experiences, there are real economic consequences that people see every day when they go to the grocery store and pay their grocery bills.

JJ: And Dedrick, the report says Black Americans are optimistic, pessimistic, multifaceted and complex in terms of their understanding of their own economic situation, and then when they’re asked about the broader picture; and that makes sense as human beings.

Pew (7/18/23)

DA: Yeah, yeah. I did think that was an interesting thing pulled out of our paper, was looking at some past surveys and seeing 67% of African Americans expressed optimism, feeling good to somewhat good, about their financial future, while at the same time, in a different poll, in a Pew poll, we saw that African Americans, 70% said they did not have enough money for the life they want. And these are different things, right?

Again, if you’re used to ridiculously high unemployment rates in your community, and then it’s getting a little bit better, that might make you feel optimistic that, oh, well, maybe things can get better in my household. But, at the same time, you can still understand that, “but I don’t have enough money to be a homeowner. I’m having a harder and harder time paying grocery bills.”

So both of those feelings can live within one’s life experience and be real. I think it’s only when you’re trying to just have a very simple explanation of how people feel that we act like they’re in contradiction.

JJ: Algernon has referred a couple times to consistent challenges faced by Black Americans. I think that’s part of what’s left out of a lot of news media conversations. So let’s just talk about, when you say big numbers, macro numbers, can be trending in a good direction, but they’re not enough, and they’re not going to be enough without something else, what are you getting at? What would responsive policy look like?

CBPP (6/10/24)

AA: In response to the Covid pandemic, the federal government expanded the child tax credit, and expanded the earned income tax credit, so that more poor people and more poor people with children would get aid from the federal government.

And what did we see? We saw a dramatic decline in poverty, dramatic decline in Black poverty, dramatic decline in Black child poverty, as well as for American Indians, for Latinos, and for the white population. So we know what works, we know that we have the power to do it, but, unfortunately, conservatives in Congress decided that they were not going to extend the expanded child tax credit and the expanded EITC.

So we’ve seen a reversal. So we’ve seen Black poverty rates—and this is using the supplemental poverty measure, that factors in these tax credits—increase again. So it’s unfortunate that policy makers don’t put the policy agenda to fight poverty, and to produce more racial equality, as a higher priority.

DA: Yes, and I’ll just add to that, I think an important takeaway from this is that though we have some record highs, we don’t need to let up on the economy. We need to put our pedal down to the metal, as the saying goes, in order to continue to build and strengthen. Because even with these record highs, in terms of income, we noted a report that was done last year with the Institute for Policy Studies, that noted that even at the current rate, if you look from 1960 to 2020, it would take hundreds of years before Blacks had equal pay with whites, and it would take almost 800 years for Blacks to have equal wealth with whites.

And so over the last five years, we’re having some important advances. And so what we need to do is do policies that build off of that, right? Whether it’s to continue to strengthen the earned income tax credits and other such types of credit, I think increased home ownership, there’s a lot of conversation on that. We have to make sure any type of home-ownership advancement is something that disproportionately affects African Americans in particular, but Latinos as well. African Americans have never had the majority of their population as homeowners, and that’s the No. 1 source of wealth for most Americans. So if we can do something in 2025 to really strengthen homeownership for first-time homeowners, that could be something substantial that could help break away from these historic inequalities that have made racial inequality, not just something that occurs through prejudice, but something that can be seen through socioeconomic status.

AA: We also need targeted job creation. Subsidized employment is the most effective way, so subsidized employment programs targeted to high-unemployment communities. I mentioned that we still need about 1.4 million more Black people working for the Black employment rate to be the same as the white employment rate. So we need to target those high-unemployment communities with effective job creation.

CEPR (2/9/23)

JJ: When I hear “consistent challenges,” I mean, we’re talking about racism, in terms of economic policy in this country, and the harms have been targeted, historically and presently—redlining, loan denial, all of that, the harms have been targeted. But at this moment, supposedly reforms are not allowed to be targeted, because that would be DEI, that would be unfair.

And I know we’ve talked about, for example, the Covid response was not about race. Great Depression, the WPA was not targeted by race. It was actually something that helped Black people, because it helped everyone. But we’re in this present moment that we’re in, where if you say these people are being particularly harmed, and so at least some remedy should be targeted towards them, we know that that’s going to be politically difficult. And I know that’s a weird question, but I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

DA: Clearly, racial equality has always been politically difficult, as the history of this country has shown. So it will continue to be politically difficult. I think we have seen, like the War on Poverty, that sometimes in its name might not appear as something particularly focused on African Americans, but it was coming out of the strong Black civil rights movement of that time period, when we saw a substantial decline of Black poverty in particular, all poverty. But many of the policies I did think had a disproportionate impact on African Americans.

The most effective and efficient way to address disproportionate negative harm is to then put in positive economic impact, particularly on those communities. So we should look at ways of doing that. Sometimes race would be the factor named, but sometimes you can also get it just by focusing on first-time homeowners of certain income and wealth level that would disproportionately have a good amount of African Americans, Latinos, and would have some whites, but would have a disproportionate impact on the community.

So I think if policymakers are willing—and I think our job as the electorate is to make policymakers willing—and we can get forward these policies, whether we call them DEI policies, or whether we call them trying to ensure that America is majority homeowner, or America is fully employed throughout the nation, there are ways of putting this forward.

Vox (7/9/23)

AA: This is a long struggle. So if you look at the history of the Black civil rights movement, or Black liberation struggle, however you want to characterize it, there have been moments when we’ve moved forward, there have been moments when we’ve moved backwards. So this is just one phase. So it’s important for people to recognize: OK, what’s next? How do we move forward from this particular point? So I think it’s important to regroup and think about how we move forward.

I’m focused on affirmative action policies, and particularly affirmative action in employment, which still exists, which needs to be protected and fought for, because it will be under attack. The second point that Dedrick was making is that there are ways that may be less efficient for racial justice, but there are ways to make impacts that reduce racial inequality.

And we saw it, going back to poverty, the expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit had a disproportionate positive impact on reducing Black poverty. It also reduced white poverty, and poverty for all other groups, but because more Black people were poor and in hardship, it had a disproportionate benefit. So although that was a race-neutral program, it did have a disproportionate racial benefit.

And similarly, I’ve called for targeted subsidized employment, and notice I said targeted to high-unemployment communities. You can go to Appalachia and find majority white communities that are high unemployment, and we should be concerned about those high-unemployment white communities. But if you target job creation to high-unemployment communities, you will disproportionately benefit Black communities, because that’s where the high unemployment is disproportionately concentrated.

So I think it’s important that we continue on both fronts. Let’s exploit all the race-neutral policies that we can, but also let’s not give up on a race-conscious economic justice fight in addition.

JJ: I just want to ask you, finally, about news media, about reporting. When, Dedrick, we spoke in 2017, I was talking about a Washington Post piece that said that a rise in middle-class incomes was “unequivocally good news,” even as the same report had some sort of notes in between, one of which was, oh yeah, “yawning racial disparities remain.” And that’s kind of par for the course in news, the idea that racial gaps in economic circumstances and options are lamentable but normal, and kind of a footnote to the real story, which holds an implication that a rising economic tide will eventually lift all boats.

And that framing and that absence of complexity, while it’s kind of par for the course in corporate journalism, it reflects a misunderstanding and a misrepresentation of the way economic developments affect different groups, which is what we’ve been talking about. And I wonder, from both of you, if you have any thoughts about the role that journalism currently plays in illuminating this set of issues, and about the role that journalism maybe could play?

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: “The future of the economy is based on how well minorities do in America.”

DA: Things have changed a lot over the last 30 years, even this idea of racial inequality, minority groups. I mean, now you look at Blacks and Latinos, and Latinos oftentimes, as well, have lower income levels, have lower home ownership levels, and you put these populations together, Blacks and Latino, and they’re about a third of the population. And if you talk about youth and children, you see that the majority of kids in many school districts throughout the country are students of color.

So no longer can it be kind of, well, there’s an issue with a small part of the population, but the rest of the economy is going strong. The future of the economy is based on how well minorities do in America—Latinos being the largest group now, African Americans being the second-largest group. So it will be essential, if we’re looking at how the economy can grow, making sure these communities are getting their share of the growth that would get them at a level of true middle class.

I think that’s one thing I particularly look at in terms of wealth, is that Black America’s never had a strong Black middle class in terms of wealth. You’ve always had a very small population that have had a middle-class economic wealth stability. And, again, the future of reporting on the future of the country really requires understanding those differences, and highlighting that, so we can push the country in the right direction, and how do we move the country forward in a way that is equitable in a manner that it never has been.

AA: I don’t want to appear to be too self-centered or self-serving, but we need the information presented in this report covered, because I feel both parts of the story have not gotten sufficient media attention. One is that we’re at historic highs on so many different measures that I don’t think has been talked about enough, and two, we still have significant inequality that we haven’t addressed. There’s some positive signs, but we obviously need to do a lot more. And like Dedrick said, we need to keep pressing the gas. We can’t take our foot off the pedal.

So that’s one thing. The other thing—I try to stress this when I speak to people—is that we’re talking about the United States, and Black people are part of the United States. Latinos are part of the United States. The American Indian or the Indigenous population are sort of part of the United States; some are independent nations, but they’re also interacting with the US economy.

If you improve the economic conditions of the Black population, you’re improving the economic standing of the United States. If you improve the economic condition of Latinos, you’re improving the economic strengths and health of the United States.

And it’s important that people understand that, because, unfortunately, people tend to go into a zero sum mode, and not recognize that helping Black people, in terms of public policy, is a way to help the entire country, help the United States. So that’s something that I think reporters can also work on communicating.

DA: The one thing I’ll add, in terms of what can reporters do, I think reporters need to focus in on expertise, Black expertise, expertise around racial inequality. I’ll just put forward, as recently new president of Joint Center for Political Economic Study, it’s important that Black institutions are utilized and are put at the forefront of conversations around the economy and these issues.

It’s great that there’s been more conversations around racial wealth divide, and race and economics; there’s been a lot of conversation around DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—movement, and attacks on it. But I don’t feel that they have enough centered on those who have been at the forefront of highlighting these issues, putting forth policy solutions to address them.

There are a cadre of reporters who have been focused on these issues for the last 20 years, and these reporters need to be at the forefront of the conversation. Too often times, if I do get a call, I’m getting a call from someone who’s reporting this for the first time, and doesn’t even quite understand the reality that there is deep economic inequality, it has been ongoing, and it would take radical change to really get us to a place where we could have some equality. So, again, I think we need to value those who have been focused on this area, and those institutions from these communities, if we really want to report correctly on these challenges.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and with Algernon Austin, director of the Race and Economic Justice Program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The brief we’ve been discussing can be found at both JointCenter.org and CEPR.net. Thank you both so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DA: Thanks for having us.

AA: Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Criswell knew how the system worked at FEMA, but her mandate was to change the status quo at an agency that is often accused of acting too slowly after disasters — and of being far too slow to adapt to climate change. In her three years leading the agency, she has attempted to overhaul FEMA’s disaster aid programs, overseen billions of dollars in new spending on forward-looking adaptation projects, and navigated tough disputes over the rising cost of insurance and reconstruction in vulnerable areas. Her goal was not just to ensure that FEMA ran well during disasters but also to shift the agency’s culture, making it more responsive to survivors’ needs and more forward-looking about disaster preparedness.

With peak hurricane season approaching, Grist sat down with Criswell to discuss how she’s handled some of FEMA’s biggest challenges and how she’s attempted to transform the agency from the inside. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. Among communities that get hit with a lot of disasters, FEMA has a reputation for slowness and bureaucracy. From your perspective, after both working here and being a FEMA customer, how much of that is merited?

A. We’ve heard that a lot, and I think that there’s a lot of people that still have memories of Hurricane Katrina — they think of the FEMA of today as the FEMA from Katrina. We are a different team. We respond faster. We have more resources for recovery. We have more resources to help reduce impact, more resilience programs. We know that recovery is really complicated, and some communities are more complex than others. But recovery is doable, and so what we have to do is work with a community to understand what their recovery needs are. We have these integrated recovery teams that go in and don’t just implement FEMA programs, but they help bring the whole space — federal agencies, philanthropies, and nonprofits — together to help identify what that community’s recovery goals are and help them with that complicated road to recovery. While I think some of [the criticism] is warranted at times, I think that we are a very different agency than we were after Katrina, and we’re making huge gains. 

Q. Earlier this year, FEMA unveiled a set of reforms to its individual assistance programs, cutting red tape and offering survivors more money for food and housing after disasters. These reforms address many of the longest-standing complaints and criticisms about how that program works. Why didn’t this happen earlier?

A. We’ve been working on that since the day that I came into this office. I think this really came about through hearing from the people that are trying to get assistance and the struggles and the barriers that they’re facing. I’ve been a local emergency manager in a small community in Colorado. I’ve been a local emergency manager in New York City. So I know what it’s like to be a customer of FEMA. In my very first year, I visited a lot of our joint field offices to hear from people and hear some of the challenges that they were facing. 

I think that lens helps us keep it at the top of our priority list, and helps us keep focused on putting people first, and always trying to understand their barriers, and knowing that we can’t just have a one-size-fits-all approach to the delivery of our programs. So I think a lot of it really has to do with the fact that we’ve had a lived experience of being on the other side.

Q. FEMA’s resilience programs allocate billions of dollars to climate adaptation and disaster preparedness. But a large share of the money from programs like Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, goes to white and wealthy areas, and there are a few “superuser” states that get a lot of the money. I’m wondering what FEMA has done or could still do to address those disparities.

A. When I came in, the first round of BRIC money was going out. Under a previous resilience program, there was a cap of $5 million federal spending, and BRIC gave us a $50 million cap, so people were really excited. But we saw from the first round that the structure that we had put in place was certainly not representative of all communities across America, and it really seemed to favor some of our coastal communities. So every year we have made adjustments to ensure everybody has a fair chance in the competitive side of the program. We have direct technical assistance, which is also making a big impact — bringing in experts, especially for our most under-resourced communities that don’t necessarily have the expertise or the personnel or the time to be able to think about the next mitigation [project] that they can do. We continue to expand that every year. 

What I’ve asked my team to do now is to study the return on investment of resilience projects to see what’s working. We want to see projects succeed, and sometimes we see projects that don’t get across the finish line because of a poor start. We’ll continue to refine the way that we are scoring these projects to ensure that communities that have the greatest need can get some of the benefit — for instance we’re adding points to the score for new applicants, or if you’re in a [vulnerable area].

Q. In response to protests from environmental groups and cities such as Phoenix, who have criticized FEMA for not responding to heat waves, FEMA has said that it can only declare a disaster when state and local financial resources are exceeded. But few communities apply for heat disaster declarations because it’s difficult to show how heat waves overwhelm local finances. Do you think FEMA can or should modify its threshold for declaring a heat disaster? And if it did, what could FEMA do to help residents during a heat wave? 

A. I’m going to start with the preparedness side. We know heat comes every year, just like we know hurricanes come to the Gulf Coast and the East Coast every year. So the individual preparedness piece is really important, and we can’t negate that. We need people to know what their risk is, know what kinds of severe weather events are going to impact them, and what their personal needs are. If I know that I have a condition that makes me more vulnerable to heat, what am I going to do during extreme heat days if my power goes out? We also can help reduce the impact through our mitigation programs — we’ve got many communities that are using BRIC funding to plant tree canopies to reduce the impact from urban heat islands, or painting roofs white, or putting in place splash pads for kids. That reduces the overall impact.

But let’s go into emergency response. I was working in New York City during Covid, and we were very concerned about the number of people that didn’t have air conditioning and the fact that we didn’t want to put them in congregate settings. So New York City utilized money [from the federal housing department’s home energy assistance program LI-HEAP] to put air conditioners in people’s homes. From a cost perspective, if that was a disaster declaration, could FEMA have reimbursed the city for the air conditioners that they put in? I don’t know. Perhaps, but it also takes other agencies, right? We need a whole-of-government solution to help these communities. 

I think about what happened in Houston with Hurricane Beryl recently, and the power outages. What could we or could we not do there? We could use some of our programs to perhaps help individuals that are vulnerable make sure that they have a place to go, like a cooling center, or if it’s a long period of time and they have to relocate somewhere, perhaps our programs could help there. We are not opposed to having a state come in and ask for a heat declaration. I just need to know what I’m reimbursing them for that isn’t part of their normal budget. Some of the things that I read are like, “we want FEMA to be able to pay for cooling centers.” Well, I don’t like the phrase “pay for a cooling center” because it makes it sound like I’m building something brand new, and really I’m just opening up the library, or I’m having people go to the library.

Q. Since Hurricane Ian struck Florida in 2022, I’ve heard from people trying to rebuild in Lee County that rising flood insurance costs are prohibitively expensive and rebuilding a house to code is really, really costly — so much so that a lot of people just can’t afford it. To what extent is that the intended outcome of these programs — to discourage this kind of waterfront living? How much is this something that you think FEMA or Congress should try to address through affordability mechanisms?

A. I get asked all the time, “Should we let people rebuild there?” And in some areas, I say probably not, and that’s why we have programs to help buy people out and move. But most of the time it’s not a matter of where, it’s a matter of how. When we look at what’s going on in Lee County right now, we don’t want people to rebuild and put their lives at risk. It’s not just about how much it’s going to cost to rebuild that home: During Hurricane Ian, 150 people lost their lives. They were in homes that weren’t elevated high enough, or they chose not to evacuate. 

So this is about not just the cost of rebuilding, but also about: How are we doing everything we can to protect the lives in an area that’s prone to a severe weather event? This is about protecting lives and saving the people that live in those areas, and people will have to make personal choices about whether or not this is the right location for them to live based on what that’s going to require. 

But to your last point about affordability [of flood insurance], we do believe that there are certain communities across the U.S. that are certainly in an area that is at high risk, but they came to be there through an environmental injustice — they’re low income neighborhoods, but they’re at a high risk, and so their costs are really high. So we do believe an affordability plan is needed to ensure that people can get the type of protection that they need. But we also know that we have homes that are high value and high risk, and we were subsidizing their rates prior to this.

Q. For the second year in a row, FEMA has run low on money and Congress has not acted to replenish its budget. As a result, the agency has once again had to implement “immediate needs funding,” which means it has paused almost all its recovery and resilience projects and restricted spending only to emergency response operations. With peak hurricane season approaching, what’s the realistic worst-case scenario here, and what can FEMA do about it without action from Congress?

A. We’ve done immediate needs funding in the past, but it has usually been after a major weather event has caused us to expend the funds that we have. What we’re finding right now is, as we close out Covid-19 [reimbursements], all of those bills are coming in. We always want to make sure that we have enough funding to support immediate responses to big incidents like Hurricane Ian, and we go into immediate needs when I reach a balance that’s going to allow me to respond to one of those events. That’s where we’re at now.

On the response side, I keep enough money to respond to one event. As we were watching Hurricane Debby, I was really concerned, because it was going to hit Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and then on up. If it had materialized as we thought it might, that could have drained the rest of the money that I have available very quickly. There’s not much that I can do other than getting a supplemental [appropriation] from Congress, and I have walked the halls of Congress to make sure that they know really where we’re at — once I have that one big event, or maybe two events coming back to back, I’m going to have to come back to them, and they may have to act faster than they’ve planned.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s FEMA director tried to fix the agency. Did she succeed? on Sep 4, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

“Get up,” she told him. “There’s a flood outside.” 

It was 8 a.m. on a Thursday in late July, two years ago in rural Pike County, Kentucky, and rain had been pouring for days. Overnight, it got heavier. Homes and vehicles were being swept down the narrow valleys of Eastern Kentucky’s mountainous terrain.

Dozens of people died after more than a foot of rain fell from July 26 through July 30, 2022, flooding 13 rural counties in Eastern Kentucky. Yet as these communities attempt to rebuild, they’re being overlooked for federal spending that’s protecting wealthier and more urbanized Americans from such weather disasters.

Wesley, Alexis, their two daughters and Alexis’ sister evacuated, hiking the half-mile to Alexis’ mother’s house via the mountains behind their own home to avoid flooded roads. They’ve been living there ever since.  

Kentucky is a regular victim of flooding. During the past century, more than 100 people have died in storms across the state, including at least 44 two summers ago. Heat-trapping pollution is driving up rainfall rates and flood risks.

Thousands of survivors were forced to move out of damaged homes, including Wesley and his family. Their house, which Wesley’s grandfather built in the 1970s, is unlivable. Insulation peels from the ceiling and the floors bubble with water damage. Finding contractors to fix the house has been difficult because thousands of other flooded properties are also being repaired or replaced. 

Their furniture and appliances were destroyed, and Wesley estimates replacing them would cost around $20,000. The family was denied FEMA disaster assistance so they’ve had to foot these costs themselves. “We just need a little help from our government,” he said.

Despite histories of flooding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) classifies Pike County and the 12 other counties that flooded two years ago as facing “low” risks in the event of a natural disaster like a flood. That’s largely because they have less to lose —financially — compared to more urbanized areas. 

Critics of FEMA’s risk-determination tool, called the National Risk Index, say it doesn’t include enough information about rural communities, especially when it comes to flooding, leading it to understate hazards.

That suggests that as the federal government cranks up spending on infrastructure, including the allocation of more than $1 billion to help reduce future flood threats, families in East Kentucky and other rural regions are at risk of missing out on projects that could help them prepare better for the next disaster. 

What is the National Risk Index?

FEMA developed its National Risk Index to help local and state officials and residents plan for emergencies through an online tool. The agency sourced historic rainfall and other data to characterize these risks, allowing it to paint a national picture of threats from local disasters, findings that influence its spending decisions.

FEMA began developing the risk index in 2016, though initial work dates to 2008. The first iteration of the risk index was released in October 2020, and the data has been updated twice since then, most recently in March 2023.

Work to update how the risk index handles inland flooding is expected early next year. In a press release touting new requirements that forced the coming update, the Biden administration said that in “recent years, communities have seen repeated flooding that threatens both lives and property” but that the agency’s approaches to measuring risks based on historical data “have become outdated.” 

The agency is also working on a “climate-informed” risk index looking at future hazards but, so far, inland flooding is not on the list of disasters planned to be included. 

FEMA’s national and regional press offices declined to be interviewed or answer questions for this story.

“There’s a bias against, I think, rural communities, especially in the flood dataset,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a nonprofit that certifies floodplain managers and educates policymakers about flood loss. He said this bias could profoundly confuse or affect emergency managers in those areas.

“It’s giving false results,” Berginnis said. “I think we’ve got to be very thoughtful and very careful on how we use [the risk index] for the hazard of flood in particular.” 

The building of homes and communities in vulnerable locations and the effects of heat-trapping pollution are converging to escalate the frequency of weather disasters across the U.S. One of the effects of climate change is an intensification in the amount of rainfall that can fall every hour. A federal report on the latest climate science showed the rainiest days across the Southeast are dumping more than a third more water on average now than was the case in the late 1950s. Ongoing emissions and warming threaten to continue to boost rainfall rates.

“If it’s gone up that much already, we might be wise to be concerned,” said Scott Denning, an atmospheric sciences professor at Colorado State University who studies carbon dioxide, water, and energy cycles. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

That rain often falls on ground where coal mining excavations removed mountaintops. Researchers overlaid data regarding fatalities from the floods with maps of mountaintop removal mining and found that many of the deaths were downstream from or adjacent to such sites. 

Neglecting rural Americans

Todd DePriest doesn’t “believe in Facebook,” but uses his mother’s account to surf the website’s digital marketplace. That’s what he was doing two summers ago when he saw alerts about severe floods in Letcher County, Kentucky, where he serves as the mayor of Jenkins, population 1,800. 

Public service announcements warning people to “turn around, don’t drown” during floods were circulating on his mother’s feed. DePriest got up from his computer to look out the window at the torrential rain and realized the threat his own town was about to face. 

DePriest jumped in his Jeep to check on the bridge at the lower end of Jenkins. When he got there, the road across the bridge had already flooded. 

“I started calling people I knew down there and said, ‘Hey, the water’s up and if you want to get out of here, we’re going to have to do something pretty quick,’” DePriest said. 

His next calls were to the fire department to prepare them for the emergencies to which they were likely to respond, then to city workers to get essential maintenance vehicles like garbage trucks to higher ground. 

Letcher County was one of the hardest hit of the 13 counties declared federal disaster areas by FEMA. Five of those killed across the region were in Letcher County. 

Two years since the floods, the region is still rebuilding. “They (FEMA) were telling us it was going to take four or five, six years to recover and get through this,” DePriest said. “And I thought, well, there’s no way it’s going to take that long.”

Now, DePriest hopes it only takes five years. 

“All the processes and dealing with FEMA – and I think they’re fair in what they do – but it’s just a process,” DePriest said. 

The National Risk Index multiplies a community’s expected annual loss in dollars by their risk factor. Like most of the east Kentucky counties that flooded two summers ago, Letcher County’s risk level is scored “very low” by the risk index. 

That’s because it includes annual asset loss in its equations. 

Rural counties like Letcher, where the average home costs about $75,000 and median household income is half the national average, score lower on the risk scale because there are fewer dollars to lose when disaster strikes. The area’s flood hazard threat is deemed relatively high but the potential consequences in financial losses are lower compared with denser areas. 

The urban-rural disparity can be examined by comparing how the National Risk Index judges Jackson, Kentucky, a small city about 80 miles southeast of Lexington, with Jackson, Mississippi, the Magnolia State’s populous capital. 

Both cities saw disastrous flooding during the summer of 2022. Unlike its namesake in Kentucky, Jackson, Mississippians suffered no flood deaths, though financial damage was far worse — an estimated $1 billion. 

Hinds County – home to Mississippi’s capital – is assigned a “relatively moderate” risk level. Its social vulnerability is categorized as very high, with community resiliency categorized as relatively high, meaning the community is expected to bounce back more effortlessly after disaster. River flooding is deemed the second greatest natural disaster risk, with annual losses estimated at about $15 million.

To compare, Breathitt County, where Jackson, Kentucky, is located, is given a “very low” risk level by the National Risk Index. Its social vulnerability is categorized as relatively high and community resiliency is categorized as very low, suggesting it would need more help after disasters. Although FEMA considers river flooding the greatest disaster risk to the community, its annual losses are rated at just $1.3 million.

This urban-rural difference matters because FEMA uses the National Risk Index to determine how much money communities should receive to better prepare for natural disasters. For example, it’s being used to make decisions about spending $1.2 trillion available to lessen future flood risks under the U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The risk index is also used to determine which communities get money through FEMA’s Community Disaster Resilience Zones program, which designated 483 community census tracts as Community Disaster Resilience Zones last year. This means the communities inside those tracts can receive extra money for disaster planning. Of those census tracts, a third are federally classified as rural.

Disaster experts say relying solely on the risk index can disadvantage places that lack long-term weather records — which are often missing from rural communities. 

Weather stations can be sparse in treacherous landscapes. Rural areas are among the last to have their flood hazards mapped by FEMA, with the agency prioritizing higher-density regions. And National Weather Service offices tend to be located in more urban areas, according to Melanie Gall, co-director of the Center for Emergency Management Homeland Security at Arizona State University. 

“I think that we miss a lot,” she said.

Progress post-flood 

Immediately after the July 2022 floods, FEMA and Kentucky Emergency Management began temporarily providing trailers for hundreds of flood survivors. Both programs have since ended.

FEMA gave trailer occupants the option to purchase their units as permanent housing. The trailer cost was determined by a formula that factored the type of unit, its size, and how many months it had been occupied by the interested buyer.

In the middle of the most recent winter, 18 months after torrential rainfall on steep slopes left so many families homeless, federal trailers that hadn’t been paid for were hauled away.

Kentucky’s program offered more flexibility: While the program has ended, three families still live in state-funded campers, according to Julia Stanganelli, flood recovery coordinator for the Housing Development Alliance. The Eastern Kentucky-based affordable housing developer has led the efforts to rehab and rebuild houses lost in the flood using state disaster money. 

The three families are living in the campers while they wait for a new housing development to be built above the floodplain in Knott County, Kentucky, Stanganelli said. 

East Kentucky’s population was declining long before the floods. Shaping Our Appalachian Region, a nonprofit focused on population retention and growth, estimates Eastern Kentucky has lost nearly 55,000 residents since 2000. The floods accelerated the losses. 

During the 2022 floods, already sparse cell service went out entirely, and even the U.S. Weather Service’s on-duty warning meteorologist faced busy or disconnected phone lines, recalls Jane Marie Wix, a warning coordination meteorologist with the Weather Service. 

Wix said the creek near her house turned into a “river,” preventing her from reaching work. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so helpless before.” 

Locals are working to better prepare for the next disaster, with or without federal government help. 

Todd DePriest, the mayor of Jenkins, worked with the nonprofit law firm Appalachian Citizens Law Center to pay for four stream monitors that can trigger flood warnings. 

Wesley Bryant, the Pike County resident whose home flooded two years ago, said he’s called his state representatives “hundreds of times” to keep Eastern Kentucky’s disaster recovery top of mind. 

Bryant said he recently felt “pretty defeated” after receiving another notification about failing to qualify for federal assistance. But he said he won’t quit fighting. 

“This is my home, this is my commonwealth,” Wesley said. “I’m going to fight for it.”

Update:

Following the publication of this story, a FEMA spokesperson reached out to clarify that responses to emailed questions initially provided “on background” were available for publication.

Those statements included that, of the NRI’s benefits, “[h]aving a baseline knowledge of natural hazard risk is essential for preparing for, recovering from, mitigating, and ultimately reducing the impacts of these hazards on an individual to nationwide scale.”

Rural communities face “unique challenges” for data collection around natural hazards, given that these weather events are more likely to be reported from urban areas and along roads, the spokesperson added, and rural areas often face a “more substantial challenge” in the “lack of capacity in terms of staffing, expertise, and resources to collect and store the data.”

FEMA’s spokesperson reiterated that the agency is consistently soliciting and receiving input from experts on natural hazard risk assessment, and working with states, tribes, and territories to fill in current data gaps and implement other feedback. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The rural Americans too poor for federal flood protections on Aug 18, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder.

People on Maui have heard the stories: neighbors forced from their homes not by last year’s wildfires, but by property owners seeking to take advantage of the housing shortage. In some cases, tenants have said property owners have rented to government aid programs that offered top dollar to shelter wildfire survivors. In others, landlords have rented to others who will pay more.

Civil Beat has teamed up with ProPublica to more deeply examine what many say is a secondary housing crisis stemming from the loss of thousands of homes in the wildfires. We want to know how widespread these issues are, who’s responsible, who’s been harmed and what can be done about it.

To do this right, we need to hear from anyone who has been touched by this issue. You can help us ensure our stories are comprehensive and nuanced and that they reflect what is happening in your life. If you’re a property owner or landlord, we want to hear your thoughts on the governor’s emergency order barring most evictions and rent increases. If you are a property manager, real estate agent or someone else with expertise in Maui’s housing market, we’d like to hear from you. If you work for a government agency, contractor or nonprofit aid group, we’d like to hear from you, too. And, of course, we want to hear from renters: people who had to leave their homes so wildfire survivors could move in, those who faced rent increases, those who have been told their leases will not be renewed and those who have left Maui.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat.

As the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Marshall Fire approached, Kyle Brown was serving as a city councilman in Louisville, Colorado, a suburb of Boulder that had been devastated by the blaze. Brown’s own home had escaped damage, but hundreds of his neighbors had lost everything to the costliest and deadliest fire in the state’s history, which caused more than $2 billion in damages and destroyed more than a thousand structures.

Despite Brown’s efforts to help the victims, the fire recovery was stalling out. Displaced residents were struggling to secure insurance payouts and scrape together cash to rebuild their homes, and most couldn’t afford the jacked-up rents in the area. The City Council was supposed to be helping these victims, but instead it was locked in a dispute with them over whether they should have to pay local taxes on building materials. 

Brown was desperate for a way to do more. When the incumbent state representative in the area resigned after it emerged that she didn’t live in the district, he saw an opportunity and put his name forward as her replacement.

What happened next is one of the rare disaster recovery success stories in recent U.S. history. After securing a seat in the state legislature, Brown, a Democrat, spent the next two years working with a highly organized group of survivors to pass a suite of ambitious bills that have made Colorado a national leader in responding to climate disasters. Many of the same issues crop up across the country after fires and floods, but survivors rarely succeed in getting lawmakers to pay attention to any of them, let alone all of them. Brown, however, was able to gain bipartisan support for bills that give fire survivors leverage against insurers, mortgage companies, homeowners associations, and rental property owners, elevating concerns that have often been ignored in other disaster-prone states. 

This legislative success wasn’t thanks to any political horse-trading or inspiring rhetoric on Brown’s part. Rather, it’s the result of a hand-in-glove collaboration with a well-organized and often militant group of fire survivors, drafting bills based on their recommendations and needs, and allowing them to tweak and strengthen legislation where necessary. 

“We needed to accelerate the pace of recovery, so I just listened,” said Brown in an interview with Grist. “I took notes on everything they said, and I turned it over, and I turned it into bills.”

This combination of organized advocacy by disaster survivors and ambitious lawmaking by sympathetic politicians could become a model for other disaster-prone places, but it was only possible because many well-heeled Marshall Fire victims had the resources to organize and press for change after the fire, a luxury most disaster-stricken communities don’t have. Lower-income communities around Colorado may benefit from the Marshall legislation, but it may be difficult for survivors in other parts of the country to emulate it. 

The Marshall Fire wasn’t like the massive forest fires that have tortured Northern California or the desert blazes that rage across Texas and New Mexico each year. It ripped down from the Front Range in December of 2021 and all but vaporized a fast-growing, gentrified segment of the Denver metroplex, bringing about what climate scientist Daniel Swain calls the “urban firestorm.” High winds whipped the grass fire to full size in a matter of hours, igniting vegetation that had dried out during a severe drought of the kind that global warming is making more common. In contrast to California, where burned communities have often been rural and less well-off, the Boulder suburbs of Louisville and Superior are dense and suburban, filled with well-to-do lawyers and consultants.

For that reason, there were several fire victims who had the time and money to become volunteer recovery advocates. One of those survivors was a patent lawyer named Tawnya Somauroo, who was galvanized to action when she learned that Louisville had not issued an evacuation order for her subdivision, most of which burned in the fire. She spent months bird-dogging the mayor’s office and local law enforcement on her own time to ask about their evacuation procedures, but found herself making little progress.

“I didn’t even know where City Hall was before the fire,” Soumaroo told Grist. “I just started calling city council members and talking to them and getting not a very good reception at first. It just became this narrative of, ‘the survivors versus everyone else.’” In other words, elected officials were weighing the need to finance the rebuilding of public parks and facilities against the need to help the hundreds of displaced homeowners.

As Soumaroo watched local Facebook groups devolve into hubbub and confusion, she turned to a less commonly used app to make order out of the chaos — she downloaded Slack, the messaging platform normally used in white-collar workplaces, and invited hundreds of locals to join her there. The app allowed survivors to create individual message threads to discuss specific insurers, specific permits, and specific federal aid deadlines. 

“People would join a certain thread, and then someone would pop up who had the same problem, and then coach them [on] how they solved it,” she said. “And you know, little by little, we started identifying problems that way.” 

Meanwhile, a former Boulder resident named Jeri Curry moved back to the area from Virginia to help aid in the long-term recovery. She and a group of fellow volunteers established a long-term recovery center in an office park, opening it up about 10 months after the fire as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of Colorado wound down their recovery operations. In addition to providing free food and computer access, the center provided guidance to survivors navigating the process of filing an insurance claim and applying for FEMA aid. 

“The big thing that we believed the community overall needed was a gathering place, a central place where people could get everything that they needed,” she said. “The agencies put their mission first, their service delivery and resource delivery first, and they don’t put the survivor in the middle.” These casework conversations alerted volunteers to the dynamics holding back the recovery — lowball cost estimates from insurers, delays in securing claim payouts, and construction material sales taxes that many residents were struggling to pay.

Frustrated with the response from city officials, the survivors’ group — now incorporated as a nonprofit — decided to team up with their new state legislator, Brown, who was looking for ways to help fire victims. Brown had worked for Colorado’s insurance department while serving on the Louisville city council and had experience dealing with complex policy issues, but property insurance and housing law were new to him. So he relied on Soumaroo’s expertise, letting her and the other survivors guide the bills he wrote and introduced.

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This strategy soon produced a number of laws that gave immediate financial relief to fire survivors who had been struggling to rebuild. Brown passed a bill that stopped mortgage servicers from holding back insurance payments from customers who were waiting to rebuild, eliminating a delay that stopped many survivors from rebuilding for months. He passed a bill that required insurers to take into account the state’s own estimates of rebuilding costs, a measure designed to stop them from lowballing homeowners trying to rebuild. Bills that gave survivors grants for rebuilding with fire-safe materials, provided them with rebates on construction material taxes, and plowed resources into studying smoke and ash damage all sailed through the legislature with ease.

“It feels really good to be listened to,” said Soumaroo. “I would just sort of brief him on, like, people with this problem, that problem, that problem, and he would go move the bill forward.” 

Beyond assisting Marshall survivors, Brown and the survivors’ groups also took on other institutions that hampered fire recovery in general. Soumaroo had become incensed that homeowners’ associations in Louisville maintained design rules that prohibited residents from replacing the flammable wooden fences that had ferried the fire across the city. Her own subdivision had a decades-old deed covenant that in theory could have allowed any other resident to sue her for rebuilding with a fire-resistant fence. She took her concerns to Brown and he drafted a bill that prohibited HOAs, which represent more than half of Coloradans, from impeding a fire-safe rebuild.

One of Brown’s most difficult fights was against rental property owners, whom he accused of price gouging after the fire. Some renters reported increased rents of 10 to 15 percent, as displaced homeowners competed with existing tenants for a tiny number of available units, mimicking a dynamic that had emerged in California years earlier. In theory, there is a simple legislative solution to this problem — bar apartment owners from raising rents after a fire — but few jurisdictions have enacted it, in part because property owners have lobbied fiercely against such moves. Earlier this year, Brown passed a strong bill that prohibits price gouging after fires, including with some Republican support.

Many of the bills Brown introduced faced initial objections from insurers, banks, and landlords, all of whom had an established presence in the Capitol. In other circumstances, this opposition might have doomed the laws, but the survivors of the Marshall Fire acted as a political lobby; rather than just plead for help, they tweaked bills in response to industry criticism and ensured lawmakers knew they were paying attention to their votes.

Still, not everyone is happy. Betty Knecht, the executive director of the Colorado Mortgage Lenders Association, a trade group representing banks and other lenders, says she worries the legislature veered too far to the left in addressing the fire recovery.

“You had a very unbalanced legislature, which unfortunately allows for a lot more to be passed.” she said, referring to the large Democratic majorities in both chambers. She also pointed out that dozens of representatives in the legislature were appointed to fill vacancies, like Brown, rather than elected. 

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Knecht argued that Brown’s price-gouging legislation wouldn’t hold down rents and that the new pressure on insurers might make many leave the state, as has happened in Florida. However, she praised him for workshopping his mortgage-servicers bill with her group before it went up for a vote and adjusting the payout requirements. The group didn’t end up endorsing the bill, but it didn’t come out against it, either.

The Marshall Fire victims secured a far bigger legislative response than the victims of past Colorado fires. The district adjacent to Brown’s had suffered a disaster of its own a few years earlier when the East Troublesome Fire roared through the mountain town of Grand Lake, leaving hundreds of underinsured residents without the means to rebuild. That district’s representative, Judy Amabile, had worked for most of 2021 on a bill that would prohibit insurers from haggling over the value of personal contents, but it still hadn’t come together when the Marshall Fire struck that December.

Frustrated with the lack of progress, Amabile used the surge of attention around the Marshall Fire to push through the bill that was designed to help the East Troublesome survivors. The experience of seeing her bill pass with bipartisan support made her realize that the Marshall Fire had opened a window for big-picture lawmaking that no other disaster had. 

“If you have more resources, you have more time to invest in the recovery effort,” said Amabile. “There was some pushback, like, ‘all these rich people in Boulder are getting all this stuff.’ But they were a force. They really made stuff happen for themselves.”

Soumaroo and Curry, two of the lead post-fire organizers, acknowledge that the high education and income levels in the cities impacted by the Marshall Fire helped the rebuilding effort move faster. Two and a half years after the fire, almost half of displaced homeowners are back in their homes, which is a higher rate than many other communities have been able to achieve after disasters of comparable magnitude. This is in part because the community had more resources to begin with, but it’s also because survivors had enough political clout to secure financial relief that other survivors have not obtained. 

Curry’s disaster casework center also relied on support from well-resourced residents: the organizers behind the center were able to pull in $1 million from wealthy locals and nearby businesses, and recruited locals with spare time to volunteer as caseworkers, allowing them to keep it open until this past June. The Boulder Community Foundation also raised more than $43 million to help victims, much of it from wealthy private donors.

The irony is that while this effort would likely never have happened in a lower-income and less-educated area, it will benefit future fire survivors in worse-off areas of Colorado. The mortgage-servicer delay and rent-gouging laws will only apply to survivors of future fires, which are far more likely to start in the state’s rural mountain communities than in the suburbs of the Front Range. It may have been Democrats who pushed the bills through, but the benefits will reach Republican sections of the state, and Brown and Soumaroo have talked with people in other states about authoring copycat bills.

“There were no lobbyists, there’s no big money running these bills,” said Brown. “We got this done through sheer community advocacy. We talk about policies, and then I run bills, and they show up and testify and make their voices heard.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the Marshall Fire sparked a political transformation in Colorado on Aug 13, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

The fire, which officials say was started by arson, has grown in the past week as the western US eyes what could be another potent wildfire season. A combination of strong vegetation growth due to heavy precipitation over the past few years, and high temperatures this summer could mean larger wildfires in the coming months.

These conditions all contributed to the magnitude of the Park Fire, which has already damaged more than 500 structures, and put at least 8,000 people under evacuation orders. For another sense of scale, the fire has grown so large that it’s visible from space and now covers more square footage than the entire city of Los Angeles.

The Park Fire follows numerous other large fires that have devastated the US in recent years, including in Hawaii in 2023, California in 2021, and Montana in 2017. It’s the latest disaster to highlight how deeply fires can impact communities across the US and the urgent need for better policies to help navigate potential displacement.

In 2023, 2.5 million Americans had to leave their home either temporarily or permanently due to a natural disaster, according to the US Census Bureau, and the agency’s current estimates suggest at least 500,000 more have been displaced so far this year. Vulnerable groups including low-income households, people over the age of 65, and Black and Hispanic Americans, are among those more likely to be displaced as a result of these phenomena.

The effects of the Park Fire and those of a growing number of natural disasters, some of which are tied to climate change, highlight the urgent need for more federal support for recovery and how these incidents exacerbate existing housing crises.

How evacuations work

Those required to evacuate during the Park Fire, and others like it, are forced to seek shelter with friends or family, at a hotel, or at an evacuation center that’s been set up by the affected counties. Typically, evacuations are led by the affected county or city, which is responsible for notifying residents as the situation becomes more urgent.

Evacuation orders can come at any time, including in the middle of the night. Law enforcement officials are usually in charge of notifying people and alerting neighborhoods, and can use cars and sirens. They also provide updates via television, radio, and social media. Many counties have text-based emergency alert systems that residents can sign up for to get mobile updates about a disaster.

Those living in areas with high wildfire risk are often urged to have an evacuation plan ready, including a go-bag with essentials like water and a flashlight, charged devices, and fuel in their cars. Those who are able to leave on their own in their vehicles are encouraged to do so quickly in the case of an evacuation order and to get out of the areas affected by the fires as shown in maps that the counties release.

Counties may also designate assembly points for people to congregate if they’re unable to leave on their own or if roads are obstructed. Officials then coordinate emergency routes that people can use, along with transportation to shelters.

Depending on how long it will take to contain and address the fire, evacuees could be in limbo for days to weeks, unsure about the status of their homes. That’s a stressful and devastating feeling for many who are waiting to hear if their homes have survived the disaster.

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Once the imminent danger has passed and the fire has been contained, officials assess when it’s safe for people to return, says Tom Cova, a professor of geography at the University of Utah who has studied wildfire evacuation systems. That includes screening the area for toxins left by the fire and other hazards like downed power lines and propane tanks.

If it’s deemed safe, people may be cleared to return to the area and assess the potential damage, or they may only be allowed to drive back, viewing their homes from their cars, due to the health risks from residual smoke and debris.

Those whose homes are destroyed and who are permanently displaced by the disaster face a far lengthier and much more complicated journey to rebuilding or moving.

Insurance could help offset some of those costs, though some former evacuees in Maui have noted that such funds were only sufficient to cover rent temporarily.

In certain areas where there’s high wildfire risk, homeowner’s insurance may not cover wildfires because of how costly these disasters have become for these companies, which puts the onus of rebuilding on the owners. In addition to construction, families also face the expense of securing alternative housing while they wait during a process that can take months to years.

Disasters highlight gaps in aid and housing

Disasters like the Park Fire underscore the gaps that currently exist in federal aid for recovery and the housing shortages that were already a challenge.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the central distributor of rebuilding grant assistance that people can apply for, but these programs can have stringent requirements — including specific thresholds for damage — that not everyone meets. People who are able to get insurance funds may also be precluded from receiving some of this aid. Often, the aid that’s provided isn’t sufficient to address the full cost of rebuilding. According to a 2020 report from the Government Accountability Office, the average amount of aid that individuals received from FEMA between 2010-2019 was $3,522.

States like California do fill in some of the gaps by offering benefits like debris removal services at no cost to homeowners, and agencies including the US Department of Agriculture and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development also have loan programs for rebuilding. By and large, though, the assistance that’s required is greater than what’s available and can put those who lose their homes in an economically vulnerable position.

“The help Americans receive after disasters isn’t just inadequate, it’s complicated to navigate and painfully slow to arrive,” writes Samantha Montano, an emergency management professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, for the New York Times. “From the amount of time it takes to complete recovery — measured in years, not months — to the labyrinth of policies, regulations, false promises and lawsuits, the reward for surviving a disaster is being forced into a system so cruel it constitutes a second disaster.”

The solution, Montano argues, is to bolster resources for FEMA, which faced a funding shortage in 2023, and for states to develop better recovery plans that include boosts to their budgets and dedicated management. Many of these challenges are evidenced by the response to the Lahaina wildfires in Maui. Families who were displaced by those fires were still navigating provisional housing roughly six months out from that disaster.

Another issue that these disasters draw attention to is the housing challenges that people were already facing in places that are hit by them. A 2018 fire in Paradise, California, for example, decimated roughly 14,000 homes and made a housing shortage in the region even worse. In Plumas County, one of the four counties hit by the Park Fire, there’s similarly already a shortage of affordable homes for low-income households. Any additional damage from the Park Fire could well deepen those gaps.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfires will put even more pressure on the country’s housing crisis on Aug 4, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Li Zhou, Vox.

The plan was launched by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader and California Forever’s CEO. He said the project has three main goals: “Help solve the California housing crisis”; create a walkable metropolitan area with a high quality of life and low carbon footprint; and build a new “economic engine” for Solano County. “There’s no playbook here,” Sramek said. “What we are trying to do is really, really different.”

Before California Forever could break ground, their proposal, the East Solano Plan, needed approval from the people who already live in Solano County. Where Sramek envisioned growth, however, others warned of irreversible ecological damage. Despite launching a multimillion-dollar campaign to persuade the public to vote for the proposal in the upcoming November election, concerns continued to grow as elected officials began speaking out in opposition, and a coalition against the project formed. Local mistrust was further deepened by the company’s ongoing lawsuit against landowners who resisted their offers. In April, a poll showed that 70 percent of Solano’s voters would likely reject the measure.

On July 22, the day before the Solano County Board of Supervisors was set to decide whether to put the initiative on the November ballot, Sramek and the board agreed to retract the proposal. According to a joint statement announcing the decision, Sramek said that California Forever will try to get it on the ballot again in two years, after a report assessing the environmental impacts of the project is finished. 

Other similarly minded and deep-pocketed projects have been springing up around the world. Masdar, a $20 billion planned zero-carbon city in the United Arab Emirates, has been delayed for decades and scaled back beyond recognition. Neom, the futuristic $500 billion renewable energy dream of Saudi Arabian royals, now anticipates less than a fifth of the 1.5 million residents they originally planned on. Malaysia’s Forest City, which won design awards for sustainability, has been called a ghost town. And the billionaire behind Diapers.com has big plans for Telosa somewhere in the deserts of the American West, a sprawling green energy metropolis.

These projects all seek to fulfill urban dreams of a better, environmentally friendly life by building a city from scratch. But even when the buildings exist, they fail to draw residents and, despite plans that emphasize sustainability, projects struggle to win the support of environmentalists. California Forever hopes to eventually house 400,000 people — goals comparable to those of Masdar or Neom. 

“I have not seen one of this size which has been successful so far,” said Alain Bertaud, an urban planning researcher at the Marron Institute, part of New York University. “But that doesn’t mean that they will not be — there are so many in the pipeline now.”

Though Bertaud said he’s normally skeptical of proposals for these new cities, he thought California Forever’s plans looked well designed. One aspect that could help the project find success is its proximity to other Bay Area cities, he said, as the lure of the region’s job market might encourage people to move there. 

But when it comes to the project’s environmental promises, he’s unconvinced — if only because it’s difficult to measure benchmarks, like carbon emissions, until a project is up and running. “I don’t doubt the dedication of people who are fighting for sustainability,” he said, “but unless you define it in a very clear way, I’m afraid that ‘sustainability’ is a self-satisfying slogan to put on whatever idea you have.” 

The question of sustainability is at the heart of California Forever’s ambition and problems alike. Both backers and skeptics want to tackle the area’s housing crisis. Eye-popping rents and home prices far exceed national averages, with single-family homes going for a median price of $1.4 million. It’s one reason why the region has the third-highest homeless population behind New York City and Los Angeles. 

Instead of solving these problems with a new city, California Forever’s critics would like to see more housing built in the seven cities that already exist in Solano County. “Building housing in existing communities is one of our best climate solutions, and paving over 17,000 acres of non-irrigated farmland is not,” said Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research at the Greenbelt Alliance. The nonprofit, along with the Center for Biological Diversity and the California Sierra Club, is one of the 16 groups in Solano Together, the coalition that opposes the project. 

Wilson says that the development threatens both the area’s potential for storing carbon in the soil and local biodiversity, and also risks leading to more pollution from people driving to work in nearby cities. And although California Forever holds water rights that could support the first 40,000 residents, Solano Together says that these don’t accurately reflect water availability. Securing a reliable supply, they argue, would be challenging in a region so prone to drought.

By starting from scratch, however, California Forever says their plans could avoid the baggage of urban problems like car-centric design and gas utilities, making it easier to support dense housing and run on renewable power. “Our plan will be the lowest per capita carbon emissions anywhere on the planet. It’s going to be pretty transformational,” said Bronson Johnson, the company’s head of infrastructure and sustainability, who added that he’s spent years grappling with barriers to retrofit existing cities. “I think when we look at the greater good of this project, that far outweighs local impacts,” Johnson said.

But the voters need convincing. After The New York Times named many of the investors behind the project — including Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn cofounder, and Michael Moritz, a prominent venture capitalist —  in August 2023, California Forever began working to bring residents over to their side in time for the 2024 election. By May, the company had spent some $2 million on its campaign and gathered enough signatures to qualify their initiative for the ballot.

In weeks leading up to the Solano County board meeting in July, an economic report by the business-backed Bay Area Council touted the potential jobs and housing benefits, saying that the county could increase employment in high-earning sectors by 53 percent. Meanwhile, the company proposed putting a lagoon right in the middle of the new town, “open to everyone from Solano County.”

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Five days before the meeting, the county released its own assessment that said the initiative lacked details on key issues, such as infrastructure funding, traffic impacts, and water supply. Many of  these unknowns would be clarified by an environmental impact report required under California law, which the company had said it planned to conduct after residents voted. According to county officials, it was this omission, and the lack of a binding development agreement, that ultimately tanked the proposal.

“This politicized the entire project, made it difficult for us and our staff to work with them, and forced everyone in our community to take sides,” said Mitch Mashburn, chair of the Solano County Board of Supervisors, in the statement announcing that the plan would be put on hold. According to the statement, Sramek and Mashburn came to the decision together after agreeing that the timing of the proposal had become unrealistic. 

“I want to acknowledge that many Solano residents are excited about Mr. Sramek’s optimism about a California that builds again. He is also right that we cannot solve our jobs, housing, and energy challenges if every project takes a decade or more to break ground,” Mashburn said in the statement. 

Solano Together heralded the news as a win. Wilson said that even though an environmental impact report would clear up many of the coalition’s questions, especially around water supply, the location of the development still poses what she considers an intractable environmental problem. “It is a vibrant landscape that supports our food systems, our environment, our water systems,” she said.

Sarah Moser, an urban geography researcher at the University of McGill in Montreal, said it makes sense that sparsely populated agricultural lands and deserts are appealing for mega developments like the proposed East Solano Plan because they’ll encounter less opposition. But by building on undeveloped land, “by definition, you’re going to incur a carbon debt that you may never be able to pay off,” she said. 

Although Moser thinks it’s logistically possible to build a city from scratch, she says that such projects are increasingly high risk, with unattainable goals. “You can make affordable housing, or you can make money, but you can’t do both,” Moser said, adding that California Forever’s for-profit model fits into a broader pattern of “rich people getting richer” in the urban mega developments she has studied. 

And perhaps the most important ingredient necessary to successfully build a new city is the very thing that stands in the way: people.  

The promise of a city built on ideals isn’t enough to fill it with people, Bertaud said. There has to be an existing community of people, culture, entertainment, and jobs that draw people there. It’s a chicken-or-egg problem unique to starting from scratch. “Why would you go to a city where there is nobody?” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is it possible to build a dream city from scratch? on Aug 1, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey.

Due to soaring temperatures, more and more people are also at risk for severe health concerns that come with them, including heat stroke, cardiovascular problems, and respiratory issues.That’s particularly true for already-vulnerable groups including elderly people, those who are pregnant, and those with preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes.

In Texas — a state that often sees some of the hottest temperatures in the country — extreme heat killed more than 330 people in 2023, setting a new record. More recently, millions of people in cities like Houston have had to deal with a massive heat wave while navigating power outages caused by Hurricane Beryl.

Despite the growing toll, there’s shockingly little regulation around protecting people from the effects of heat. It’s a stark contrast to how policies tend to treat the extreme cold. And while extreme cold continues to be deadlier than extreme heat, as heat waves become more dangerous, the gap between the two is likely to shrink.

For example, very few states have laws that require landlords to provide air conditioning for their renters. Conversely, most states have policies that mandate the provision of heat in the winter. But even navigating what is and isn’t required around extreme heat is difficult. A comprehensive state-by-state cooling policy resource doesn’t yet exist, which speaks to the sparse landscape of regulations considering heat exposure.

That’s largely due to policymakers lagging behind climate change, the opposition from landlord groups to such requirements, and the hefty cost of both energy bills and equipment that would actually address the problem. There are questions, too, over who would bear those costs, including concerns that mandates for air conditioning would simply fall on tenants in the form of higher rents.

The need for adequate cooling will only become more pressing, though. And the growing prevalence of heat waves — which are getting stronger, longer, and more frequent — underscores the fact that air conditioning is no longer a luxury but a necessity and that the lack of it in people’s homes could prove fatal.

There are big gaps in cooling policies

Cooling policies for rental properties vary state by state, often city by city. There’s no federal law or regulation governing them, and many states don’t have them either. Although some cities like Dallas have approved ordinances mandating that landlords provide air conditioning, for instance, Texas doesn’t offer the same protections statewide.

“There’s no baseline right to air conditioning or anything like that at the federal level,” David Konisky, Indiana University’s co-director of the Energy Justice Lab, told Vox.

As a result, such measures — known as habitability laws— are highly dependent on where people live. These laws, which determine what requirements a landlord must meet for the housing they provide, rarely include cooling. For heat, meanwhile, these policies tend to say that rental properties need to include a heating unit that keeps them above a certain temperature.

“Unlike heat, cooling is really not incorporated into habitability standards or enforced in increasingly hot summers,” says Ruthy Gourevitch, a housing policy manager at the Climate and Community Project.

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Some state policies, like those in California and New York, require landlords to maintain air conditioning that’s already in a unit, but they don’t mandate that they provide AC in the first place. Most states have experienced scorching heat waves in recent years yet many still have no state law on the books to require cooling systems.

A similar dynamic is evident when it comes to federal energy assistance programs, which often dedicate most of their funds to assisting tenants in the winter to cover heating costs. About 80 percent of the funds allocated to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) are doled out in the winter, while far less is distributed in the summer, says Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. That’s largely a byproduct of the underfunding of the program, with much of the money running out after it’s been used in the winter, Wolfe says.

This breakdown can leave tenants in need of such aid struggling to cover costs in the summer even if they have access to air conditioning.

As Rebecca Leber previously reported for Vox, this same trend holds true when utility companies shut off power, something they do when a customer misses their payments.Many states will offer protections to customers in these situations during the cold months of winter. Not so with the increasingly fierce, hot months of summer. According to Vox’s previous reporting, 41 states offer customer protections from utility shut-offs during the extreme cold if they fail to pay a bill, while just 18 states offer the same for extreme heat.

Preventing such shut-offs is one key way to ensure that people have air conditioning access during dire spikes in temperature, Leber writes.

“There are lots of areas of policy where we have this distinction historically, between cold and heat,” says Konisky. “[We’ve thought that] trying to protect people from extreme cold temperatures has been more important.” But, now, “heat is just as deadly, just as big of a concern.”

These omissions could have severe consequences

As extreme heat becomes more common and more hazardous to people’s health as a result, the impact of these gaps will become increasingly apparent.

Low-income tenants, in particular, are disproportionately affected by such omissions, experts say, because they’re less likely to be able to afford their own cooling systems. Black Americans are also more likely to live in places where they are exposed to extreme heat, a 2020 study found. According to research by climate and health scientists Adrienne Hollis and Kristy Dahl, “counties with large African American populations are exposed to extreme temperatures two to three more days per year than those counties with smaller African American populations.”

The risks of being indoors without air conditioning or other cooling options during these heat waves are high especially for older people, infants, pregnant people, and those with serious health conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Severe complications that could result include blood clots, kidney impairment, and asthma.

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“With access to cooling, unfortunately, it’s heading that direction of being another one that shows the economic divide in the country and also the globe,” says Wolfe. Roughly 13 percent of US households lack air conditioning, with renters more likely to go without than homeowners.

The consequences of that lack have been increasingly evident in recent years, with multiple cities like Phoenix recording record-high deaths from heat. In 2023, Phoenix experienced 30 consecutive days of heat over 110 degrees Fahrenheit and saw 645 deaths, almost double the number from the year before. A large proportion of these deaths included people who were low-income or unhoused, according to Phoenix officials.

Being inside during such heat waves, without air conditioning, is particularly hazardous.

“It can actually get hotter indoors than outside, and this is a really important environmental justice issue,” Leah Schinasi, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at Drexel University, concluded in a 2024 Heliyon study.

The policies that could change

In addition to regulations that treat cooling systems like a necessity, experts say there needs to be more funding to cover the costs associated with them.

Some cities, where temperatures have been consistently high and climbing, like Dallas, have approved ordinances in recent years to mandate that landlords provide air conditioning that keeps units under a specific temperature. Other cities, like Los Angeles, are considering similar proposals.

Such policies add to a handful of laws at the state level.

Seth Gertz-Billingsley, a Harvard law student who has studied heat protection policies across different states, notes that the Oregon law is one of the most expansive. That law — which passed in 2022 — allows renters to install air conditioning, and also sets up an emergency fund to help low-income tenants afford AC. It doesn’t, however, mandate that all landlords offer air conditioning.

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In addition to strengthening requirements for air conditioning and other cooling systems, advocates say it’s important that such policies account for the costs that would accompany these changes, so they aren’t simply passed on to tenants.

Federal and state governments could offer subsidies to landlords, for instance, says Wolfe. And more funding is needed for energy assistance programs directly focused on tenants.Wolfe estimates that LIHEAP could use an additional $3 billion annually to cover the costs people face in summer.Tenant protection from rent increases and potential evictions needs to be baked into such proposals, too, says Gourevitch.

Another key consideration is the need to install cooling options, like heat pumps, which are more efficient than traditional AC. The paradox of air conditioning has long been that it’s crucial to help preserve people’s health during heat waves but that it simultaneously spews a sizable amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Devices like heat pumps, which move heat from indoors to outdoors and vice versa, are a more climate-friendly alternative, especially in the winter since they are vastly more efficient than conventional furnaces.

To change such policies, however, lawmakers need to catch up with how quickly climate change is taking place and affecting people’s lives. Forecasts for this summer and beyond show that the world is poised to get hotter.

“Many of our habitability laws and enforcement policies are many decades old, and need to be updated to confront the new reality that we live in,” says Gourevitch.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US is failing renters during extreme heat waves on Jul 20, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Li Zhou, Vox.

Canada has decided to try something different. 

The government has taken the unprecedented step of offering provincial governments billions of dollars in infrastructure funds with one catch: To receive it, they must require cities to abandon single-family zoning laws and allow the construction of fourplexes. This unusually broad policy, adopted in May, has implications beyond expanding the housing stock. It could help mitigate climate change.

Research has consistently shown that multifamily structures reduce overall vehicle miles traveled by placing people closer to urban centers and mass transit. They also use materials and energy more efficiently, driving down the carbon footprint of construction. “Higher density tends to reduce emissions, and by a pretty significant amount,” said Zack Subin, a housing and climate researcher at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC-Berkeley.

If Canada’s approach works, it could encourage similar policies in the United States and nudge cities toward building a greater variety of climate-friendly housing. “Historical planning, rooted in segregation and exclusion, have effectively banned the most efficient forms of housing across most of our cities and suburbs,” Subin said. “Any reform like this is moving in the right direction.”

States like Washington, Oregon, California, and cities including Minneapolis and Austin, have in recent years taken steps to eliminate or amend single-family zoning laws. But none have gone to the lengths of the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The country’s 2024 budget includes 6 billion Canadian dollars (about $4.4 billion) to accelerate new construction, with 5 billion Canadian dollars of that set aside as conditional infrastructure funds. To access the money, each of the nation’s 10 provinces and three territories must require municipalities to eliminate single-family zoning and allow fourplexes. They also must adopt updates to Canada’s building code, which is advisory, not mandatory, and enforce renter and home-buyer protections, among other measures. 

Ottawa is serious about enforcing the rules, too. When the city of Oakville, Ontario rejected a measure to permit fourplexes in May, Housing Minister Sean Fraser ordered the city to return more than 1 million Canadian dollars it had received. “If provinces don’t want to make some of the changes, they don’t have to accept the funding that we are putting on the table,” he said in response to conservative leaders who rejected the idea of eliminating single-family housing. (Any money the provinces and territories don’t claim will be offered directly to municipal governments.) 

To get around the fact that in most of Canada, as in the United States, zoning is handled at the local level, the government offers its carrot to provincial authorities. By dangling vast sums in front of them, federal officials hope to encourage action at “levels of government that have been resistant to change,” said Carolyn Whitzman, a housing policy expert at the University of Ottawa who helped shape the country’s latest national housing plan.

It’s an example of what is called a pro-housing policy, one in which a state (or, in this case, province) or the federal government offers money or other benefits to incentivize progressive policies like zoning reform or eliminating parking minimums. Canada’s approach echoes a proposal the Biden administration floated to dole out $10 billion in grants to states and cities to reform single-family zoning and build new housing. The program was watered down last year to provide just $85 million to cities that commit to removing barriers to affordable housing construction. (In 2021, California succeeded in introducing a program that offers municipalities pursuing zoning reform a leg up when applying for certain state grants and exclusive access to additional funds.)

Canada’s policy targets what housing experts call the “missing middle” in home construction: low-rise dwellings like townhomes and fourplexes that fall between a single-family home and an apartment building. Such structures have until recently been illegal in many parts of Canada and the United States. Allowing their construction could boost housing supply by facilitating the development of parcels previously off-limits to multifamily housing. “The majority of land with existing infrastructure — close to public transit, schools, parks, community services — have been exclusively zoned for single-family housing,” Whitzman said. The change could lead to more construction, greater housing availability, and lower costs, she said.

Whether such reforms will do that is, according to Subin at UC Berkeley, “still a live research question.” Only a few U.S. cities, including Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, have adopted missing middle zoning reforms, and the long-term effects still aren’t understood. Local market conditions, like housing demand and land value, also affect the impact of allowing more fourplexes. Yonah Freemark, a transportation and land use policy researcher at the Urban Institute, said Canada’s reform will likely have only a modest effect on housing availability, since fourplexes tend to get developed mostly in areas that have relatively high housing values and amenities within walking distance. 

But such efforts offer an often overlooked benefit: They mitigate climate change. Neighborhoods with denser housing tend to have far lower emissions than the national average, in large part because people living in them tend to drive shorter distances and use more public transit. A recent study that Subin led at the Terner Center found that across the San Francisco Bay Area, higher population density corresponded with fewer vehicle miles traveled. San Francisco residents, for example, drove one-third the distance of those in Oakley, a suburb about 50 miles to the east with far less density.

Although access to public transit is a critical factor for reducing car dependency, Subin noted that higher density leads to fewer vehicle miles traveled even when people don’t ride the bus or take the train. Simply having homes and businesses closer together means that “people are still driving shorter distances, and walking and biking for a greater share of their trips,” he said. 

Fourplexes and other low-rise multifamily dwellings require less energy than single-family homes because they share insulated walls and roofs. They also require less materials to build, reducing the emissions associated with their construction. A recent study by researchers in Canada estimated that building missing middle housing in Ontario, Canada, could reduce future construction-related carbon emissions from residential buildings by as much as 46.7 percent. 

For these reasons, encouraging greater housing density could be among the most underappreciated climate mitigation policies. UC-Berkeley researchers have found that building additional homes in underutilized urban areas is the most effective climate strategy available to California’s local governments. Yet most municipal climate action plans don’t mention adding housing as a climate tool, in part because it’s difficult to calculate the exact benefits. 

Housing experts cautioned that missing middle reforms on their own are insufficient to address the housing shortage or make a dramatic impact on emissions. “Just because you allow for housing does not mean the housing gets built,” Freemark from the Urban Institute said, pointing out that complex market dynamics ultimately determine what types of new housing gets built. He also said that large-scale apartment buildings built near public transit would more effectively address the need for housing while maximizing the carbon-cutting benefits of greater density. 

But as governments across the U.S. and Canada try new housing policies and wade into zoning reform, the two countries can learn from each other’s experiences. “There’s a lot of learning going on between them,” Whitzman said. “When we’re talking about these issues, the differences between Canada and the U.S. are very minimal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Canada makes an unprecedented push for multifamily housing on Jul 18, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Akielly Hu.

People who want to install solar panels on their roofs have to consider a lot: sunlight, cost, and coordinating with contractors and utilities. Tens of millions of people across the country also have to think about their homeowners association. 

In Michigan, a new law aims to remove that barrier by telling homeowners associations, or HOAs, they have to allow rooftop solar. 

The Homeowners’ Energy Policy Act was signed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Monday. 

“We wanted to find a way to … empower homeowners to make those decisions themselves,” said Ranjeev Puri, a Democratic state representative from Canton Township in southeast Michigan and the bill’s main sponsor. “I think that this is an important step for a lot of people.”

The law gives many HOA members the power to install rooftop solar and an array of other energy-saving measures, from clotheslines to heat pumps. HOAs also have to adopt a solar energy policy within a year, and they can’t enforce standards that increase the cost of installation by more than $1,000 or decrease energy output by more than 10 percent. 

It doesn’t apply to shared roofs and common areas, so multifamily housing and some condominiums are not affected by the legislation. 

HOAs are becoming increasingly common; over 75 million people belong to one, according to the Foundation for Community Association Research. 

Supporters say Michigan’s new law is a step toward making rooftop solar more accessible to many of the 1.4 million HOA members in Michigan.

“We thought that this was a very important bill, because there are thousands of homeowners associations across the state,” said John Freeman, the executive director of the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association. “From our point of view, it was completely absurd that … by moving into a neighborhood which is governed by a homeowners association’s agreement, that homeowners would not be able to install solar on the roof in order to generate their own electricity and to help reduce carbon pollution.”

Michigan is lagging in overall solar energy capacity, coming up 26th in the nation. With this legislation, it joins over two dozen other states that have some form of “solar access laws,” including neighbors like Illinois and Wisconsin, which aim to reign in an association’s say over solar in their community. 

HOAs generally seek to maintain a neighborhood’s property value by enacting and enforcing rules, called codes, covenants and restrictions. Along with providing maintenance and other services, HOAs can use these rules to shape a neighborhood’s aesthetic, such as requiring houses to be a certain color or gardens to look a certain way. Violations could result in fines or even foreclosure. 

And their rules can prevent people from pursuing climate friendly practices, like planting native species and switching to more sustainable energy systems, adding to the logistical and financial barriers to residential solar.

Dan Kramer, a biology professor at Michigan State University, co-authored a 2022 study in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning on how homeowners associations hinder — and help — sustainable residential development in mid-Michigan. 

“They could be bridges to more sustainable residential development rather than barriers, as they are now,” he said. “And it just takes a little change, I think, of perception and maybe a little bit more open thinking on the part of HOAs.”

Kramer started researching HOAs because he had wanted to build a house in mid-Michigan, something small and energy efficient with renewable energy and no big, turfgrass-covered lawn.

“I kept running into this problem that my house is too small, or my plan to use solar panels or my plan to do the landscaping that I wanted was unacceptable to the HOA, and so I would just have to keep looking,” he said. “This happened repeatedly in my own kind of personal search for land to build a home.”

Some HOAs do support sustainability efforts. For instance, associations in Arizona have promoted desert-friendly landscaping and regulated water use. But Kramer said the cases they reviewed in mid-Michigan were rare. 

“I don’t think that HOAs have any kind of anti-environmental or anti-sustainability agenda,” he said. “I think it really is more tied to the idea of a neat and tidy neighborhood. And that’s related to home value.”

Opponents of the new law worry that it’s eroding the rights of an association to determine what happens in their community. That includes the Community Associations Institute, a national organization that advocates for HOA interests. 

Attorney Matt Heron, a co-chair of the institute’s Michigan branch, said the law could also complicate maintenance and repair of roofs.

“You’re going to have communities that may lose their insurance because they’re not going to have the ability to insure everything,” he said. He thinks it would have been better to encourage rather than mandate energy efficiency measures. 

Under the law, HOAs do have some say in these projects, like limiting their height and appearance on the roof. And some associations were already accommodating solar, like the Ashland Park No. 1 Association in Traverse City, which has worked to get a system in place for residents that want solar panels. 

“We just didn’t think it was a smart move to try to limit people right now, when the government’s … trying to push renewables,” said Ben Brower, the association’s president. Brower said they’re going to pay close attention to what they still have control over moving forward: “We don’t want it to blight or make the property look bad and hurt the values of the neighboring properties.”

The landscape for solar in Michigan is changing; last November, the state passed a law requiring all of its electricity to come from “clean” sources by 2040, and it now allows more people to sell electricity from residential solar back to utilities. Federal incentives have also helped make it more affordable.

Michigan is “playing a lot of catch up” in solar power, said Allan O’Shea, the CEO of CBS Solar, a solar installation company based in the northern Michigan village of Copemish. He has worked in the solar industry for decades, and while he’s had some good experiences with associations, there have also been problems.

“We had an issue where they actually adopted a new law in the middle of [the process] to prevent solar from going in. And those are fighting words,” he said. “Not so much for us because we had to walk away from the project, but it really damaged the homeowner, the condo owner.”

For O’Shea, this law is part of that change; some of the customers unable to install solar because of HOA restrictions are planning to take up their project again. 

“It’s going to continue to normalize solar energy as another form, another power source that needs to be let into the mix,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Homeowners associations in Michigan now have to allow rooftop solar on Jul 11, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Izzy Ross.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, which submerged the town under more than 10 feet of water eight years ago, Princeville’s residents debated three distinct options: staying put on the town’s historic land, taking government buyouts to relocate individual families elsewhere, or moving the town itself to higher ground. But internal disagreements and a lack of funding made it difficult for the town to move forward with any of those choices in a comprehensive way. As a result, the damaged town hollowed out as residents and businesses left one by one, becoming yet another example of how slow and painful disaster recovery can be for rural and low-income communities.

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Now, almost a decade after Hurricane Matthew’s devastation, Princeville’s fate is becoming clear — for better and for worse. The town has just received millions of dollars in new funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to build a new site on higher ground, offering hope for a large-scale relocation. At the same time, a long-awaited levee project that promised to protect the town’s historic footprint has stalled out, making relocation harder to avoid as another climate-fueled hurricane season begins.

The idea to relocate the town first emerged after Hurricane Matthew, when the state of North Carolina helped Princeville buy 53 acres of nearby vacant land. The state also kicked in money to help town leaders plan a mixed-use neighborhood with new apartments and businesses, and it later bought another larger parcel adjacent to the 53-acre tract. Earlier this month, FEMA officials announced that they will send almost $11 million to Princeville to build out the stormwater infrastructure for the new town. Construction could begin before the end of the year.

When the development is done, it will contain the seeds of a new town center for Princeville. There will be a fire station and a town government building, as well as 50 new subsidized apartments to replace a public housing complex that was destroyed during Hurricane Matthew. Town officials are hoping that private developers will build dozens of single-family homes and businesses on the tract. This would make the 53-acre development almost as large and well-appointed as the old Princeville, with as many stores and almost as many homes.

When he announced the new funding, FEMA administrator Robert Samaan praised “Princeville’s commitment to build outside of the floodplain and protect their community,” saying the decision to move to higher ground “is a testament to their resilience.” But this was somewhat misleading: Many residents and town leaders, including the mayor, have sought for years to stay put on the town’s original flood-prone site. In 2016, Jones even tried to turn down a federal program to buy out flooded homeowners in the old town. 

“We’re open to expansion, but we are not going to leave,” said the town’s mayor, Bobbie Jones, in an interview with Grist. 

But that option looks less viable than ever. Those who wanted to protect historic Princeville have long held out hope that the federal Army Corps of Engineers would repair and expand the old levee that defends the town from the caprices of the Tar River, whose overflowing banks have long been responsible for Princeville’s woes. The Corps’s original levee contained critical flaws that caused it to fail during floods in 1999 and again in 2016, but it took the agency until 2020 to secure funding from Congress to build a new and larger levee.

Jones touted this new levee project as proof that historic Princeville could survive, but earlier this year the Corps told residents that it was going back to the drawing board to review the project. The agency had discovered that building the planned levee would inadvertently cause flooding in the larger nearby town of Tarboro, on the other side of the Tar River. Officials said they couldn’t reduce flood risk in one place only to increase it in another. This is a cruel historical irony: The founders of Princeville only got access to the low-lying land in the 19th century because the white residents of Tarboro deemed it too flood-prone to use.

“Here we are in the midst of hurricane season again, and we’re just praying,” said Jones. 

In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for the Corps said the agency is committed to flood protection in Princeville and is seeking funds that would allow it to commission a report looking at other options beyond the levee.

The setbacks on the levee project, combined with the sudden burst of progress on the new 53-acre development, seems to provide a bittersweet answer to the murky question of how Princeville will adapt to climate change. When it is complete, the new development will give Princeville a path toward long-term resilience, one that doesn’t require keeping most residents on land that’s destined to flood. But even this progress has come at great cost: Almost eight years after Matthew, many displaced residents have moved on for good, and even the promise of a new Princeville on higher ground may not be enough to draw them back.

“I understand the government moves slow,” said Calvin Adkins, a former resident of Princeville who took a government buyout and now lives across the river in Tarboro. “But when you’re talking about such a historic town, I just — in my heart of hearts, I was hoping that these things could have been done earlier.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change has forced America’s oldest Black town to higher ground on Jul 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Arguably one of the most powerful unions for teachers in the nation, the CTU held public negotiations last Friday in a crowded elementary school gymnasium, facing off against leaders from Chicago Public Schools, or CPS. 

The two entities have a contentious relationship, made clear in the last decade with two strikes and several showdowns during the pandemic. The negotiations were also streamed, but any observers expecting the usual verbal fireworks would be disappointed. Both sides agreed that climate change is a real challenge. Now, they just have to figure out how to pay for the changes necessary.  

“Chicago’s buildings, including school buildings, are a major source of carbon emissions,” said Lauren Bianchi, a social studies teacher on the city’s Southeast Side and chair of the CTU’s climate justice committee. “CPS buildings produce yearly emissions equivalent to about 900 railcars’ worth of coal.”

Nationwide, the Biden administration has encouraged school districts to begin thinking about cutting their climate emissions. To that end, the federal government has funneled millions of dollars in federal grants and technical assistance to help schools install solar panels, purchase electric buses, and update heating and cooling systems. But from California to Massachusetts, teachers unions have already started to get loud about climate justice demands.

As heat and extreme weather become more prevalent because of the climate crisis, J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said it makes sense that climate demands are turning up in union negotiations. 

“If you want a green school, you have to really think about what the challenges of the climate crisis will bring to students who are trying to study,” said Cha. “Things like heat and other things that will intensify from the climate crisis are then educational issues.” 

In April, Stacey Davis Gates, the union’s president, announced a “transformative” contract proposal in which increased wages were just a starting point. The plan included hundreds of items ranging from a plan to build more affordable housing citywide to providing additional resources for the thousands of migrant children shuttled to Chicago from the Mexican border. On top of that, the union wants energy efficiency and climate resiliency written into their new contract.

To start, the CTU wants to bring the school district’s aging infrastructure into the 21st century. Chicago’s school campuses are on average more than 80 years old, twice the national average according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. The oldest school still in operation dates back to 1874, the same year as the Great Chicago Fire. 

And keeping the lights on in the city’s old public schools isn’t cheap.  

“Chicago Public Schools will face more than a billion dollars in climate driven cooling costs by 2025,” Ayesha Qazi-Lampert, an environmental science teacher, explained.

The CTU wants to transform the city’s schools into “climate-resilient community hubs,” Qazi-Lampert said to the crowd. To do it, the union wants the school district to install heat pumps, transition to solar and geothermal power, and get all lead contamination out of the school’s drinking water. 

Outside the school campuses, the teachers union wants more green spaces — expanded urban canopies and native gardens that beautify the neighborhood and capture stormwater. 

“Our school buildings were not designed to withstand frequent and immediate hot and cold extremes,” said Qazi-Lampert. “We’re not only testing the integrity of the building materials, but we’re adding stress to already outdated cooling and heating systems.”

It isn’t just physical infrastructure the union wants to modernize, but also what happens inside classrooms and cafeterias. The CTU is calling for expanded career technical education that puts Chicago students on track for jobs in the emerging clean energy economy. And better lunches for the students to keep students full while they learn inside their newly solar-powered school. 

But these updates won’t be quick and they won’t be cheap. Money, especially in the upcoming year, is in short supply. CPS is staring down a nearly $400 million deficit for the next school year as pandemic relief funding is beginning to run dry. 

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On top of impending budgetary shortfalls, CPS’s chief facilities officer, Ivan Hansen, said there is already a massive backlog of deferred updates. “Our total district immediate critical need is over $3 billion and that is just to bring the buildings to a good repair,” he said.

Still, CPS leadership agrees with the union on the broadest points: CPS has a massive footprint across the city, with over 62 millions square feet in building space and most of it is in decline. On the finer details, the city still had questions.

In one instance, David Singler, the energy and sustainability program manager for CPS, rebuffed the union’s plans to install solar panels en masse. “If we were to take every square inch of roof and put a solar panel on it, it would only generate a fraction of the amount of energy that we need in the district to operate our buildings,” he said.  

Before wrapping up its first public bargaining sessions, CPS and CTU agreed to collaborate more closely on grant applications in the future. Most everything else was left in the air. 

But the union is set on getting the district to enshrine its climate-mitigation proposals into the upcoming contract. Davis Gates explains that responding to climate change must be a priority, not just for the union but for the district. 

“That contract means nothing if our Earth is on fire,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chicago teachers demand climate solutions in their next contract on Jun 18, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WABE. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Malik Johnson thought he was doing well after he turned 21 and left foster care, working two jobs to afford his apartment south of Atlanta.

But last fall, everything started to fall apart: His car transmission failed, so he couldn’t reach his second job. He fell behind on rent.

He didn’t know about a federal housing program that could have reduced his housing costs. It’s open to foster youth in all states as long as local government agencies put in an application for the funding. But in Georgia, they didn’t make that request for Johnson — or for almost anyone else.

Instead, at 23, he was on his own. As he faced his mounting bills, the stress got to be overwhelming.

“I was to the point where I was so behind on everything, I just almost stopped caring,” Johnson said.

In Georgia’s foster care system, about 500 young people become adults each year and, sometime between age 18 and 21, they’ll have to make it on their own. Without the safety net the foster care system provides, they’re especially vulnerable to becoming homeless.

That risk is why, in 2019, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development created the Foster Youth to Independence program, which offers between three and five years of rental assistance to young adults who have moved on from foster care. The program is the only long-term federal housing assistance targeted at former foster youth as they navigate adulthood, and advocates hoped it would help prevent situations like Johnson’s from ever happening.

But there’s a catch: The money comes not directly through the federal government, but through the states, which have to apply for and coordinate the funding. WABE and ProPublica found Georgia has barely done that.

Through the program, each local housing authority can request up to 25 FYI vouchers each year. In Georgia, where 20 housing authorities are eligible, that means as many as 500 vouchers could be available, bringing in as much as $5 million in rent money from the federal government each year.

According to HUD’s latest data from last fall, housing authorities in Georgia have received only eight FYI vouchers total since the program began. By contrast, a third of states have each received at least 75 of these vouchers in the program’s first several years. Texas, Florida and Washington have received more than 400 each; California has upwards of 800, helping hundreds of young people afford stable housing. Only five states, all significantly smaller than Georgia, had requested fewer vouchers.

The failure to tap federal vouchers for foster youth in Georgia is a symptom of a child welfare system that has paid little attention to the housing needs of families and children, WABE and ProPublica have found. Previous reporting showed how the state Division of Family and Children Services had put few of its resources toward housing assistance for families in recent years, even as it cited “inadequate housing” among its reasons for removing 20% of children from their parents.

In the case of the FYI vouchers, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has instructed state welfare agencies to work with local housing authorities to ensure the program is used, and in states that have received the most vouchers, child welfare agencies have actively promoted the program and sometimes hired new staff.

But in Georgia, staffers at roughly half of the state’s eligible housing authorities said they hadn’t heard from the state agency about the vouchers in the program’s first five years. A couple of housing authorities said they struggled to get in touch with DFCS to complete the application, while others said they were not eligible to apply because the agency had not helped them to use up other housing funds they needed to distribute before they could tap the program.

DFCS spokesperson Ellen Brown said the staff overseeing services for older foster youth had recently changed and she couldn’t speak to what had happened previously. But she said the agency is now working to strengthen partnerships with housing authorities — efforts that have taken place as WABE and ProPublica started reporting on the issue in recent months and after a local volunteer began pushing the state to expand its use of the FYI program.

Brown also said DFCS staff meet regularly with young people before they exit foster care to “discuss their future plans,” which includes figuring out their housing. “Our team works tirelessly to help them plan and prepare for a safe, stable and successful transition out of care and into adulthood,” she said.

Still, Ruth White, who directs the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare and was central to getting the federal program created, questioned why DFCS wasn’t more aggressive in bringing the vouchers to the state.

“Imagine being an entity that goes in and removes a kid from their house,” White said, “and then not being the agency that’s chomping at the bit to make sure you get a housing voucher for that young person.”

Study after study has shown the high risk of homelessness among young adults who age out of foster care. A 2021 national survey of 21-year-olds who had been in foster care across the country showed that a little more than a quarter of them had been homeless during the previous two years. The same survey also showed similar numbers in Georgia.

For years, child welfare advocates and former foster youth pushed Congress to address this housing crisis.

“We have the numbers, and we have the data,” said Lisa Dickson of the foster youth alumni organization ACTION Ohio in her 2018 testimony to Congress. “What our nation needs is a sense of urgency about this problem.”

HUD already had its Family Unification Program, which provides housing funds to families and youth who’ve been affected by the foster care system. But HUD found that, in the competition for those limited resources, young people were losing out: They received just 5% of those vouchers in 2019, with the rest going to families.

So HUD created the Foster Youth to Independence program, earmarking some vouchers exclusively for young people. As with any Section 8 housing voucher, young people contribute a third of their income toward rent; the federal government covers the rest.

But unlike other voucher programs, FYI requires significant buy-in from child welfare agencies, which must identify eligible young adults and also offer them other support, like job training and financial counseling. That’s why housing authorities and child welfare agencies have to work together to take advantage of the program.

That didn’t happen in Georgia. In Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta, the chief operations officer of the Marietta Housing Authority tried to pursue vouchers in 2020. Mark Wright reached out to the local DCFS director, but he didn’t get the signed agreement from the agency that the program requires. After that, Wright said, “I kind of felt like we were not going to get the kind of buy-in from other agencies to make it successful.” He gave up.

Housing authorities in Atlanta and neighboring DeKalb County already had partnerships with DFCS because they offered the Family Unification Program. But they still had a hard time accessing the FYI funding. In recent years, they said, DFCS hadn’t identified enough young adults or families for the Family Unification Program, and this prevented them from qualifying for the FYI vouchers under HUD’s rules.

In Texas, by contrast, the child welfare agency took the lead in making sure the vouchers reached young people. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services hired Jim Currier as housing specialist. He, in turn, designated liaisons in each of the child welfare system’s regions, trained them in the rules of the program and incorporated information about the vouchers in the manuals for foster youth aging out of care. The child welfare agency now has 40 partnerships, and DFPS initiated 38 of them.

Currier said vouchers have transformed the lives of some of the young people they’ve gone to. “They now have a safe, permanent home; they can begin to work on their well-being; they can work on their education,” he said.

Recently, in Georgia, DFCS and housing authorities began talking about how to serve more of those former foster youth — thanks in part to the work of one persistent volunteer.

Anne Carelli got to know teenagers in foster care when she volunteered at a group home in Atlanta. As they aged out of the system, she saw some of those teenagers end up homeless. So when she learned about the FYI vouchers a few months ago, she couldn’t believe Georgia wasn’t using them.

“To have housing vouchers for youth aging out of care — that is an incredible opportunity for all of us to come together and figure this out,” said Carelli, who has founded a nonprofit called Up3 to help connect young adults with the resources they need.

Carelli said she has sent more than 60 emails to housing authorities, public officials and DFCS to kickstart meetings about getting vouchers to young people she knows who qualify.

She’s hoping one of them will be Johnson, who she met through the group home. He’s still spending nearly four hours every day on buses and trains to get to work. The assistance would help him save for another car.

Johnson knows the value of a little outside support. Last fall, Carelli loaned him the money that allowed him to make up his rent until his income was stable again. As much as he’s tried to be responsible for himself — keeping his apartment vacuumed and clear of clutter, earning an employee of the month plaque from his job — he faced a crisis he couldn’t handle on his own.

“But I had help,” Johnson said. “And that was the best part about it too — being able to receive help when you need it.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Stephannie Stokes, WABE.

The problem is fast becoming a crisis that stretches far beyond the nation’s coastal states. That’s owing to another, less-talked-about kind of disaster that has wreaked havoc on states in the Midwest and the Great Plains, causing billions of dollars in damage. In response, insurers have raised premiums higher than ever and dropped customers even in inland states such as Iowa.

These so-called “severe-convective storms” are large and powerful thunderstorms that form and disappear within a few hours or days, often spinning off hail storms and tornadoes as they shoot across the flat expanses of the central United States. The insurance industry refers to these storms as “secondary perils”—the other term of art is “kitty cats,” a reference to their being smaller than big natural catastrophes or “nat cats.”

But the damage from these secondary perils has begun to add up. Losses from severe convective storms increased by about 9 percent every year between 1989 and 2022, according to the insurance firm Aon. Last year these storms caused more than $50 billion in insured losses combined—about as much as 2022’s massive Hurricane Ian. No single storm event caused more than a few billion dollars of damage, but together they were more expensive than most big disasters. The scale of loss sent the insurance industry reeling.

“As insurers, our job is to predict risk,” said Matt Junge, who oversees property coverage in the United States for the global insurance giant Swiss Re. “What we’ve missed is that it wasn’t a big event that had a big impact, it was a bunch of small surprise events that just added up. There’s this kind of this reset where we’re saying, ‘Okay, we really have to get a handle on this.’”

Part of the reason for this steady accumulation is that more people are moving to areas that are vulnerable to convective storms, which raises the damage profile of each new tornado or hailstorm. The cost of rebuilding a home has increased due to inflation and supply-chain shortages, which drives up prices. But climate change may also be playing a role: Convective storms tend to form in hot, moist, and unstable weather conditions.

“We have such a dearth of observations about hailstorms and tornadoes, so the trend analysis is tricky,” said Kelly Mahoney, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who studies severe convective storms. “But you are taking storms that are fueled by heat and moisture, and you are watching them develop in a world that is hotter and moister than ever. It’s a tired analogy these days, but it’s still true here, of loaded dice or a stacked deck.”

Climate attribution is much harder for these ephemeral storms than it is for hurricanes and heat waves, Mahoney said, but it stands to reason that climate change will have some influence on how and where they develop. Warming has already caused the geographic range of “Tornado Alley” to extend farther south and east than it once did, delivering more twisters to states like Alabama and Mississippi.

Whatever the cause, this loss trend is making business much harder for many insurance companies. Most vulnerable are the small regional insurers with large clusters of customers in one state or metropolitan area. When a significant storm strikes, these companies have to pay claims to huge portions of their risk pool, which can drain their reserves and push them toward insolvency.

“The local mutuals, you have a couple storms, you have a bad year, and they’re in trouble, because all their business is here and that risk isn’t spread out,” said Glen Mulready, the insurance commissioner of Oklahoma. The state has some of the highest insurance premiums in the country, and Mulready said many insurers are now refusing to write new policies for homes with old roofs that are vulnerable to collapse during tornadoes and hailstorms.

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Even large “reinsurers,” which sell insurance to insurance companies around the world, are feeling the sting from these storms. Global reinsurance firms such as Swiss Re take in premium revenue from all over the globe, insuring earthquakes in Japan as well as hurricanes in Florida, so they aren’t vulnerable to collapse during local disasters, even major ones. But the increasing trend of “attritional” losses from repeated convective storms does threaten to cut into their profit margins.

“We have less of a concern about the tail on these types of events,” said Junge of Swiss Re, using the industry term for the costliest disasters. “The concern for us is just the impact on earnings.”

Ed Bolt, the mayor of Shawnee, Oklahoma, has seen this impact up close. A tornado raged down his town’s main boulevard last year and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, knocking the roof off Bolt’s own house. His insurance company paid to replace the roof, but it mailed him a letter a few months ago with a notice that his annual premium was going to increase by 50 percent, reaching around $3,600 a year.

“The cost used to tick up and tick up a little bit, but last year we knew we would get a big hit because of the tornado,” Bolt told Grist. “I’m sure that would be a pretty consistent experience across town.”

Most states require insurers to get permission from regulators before they raise rates, which presents governments with a tough dilemma. If they raise rates, they make it harder for homeowners to keep up with their insurance payments, and they also risk dampening property values. If they keep rates down, insurers might react by ceasing to write new policies or pulling out of the state. Mulready, the Oklahoma commissioner, says he had one national insurer leave his market earlier this year.

Still, the Midwest has yet to encounter a large-scale exodus, and industry representatives say it’s unlikely that they will pull out of the region the way they have from California. But it’s a safe bet that insurers will keep raising premiums as high as states will let them. Insurers may also raise deductibles, setting a higher minimum amount of damage before insurance kicks in. The upshot is a bigger financial burden for homeowners in fast-growing metro areas like Denver, where insurers’ storm exposure has skyrocketed in recent years.

Perhaps the worst part of the problem is that most states have made little progress in preparing for these storm events. Florida imposed a strict building code after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and most newer homes in the state can withstand high winds. The housing stock in the central United States is far less resilient to tornado winds and hail, and just a few cities have forced builders to fortify homes against those hazards.

Erin Collins, the lead state policy advocate at the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, the nation’s largest insurer trade group, said carriers might have to keep raising rates until the nation’s housing stock becomes more resilient to severe storms.

“It’s going to take community-scale hardening to bend that loss curve down,” she told Grist.

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That won’t be easy. Insurers need to convince large home builders that they should build with more expensive, storm-resistant materials, and they also need to nudge millions of people in existing homes to upgrade their roofs and windows, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Because severe convective storms can strike such a wide geography, it will take a long time for this mitigation work to “bend the loss curve down.”

The good news is that we know how to build storm-resistant homes, and there’s proof that building better makes a big difference, says Ian Giacomelli, a senior meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger building standards. 

Giacomelli points to the city of Moore, Oklahoma, which rolled out some of the strictest storm-resilience standards in the country after it suffered three devastating tornadoes in two decades. Now almost the city’s entire housing stock has roofs that can bounce off large hail storms and strong joints that prevent roofs from flying off during tornado events. Giacomelli says the nation’s current insurance crisis would likely ease up if more cities followed Moore’s lead.

“I think the solutions are coming into focus,” he told Grist. “It’s more about can we get the will to do them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How ‘kitty cats’ are wrecking the home insurance industry on May 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

“America is contending with a variety of housing issues – including surging rents, increasing homelessness, and roadblocks to the American dream of homeownership. It is more important than ever to provide environments for every community to have quality housing within affordable reach,” wrote the Members. “Thankfully, HUD’s proposed AFFH rule would aid local government in creating a true fair housing environment. By forming goals for addressing fair housing concerns, in conjunction with the public that they serve, they will be empowered to take significant steps towards accountability, transparency, and oversight.”

This proposed rule was published in February of 2023 and remains a critical tool to address the country’s history of discriminatory housing policies. Although the Fair Housing Act was passed with the goal of prohibiting direct discrimination by landlords and real estate companies, patterns of segregation still exist.

The proposed AFFH rule would serve to close gaps in the enforcement of the Fair Housing Act and ensure through Equity Plans that the law is being upheld to its full extent. These plans will help communities receiving housing funds, like local governments and housing non-profits, measure the impacts of housing discrimination and outline strategies to alleviate those issues. As working families contend with an affordability crisis, finalizing this rule would help to curb inequity, end homelessness, and create opportunity for historically disadvantaged communities.

The letter was signed by Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Jimmy Gomez (CA-34), Becca Balint (VT-AL), Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), Greg Casar (TX-35), Judy Chu (CA-28), Yvette D. Clarke (NY-09), Danny K. Dennis (IL-07), Dwight Evans (PA-03), Maxwell Frost (FL-10), Daniel S. Goldman (NY-10), Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07), Henry C. "Hank" Johnson, Jr. (GA-04), Ro Khanna (CA-17), Barbara Lee (CA-12), Summer L. Lee (PA-12), Ted Lieu (CA-36), Kevin Mullin (CA-15), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Scott H. Peters (CA-50), Delia C. Ramirez (IL-03), Janice D. Schakowsky (IL-09), Adam B. Schiff (CA-30), Melanie A. Stansbury (NM-01), Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), Nydia M. Velázquez (NY-07), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12) and the full text can be read here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Much of the deepest flooding happened in the San Jacinto River, a serpentine waterway that winds along Houston’s eastern edge and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. This area happens to be the site of perhaps the country’s longest-running experiment in the adaptation policy known as “managed retreat,” which involves moving homeowners away from neighborhoods that will become increasingly vulnerable to disaster as climate change worsens. Harris County has spent millions of dollars buying out and demolishing at-risk homes along the river over the past decade. But the past week’s flooding has demonstrated that even this nation-leading program hasn’t been able to keep pace with escalating disaster.

“This is basically the largest and the deepest river within the county, and the floodplain is so deep that really we can’t do projects to fix these areas,” said James Wade, who leads the home buyouts for the Harris County Flood Control District. “We’re trying to get contiguous ownership in these areas so that we can basically convert it back to nature.”

It’s been slow going: Wade says the county has purchased about 600 flood-prone homes along the waterway over the past 30 years, almost all of which would have flooded during the recent storm if they hadn’t been bought out and demolished. There are still more than 1,600 vulnerable homes that the county is trying to purchase, but it has struggled to secure the necessary funds and get property owners on board.

Harris County was one of the first local governments in the United States to buy out flood-prone homes with money provided by FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. The county has acquired more than 4,000 homes in dozens of subdivisions around Houston since the turn of the century, creating what are essentially miniature ghost towns around the city and its suburbs. Many of these neighborhoods, including the ones around San Jacinto, were so prone to flooding that the county couldn’t protect them with channels and retention ponds, which secure other residential areas.  

The county doubled down on this strategy around the San Jacinto after Hurricane Harvey flooded hundreds of homes along the river in 2017, confirming that many residences were “hopelessly deep” in the floodplain, in the county’s words. Not only is the land around the river low-lying and marshy, but it also sits downstream of a reservoir that needs to release water during flood events so it does not overflow. 

The county used federal funds to purchase and demolish an entire subdivision called Forest Cove, converting the open space into a “greenway” park with walking and bike trails. Elsewhere, it bought out homeowners who had already elevated their riverside homes as high as 14 feet in the air but had still seen flooding during Hurricane Harvey. These buyouts were voluntary, but after years of advocacy the county managed to persuade most homeowners to leave.

A separate county agency pursued a mandatory buyout in a few subdivisions where residents had been flooded several times, including one large community along the San Jacinto. This mandatory initiative has drawn criticism from residents who accuse the county of uprooting established communities, but the county saw it as a necessary measure to control flood risk in places where no other flood control strategies would work. More than six years after Harvey, officials are still working to close on the last of those homes. 

Yet this aggressive program has still left many vulnerable neighborhoods untouched. The county gets most of its buyout funding from FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which tend to dole out grants only after big disasters. It has also floated a $2.5 billion bond to finance flood protection and buyouts, but that sum has proven too little. There are far more flood-prone homes even along the San Jacinto than the county can afford to buy, to say nothing of the rest of the Houston metropolitan area, one of the country’s most populous urban centers. 

“Money is obviously the biggest constraint,” said Alex Greer, an associate professor of emergency management at the University at Albany who has studied buyout programs. “They often have far more interested homeowners than they have funds, and the funding comes way too late.” Wade isn’t sure yet whether the flood caused enough damage to meet the criteria for a presidential disaster declaration, which would unlock significant FEMA aid and likely help the county fund more buyouts along the San Jacinto. 

Furthermore, buyouts can take years to execute. In most cases, the county has to convince individual homeowners to enroll in a buyout program, then complete months of paperwork to purchase their homes, then wait for the homeowners to move. If there are holdouts who don’t want to leave, the buyouts end up happening in a “checkerboard” pattern, and the government can’t let water retake the land. Some neighborhoods, like those in the more upscale Kingwood area, are fighting for alternate solutions like new upstream reservoirs or dredging projects that could reduce flooding without homeowners needing to leave.

Even though residents along the beleaguered river have been dealing with floods for decades, Wade says he hopes this most recent flood will convince more of them to join the buyout program, allowing the county to return more land along the river back to nature. Without more money, though, he won’t be able to take advantage of what Greer calls the “window to woo.”

“Right after a flood event, that’s when people are most like, ‘I don’t want to do this again,’” he said. “But then there’s that lag of time between them coming forward and us being able to secure the funds, and they could change their minds.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas flooding brings new urgency to Houston home buyout program on May 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

Enforcement of the 50 percent rule largely falls to local officials in flood-damaged regions, who are charged with ensuring that their constituents aren’t rebuilding in flood zones. In exchange for this diligence, the federal government subsidizes low-cost flood insurance for homes in communities that certify their compliance with the rule, goosing red hot real estate markets in Florida and other scenic but climate-threatened regions.

As Florida continues rebuilding from 2022’s devastating Hurricane Ian, however, the Biden administration may be signaling that this era of easy money is over. Late last month, FEMA sent an explosive letter to local officials in Lee County, Florida, where over 750,000 people live near some of South Florida’s most prized coastal land. FEMA claimed that almost 600 homeowners in the city of Cape Coral and other nearby towns had rebuilt vulnerable homes in the flood zone over the 18 months since Hurricane Ian, violating the 50 percent rule as well as local construction laws. 

The agency had long given the county and its cities a 25 percent discount on flood insurance in recognition of the county’s efforts to control flood risk, which saved residents millions of dollars a year. The letter threatened to yank away that discount, arguing that the county’s lax approach to the Hurricane Ian rebuild had negated those earlier efforts. The message was clear: After decades of risky construction in floodplains, the feds were putting their foot down. 

This new effort to penalize floodplain construction is yet another sign that the long-hidden costs of climate change and development are starting to catch up with homeowners in coastal states — and at the very same time that housing costs more broadly are increasing for many Americans. FEMA has already raised flood insurance premiums across the country in recent years to keep up with mounting risk, and private home insurance companies have also hiked premiums for wind insurance in several states along the Gulf Coast. 

The crackdown in Lee County represents an attempt by FEMA to shift the cost burden of climate risk away from the federal government (and the public that funds it) and onto local homeowners. This will test the strength of the area’s white-hot real estate market, potentially forcing many homeowners to walk away from their waterfront properties. As the federal government and private insurers both try to reduce their exposure to climate change, Lee County and its cities could be canaries in the coal mine for a housing market disfigured by mounting flood risk.

The reaction from these canaries has been swift and furious. Elected leaders from the county and the city blasted FEMA as “villains” and accused the agency of hampering Florida’s hurricane recovery at the behest of President Joe Biden. Lee County’s board of commissioners mulled suing the agency at a tense meeting a few days after the announcement. Local TV stations ran dozens of stories about the impact FEMA’s decision would have on homeowners, who are already dealing with a steep rise in both flood insurance and traditional property insurance, which covers wind damage. 

“It’s almost like revenge politics,” said Cecil Pendergrass, a Lee County commissioner, during the county meeting after the announcement. “Our citizens, our taxpayers are being held hostage here.”

FEMA soon put its decision on pause, giving the county an extra 30 days to prove it hadn’t let homeowners break the 50 percent rule or build in the floodplain. It is unclear whether Lee County or cities like Cape Coral will be able to do that. Federal and local officials declined to provide Grist with details about the post-Ian violations, citing privacy concerns, but if homeowners have already rebuilt their destroyed properties, the county won’t be able to fix that within a month.

The bigger question for communities around the country is whether FEMA is changing how it enforces the 50 percent rule in an effort to force homeowners out of flood-prone areas.

“The floodplain management community is tracking this very closely,” said Susanna Pho, the founder of a flood risk firm called Forerunner, which helps flood-prone communities with FEMA compliance.

Lee County has long been a poster child for risky waterfront development. The city of Cape Coral sits on artificial filled land in what used to be a swampy section of Florida shoreline, with no barrier between the city’s urban landscape and the Gulf of Mexico. When hurricanes strike, as Ian did in 2022, they can push as much as 15 feet of storm surge through the city, inundating thousands of homes. Nearby cities such as Bonita Springs, which also caught a penalty from FEMA, aren’t much safer.

The 50 percent rule is supposed to reduce this risk over time by ensuring that flood-prone homeowners don’t rebuild the same vulnerable properties over and over. If a county determines that a home has suffered what FEMA calls “substantial damage,” it must force the homeowner to tear it down and elevate a new home above flood level, often on concrete pilings. If a county doesn’t comply, FEMA can kick it out of the federal flood insurance program, rendering homes more or less uninsurable, or downgrade its discounts as it did with Lee County. This rule acts as a de facto tax on risky property: Flood insurance payouts max out at $250,000 per home, which means homeowners are often on the hook for tearing down their houses and building new ones.

The problem is that determining what counts as “substantial damage” is a complicated process. Local officials conduct basic “windshield assessments” in the first few weeks after a storm, logging damage information that they can see from the street as they clear debris. They only do detailed examinations for the 50 percent rule when homeowners request permits to rebuild. But many homeowners never request permits from their city or county. Instead, they come back and patch up homes that they should be tearing down and rebuilding at higher elevations, and the local government either never catches them or looks the other way.

This mandate puts local governments in a tough political situation: They have FEMA on one side, urging them to enforce strict flood rules, and displaced homeowners on the other side, trying to get back in their homes without going broke. It’s unclear how much Lee County and its cities knew about the hundreds of rebuilt homes that FEMA alleges were noncompliant after Ian, but attempts to flout the 50 percent rule have been a scourge for the agency going back decades.

Albert Slap, a coastal planning consultant in Florida, said he understood why Lee County or cities like Cape Coral might have allowed homeowners to repair their homes without elevating.

“It’s pretty clear that the motivation is voters,” he said. “The people who got damaged are voters, and they’re going, ‘If you make me build back better, I’m not gonna be able to do it, and I’m leaving. I voted you guys into office and you’re screwing me.’”

Lee County says it followed normal protocol after Hurricane Ian, conducting basic damage assessments in the immediate aftermath of the storm and inspecting homes only later on when homeowners requested permits. Flood and disaster experts who spoke to Grist said this protocol is more or less standard across Florida and other hurricane-prone states, which raises the question of whether FEMA is changing the way it enforces the 50 percent rule and cracking down harder on rogue rebuilds.

FEMA didn’t answer questions about its enforcement strategy. In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson said the agency is “committed to helping communities take appropriate remediation actions” to fix the rebuild violations. A spokesperson for Lee County said the county “will work with its partners at FEMA during a 30-day extension period.”

Adam Botana, a Republican state representative whose district encompasses much of Lee County, said he had faith that Lee County and other local governments would address the violations that FEMA identified and take action against homeowners who rebuilt without following FEMA regulations.

“Nobody likes the 50 percent rule, but I understand there have to be rules,” he told Grist. “Some municipalities may be a little more lax than others, but we have to keep everybody in line.” He added that he thinks the county will be able to prove many of the alleged violations didn’t take place.

Even if Lee County manages to contest the decision, homeowners in Southwest Florida are almost guaranteed to suffer more financial pain as a result of this enforcement effort. If FEMA stays the course and removes the discount, it will raise flood insurance costs for homeowners in unincorporated parts of the county between $14 and $17 million per year, equating to a $300 annual hit for each flood insurance customer in the area. But if Lee County cracks down on the 50 percent rule and FEMA restores the discount, homeowners who rebuilt in flood zones may have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to elevate their homes.

This new penalty comes on top of a much larger rate hike that FEMA has rolled out over the past few years as part of an effort to fix issues with the flood insurance program. This new system, called Risk Rating 2.0, will triple insurance costs in Lee County by the time it takes full effect, raising the average annual premium from around $1,300 to almost $4,000, with some of the most extreme bills ballooning well over $10,000 per year. Florida’s private insurance market for wind damage is also in a tailspin: More than 30 private carriers have pulled back from the state over the past two years, thanks in part to mounting hurricane risk. Those that have stuck around have doubled or tripled their prices.

Lisa Miller, a veteran Florida political consultant and former state insurance regulator, said the burden of rising costs shouldn’t trump the need to ensure that Lee County homes are resilient to future disasters.

“When I hear someone tell me they don’t want to pay $12,000 a year, I remind them, ‘we live in Florida,’” she said. “Our catastrophe risk is higher than almost anywhere in the world. What matters is, the homes that were repaired when they should have been torn down and rebuilt — will they withstand the next storm? That’s the question.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is making an example of this Florida boomtown. Locals call it ‘revenge politics.’ on Apr 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Visualizing Palestine.

When Hurricane Florence spiraled over eastern North Carolina in September 2018, it damaged or destroyed more than 11,000 homes in the space of a few hours. In the aftermath of the storm, the state channeled millions of HUD dollars toward an ambitious effort to build affordable apartments in the areas that had lost big chunks of their housing stock. Restoring this low-income housing is one of the most difficult and expensive parts of disaster recovery, and the HUD money was meant to help ensure displaced renters didn’t have to scatter far and wide to find homes they could afford.

One of the first test sites for the effort was the shoreline city of New Bern, the birthplace of Pepsi. Florence damaged or destroyed almost 2,500 homes and apartments in the city and surrounding Craven County, which were too remote to attract much new investment from private builders. After the storm, the state used HUD money to build a 60-unit apartment complex called Palatine Meadows that is reserved for locals making below the area median income.

But the development may well be arriving too late to make a difference: It only opened last month, more than five years after Florence struck, thanks to a mountain of federal paperwork. Documents obtained by Grist through a public records request show that it took two years to set up a program to spend the money, another year to select a site, almost two years to complete a mountain of environmental review paperwork, and another year to build the complex. This timeline was so long that it undermined the initial purpose of the project, which was to provide a timely and affordable option for residents who suddenly find themselves with nowhere to live.

Jeffrey Odham, the mayor of New Bern, says he doubts the new apartment complex will help any of the city’s storm victims.

“There’s people that will take advantage of those units, but someone who was displaced from Hurricane Florence now moving into one of these houses — I don’t think you can make that correlation, because it’s been too long,” he said in an interview with Grist. Odham didn’t know the project was part of North Carolina’s Florence recovery program until Grist informed him. It is the only subsidized apartment project in New Bern that has been built with FEMA or HUD money.

The state department that administers federal recovery funding, Rebuild NC, has faced numerous accusations of delay and financial mismanagement dating back to Hurricane Matthew in 2016. The nonprofit investigative outlet NC Newsline has reported that state officials awarded millions of dollars in building contracts to a construction firm that racked up hundreds of homeowner complaints, relocated storm victims to leaky and moldy homes or hotels that then evicted them, and delayed aid applications for years. (Rebuild NC has defended its spending decisions and blamed delays on the pandemic and supply chain shortages.) 

But just as concerning is what happened for the state when everything went according to plan. Even a well-financed housing project built by a trusted developer took more than half a decade to complete.

The sluggish timeline on the New Bern development is symbolic of a much larger problem with HUD’s disaster recovery program, according to Carlos Martín, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies who has followed the agency’s relief efforts. By the time states can develop new housing with HUD money, he said, it’s often too late. 

“I’ve heard this story before,” Martín told Grist. “They were doing everything right, and it still took forever.”

The problem starts with Congress: FEMA doesn’t need to get a green light from Congress before it starts sending money for disaster relief, but HUD does. That’s because lawmakers have never passed legislation that authorizes the agency’s disaster program on a permanent basis. Instead they pass standalone funding bills that give the agency authorization to spend on specific disasters, and a community’s recovery depends on whether it can elbow its way onto the agenda of the the House of Representatives and the Senate.

North Carolina was luckier than many places, because Congress passed such a bill mere weeks after Hurricane Florence, giving the state more than $336 million for storm recovery. Lawmakers added another $206 million the following year. By congressional standards, this was a fast turnaround: Other hard-hit areas such as Lake Charles, Louisiana, have had to wait more than a year after disasters for lawmakers to allocate funding.

The half-billion-dollar grant from HUD was far more than North Carolina could have hoped to raise on its own, but it took ages for the money to reach the state. Because Congress passes each HUD disaster allocation as a separate bill, HUD has to create new rules for how it spends each new infusion of money, then solicit public feedback on those rules in order to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act. The feds must then review and edit “action plans” from each state that receives money, making detailed decisions about what projects to fund.

North Carolina aimed high with its post-Florence action plan. Housing was the biggest need after the storm, and officials wanted to go beyond traditional FEMA programs that reimburse storm victims who relocate to hotels and existing apartments.

“These [reimbursement] programs are beneficial to renters, but may not be best suited to meet the renter recovery need of such a vast geography,” state officials wrote in a 2021 report, adding that a better approach would be “to create new housing stock in a way that is more responsive to the needs of the recovering community.” 

The private market was never going to build back low-income housing on its own in eastern North Carolina. Almost all new affordable housing — whether in disaster-struck areas or anywhere else — relies on government subsidies, most notably the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which allows developers to claim tax breaks for the expenses of building new units at below-market rates. But even that credit wasn’t generous enough to bring developers to the impoverished towns that had been destroyed by Florence; it would take the extra inducement of HUD money to get developers to build new low-income apartments in places like New Bern.

In 2021, after the state completed months of paperwork to set up its action plan, it sought out builders who were interested in taking advantage of the HUD money. One of the bids was from an established affordable housing developer called Woda Cooper, which owns dozens of apartment complexes across the country. Woda had found an empty lot off a major thoroughfare in western New Bern, just down the road from a high school and well inland from the coast. The lot had been vacant for decades, and it wasn’t exactly a moneymaker, but by stacking HUD money on top of other federal tax credits, Woda could make the project pencil out.

Finding the developer was only the start of the process, because the HUD funding was subject to dozens of laws and regulations that restrict how the federal government spends money. These regulations have piled up over the decades to protect wetlands, endangered species, drainage systems, historic assets, and people who live near construction sites. Together they created a set of additional hurdles that Woda and Rebuild NC had to clear before the development could break ground.

“We stress repeatedly to everyone that we’re partnering with, ‘don’t disturb any ground, don’t spend any money, don’t do anything until we clear the environmental review process and have permission from HUD,’” said Tracy Colores, the community development director at Rebuild NC, who managed the housing program.

That review process took most of 2022. In order to comply with endangered species laws, the state engaged in a monthslong back-and-forth with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to figure out whether cutting down trees on the site might threaten migration stops for the northern long-eared bat. (It didn’t.) In order to ensure the complex didn’t violate any historic preservation laws, officials sought comment from two Native American tribes, who didn’t express any concerns. There was a Superfund site at a defunct power plant almost a mile away from the lot, so the state had to check in with another state agency about the potential risk of groundwater contamination, which was nonexistent. Rebuild NC had to contact a separate department to check whether there were any underground fuel storage tanks in the area, which there weren’t, or aboveground fuel tanks that could explode, which there also weren’t.

Furthermore, a small corner of the parcel sat within a FEMA-designated flood zone. Even though the developers weren’t going to build in that corner, they did plan to cut down a few trees, which triggered another review under an executive order issued in the 1970s, which regulates flood zone construction. The state liaised with the local floodplain administrator, completed an exhaustive report on flood risks, redid site plans to add a retention pond, and ran a public notice about the proposed tree-cutting in a local newspaper — all to mitigate “temporary impacts to .01 acres” of floodplain, an area roughly the size of a two-car garage. 

The state had to undertake yet another review process when they realized that a ditch on the property counted as a federally designated wetland because it contained stagnant water. The developer needed to replace two concrete culverts that drained into the ditch, expanding the 15-inch pipes to 18 inches, but under federal law this action counted as new wetland development under the Clean Water Act, which meant the developer had to seek a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Meanwhile, the developer and the state spent months waiting for HUD approval to sell a portion of the lot that contained a cell phone tower, which conflicted with land use regulations governing the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit.

HUD handed down final permission to use federal money for the project in November, more than four years after Florence made landfall, at which point Woda Cooper closed the deal to buy the land and started preparing the site for construction. They cleared the lot during the first half of 2023, and by the time the fifth anniversary of Florence came around, they were about halfway done building the apartments themselves. The construction timeline stretched on for a few extra months due to a supply-chain snag with the building’s electrical system, but otherwise things went according to plan. The first tenants are expected to arrive later this month.

The other developments in the state’s housing program aren’t much further along. Out of the 16 apartment projects that the state chose to fund with HUD money, 13 were in various stages of construction as of late January, including the completed Palatine Meadows. Two projects had received their authorization from HUD but haven’t yet broken ground, and one project had fallen through after the state couldn’t find a suitable developer. Meanwhile, a separate effort to rebuild one of New Bern’s largest public housing projects with money from FEMA has yet to get off the ground.

On one hand, these new low-income units would likely never have been built at all were it not for the infusion of money from HUD. Other federal programs helped Florence victims find new housing throughout the state, but the HUD money built new housing in the same places that lost it. Denis Blackburne, the senior vice president of Woda Cooper, told Grist that “without this [HUD] funding source, this development [Palatine Meadows] would not have been feasible” and that the federal money didn’t delay the building process.

On the other hand, Palatine Meadows may be arriving too late to change the trajectory of New Bern’s rebuild. Odham, the city’s mayor, says that most New Bern homeowners who suffered damage during the storm have returned and rebuilt their houses with money from insurance and federal grants. Renters, on the other hand, have almost all moved away: The city didn’t have any available apartments in the years after the storm, so renters who lost their homes had no choice but to look elsewhere for replacement housing.

“The question of whether people came back would come down to whether it was owner-occupied, or whether it’s rental property,” he said. “For rental property, I would say that most of those folks have probably turned over. They left to go find somewhere else to live.”

Martín, the Harvard researcher, says that other states like Louisiana and New York have also seen long delays when they try to develop new housing with HUD money.

“Affordable housing projects tend to take the longest for all grantees,” he said. “It certainly helps to have more housing, but if we’re looking at the people who lost their housing back in the disaster, I’m pretty sure it does very little for them.” HUD’s own inspector general found in a December report that the agency has taken longer and longer to deliver disaster funds: The average time between the passage of a disaster bill and the disbursement of funds to states tripled from around 200 days to around 600 days between 2000 and 2022.

In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for HUD said that the agency is working on a plan to streamline the funding process for its disaster program — and that it has asked Congress to authorize the program on a permanent basis. 

Martín says Congress should also add exemptions to the environmental review process that would allow states to move through reviews faster if they’re working on affordable housing projects that are below a certain size, or projects in urban areas that are already developed. The state of California has added such exemptions to its own environmental laws as part of an effort to build more low-income housing, and a recent executive order Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass has streamlined permitting reviews for new infill housing, leading to thousands of new units. For a project like Palatine Meadows, which brought just 60 units to an existing neighborhood, such exemptions might have sped up the timeline by a year or more.

Colores, of Rebuild NC, told Grist that the housing development project was worth doing even on a prolonged timeline. She added that new apartment complexes like Palatine Meadows will ease local housing shortages and provide new housing stock that will be strong enough to withstand future storm events.

“To the extent that we can leverage these HUD dollars, we can make a significant difference in the quality and quantity of affordable housing in a lot of communities that are frequently hit by storms,” she said. However, she acknowledged that for many victims of Hurricane Florence, the ribbon-cutting on Palatine Meadows will be too late to make much of a difference. 

“I wish that we could move more quickly,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline North Carolina tried to rebuild affordable housing after a hurricane. It took half a decade. on Apr 3, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WABE. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

K. thought she was one step closer to regaining custody of her children when she secured her studio apartment.

It wasn’t much — just a large basement room in an outer-Atlanta suburb that she was able to rent through a friend. But it had a kitchen and living area, and she was able to arrange beds in different corners of the room for her two sons and daughter. “It was cozy,” she said.

She hoped this would be enough for the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services to, at last, allow weekend visits with her kids — setting the stage for her to get them back permanently after two years in foster care.

But she learned in court, following her caseworker’s inspection of her apartment, that there was a problem: She didn’t have individual bedrooms for her kids. DFCS wouldn’t let them stay there unless she had at least one for her daughter and another for her sons, she said.

This didn’t make sense to her — she knew that there were families who lived long term in single hotel rooms without ever triggering child welfare investigations. In fact, DFCS itself has resorted to housing foster children in hotels when the agency can’t find other placements.

K., who is identified by her first initial because of her fear of retaliation from DFCS, had worked to fix every other aspect of her life since her kids were taken away. She completed a yearlong drug treatment program, testing clean continuously ever since. She also began work as a home health aide. And she was diligently making child support payments to the state.

“I did everything I was supposed to do,” she said, her voice shaking as she stressed this point.

That was in 2019, and K. quickly turned her attention to improving her housing situation, seeing it as one more challenge for her to overcome.

She didn’t know at the time that it would be another four years, until 2023, when her family would be finally reunited. Her kids, by then teenagers, had been in foster care for almost six years.

In Georgia, children whose cases cited "inadequate housing" typically took three months longer to reunify with their families than those whose cases did not.

K.’s case is a striking example of the way parents’ housing instability can lengthen their children’s stay in foster care. In Georgia, WABE and ProPublica found, versions of her experience play out across the child welfare system.

An analysis of data reported to a federal repository of foster care and adoption cases between fiscal years 2018 and 2022 shows that, in Georgia, cases that included “inadequate housing” as a reason for removing a child typically took 11 months to reach reunification, three months longer than cases that did not. Foster care cases associated with inadequate housing took longer to resolve than cases involving allegations of physical or sexual abuse.

Interviews with more than a dozen attorneys, judges and advocates in Georgia’s child welfare system confirmed the delays that housing can cause. They described cases similar to K.’s, in which parents overcame issues like drug addiction and mental health struggles but still waited months to be reunited with their children because of their housing situation.

“These kids just sit in foster care,” said Melanie Dodson, a family law attorney based in Cleveland, Georgia, offering a typical example, “because mom and dad are working at Subway and can’t afford a four-bedroom house.”

While all agreed that a shortage of affordable units is a major obstacle, several attorneys and advocates said DFCS adds to the challenge for low-income parents by insisting their housing meet requirements that can be unattainable.

They said it’s often not enough for parents to provide shelter to get their kids back; DFCS may ask for a formal lease or for the home to be of a specific size. K.’s example, they said, is common: The agency often argues in court that parents must provide individual bedrooms for children of different ages and genders.

DFCS spokesperson Kylie Winton didn’t provide explanations for any of these requirements, which aren’t written down in any statewide policy. But she noted that the agency designs its recommendations for housing based on the needs of each family. Ultimately, she added, judges decide what conditions are appropriate for reuniting children with their parents.

But attorneys and advocates, who practice in counties throughout Georgia, said many judges are reluctant to return children to parents with housing that doesn’t win DFCS’ endorsement. They also said while the agency may not have a statewide policy, they've noticed a pattern of DFCS arguing for the same stringent housing requirements across many county courtrooms.

While stringent housing requirements aren’t unique to Georgia, experts say they can be especially difficult to meet in the state, given how little housing assistance is available to families through its child welfare system.

If your issue is housing, that’s a societal problem, not an individual failing, and we need to dig a little bit deeper to come up with a way and a solution to that problem that doesn’t scar children.

As WABE and ProPublica reported in January, DFCS invested only a tiny portion of its resources toward housing assistance in recent years despite citing “inadequate housing” among its reasons for removing children in roughly 20% of foster care cases. Child welfare agencies in several other states allocated significantly more to provide housing to families, including those working to reunite with their kids in foster care.

Vivek Sankaran, a professor at the University of Michigan and an attorney representing parents and children, said Georgia’s child welfare system should provide housing assistance to parents — or simply return their children. Prolonging a family’s separation for housing alone goes against federal and state guidelines, including Georgia’s, he argues, which emphasize that child welfare systems should return children as soon as possible.

“If your issue is housing, that’s a societal problem, not an individual failing,” Sankaran said, “and we need to dig a little bit deeper to come up with a way and a solution to that problem that doesn’t scar children.”

Attorneys and advocates told WABE and ProPublica that parents who are trying to reunite with their children in Georgia are often expected to meet housing requirements that go far beyond the conditions that would justify a child’s removal.

Heather Daly, an attorney who represents children and parents in child welfare cases, said she has often seen DFCS refuse to approve of housing that parents share with relatives. That’s a problem for many of her clients who come from rural areas and often live with family to cut costs.

Daly said DFCS may label a multigenerational home as unsafe because a grandparent has a 20-year-old criminal charge or because relatives refused to be fingerprinted for background checks. Any past history with DFCS, no matter the circumstances, can also lead the agency to discourage returning children to the household.

In court, Daly said, she tries — with little success — to point to other families who are able to share homes without DFCS getting involved or running background checks. “I mean, most of this generation is living with their parents right now,” she said. ”And this is nothing different.”

Several attorneys and advocates pointed to another obstacle to reunification: DFCS sometimes won’t accept housing unless parents can prove that they have a right to stay in it long term.

Colleen Puckett, whose children were formerly in foster care and who now helps others navigate the reunification process across the state, said sometimes parents can get around this if they’re able to draft leases with the relatives or friends they’re staying with. But that’s not possible to arrange with extended stay hotels and homeless shelters.

It’s also not uncommon for DFCS to request that parents secure housing with a lease of their own, attorneys and advocates told WABE and ProPublica. Even when parents manage to accomplish that, they may still have to maintain the housing for six months before they can reunite with their children.

The problem with these rules is that few families in the child welfare system can afford — or qualify for — housing that comes with the space and certainty DFCS is demanding, attorneys and advocates said.

Many parents face challenges similar to K.’s. Because of criminal charges from when she was using drugs, many landlords refused to rent to her. Even if they had accepted her record, they also required incomes that were three times the rent, far outside the scope of her $11-per-hour wage.

Having an open child welfare case only makes the housing situation more difficult for parents like K. because they’re often hit financially — and are thus less likely to be able to afford rent — when they have to miss work to complete the requirements of their case, such as attending court hearings, seeking therapy or making visitations with their kids. On top of that, many can’t receive assistance from social service organizations until they can get their kids back.

“It just delays reunification significantly,” Puckett said.

Peggy Walker, a judge who has presided over child welfare cases in Georgia courts for more than 25 years, acknowledged that housing requirements often are more stringent for parents in the child welfare system and explained that that’s because judges are trying to eliminate the risk of children reentering foster care.

“You have traumatized that child by removing them,” Walker said. “If you put them back too soon, you have to turn around and remove them again.”

Walker said this consideration could lead judges to deny housing situations that may be acceptable for parents who aren’t involved in the child welfare system — though she said the requirements should be specific to the case. If the relatives have a history of kicking the parents out, for instance, then she said she might not have approved that housing situation for returning the children. She said if the family is known to be supportive, however, she would consider returning children to their home.

Regarding families with criminal histories, Winton, DFCS spokesperson, said the agency evaluates each situation to determine whether prior charges present a risk to the child.

You have traumatized that child by removing them. If you put them back too soon, you have to turn around and remove them again.

But attorneys and advocates said too often DFCS officials and judges insist on parents providing an ideal environment for their children. Sankaran, the University of Michigan professor, said that shouldn’t be the bar parents have to meet in order to regain custody of their kids. “We’re never going to in any of our lives get to a place where there’s zero risk for any of us,” he said.

Instead, Sankaran said, the requirements should be based on what is safe enough.

In its manual, DFCS outlines housing conditions — including exposed wiring, raw sewage and rodent infestations — that pose a threat to children’s safety and may warrant their removal into foster care. Sankaran said those kinds of concerns should be used as the guide for defining the conditions for reunification.

The child welfare system isn’t supposed to wait years to find a permanent outcome for parents and their children. Federal and state laws call for DFCS to make “reasonable efforts” to reunite parents with their children — Georgia's code specifies “at the earliest possible time,” repeating the phrase in its code section three times.

State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, a longtime Democratic lawmaker who has authored several legislative changes to the foster care system, said this should include connecting parents to housing once they have resolved other safety concerns. “If we are not able to provide a competent working parent with a place to live, I think that we’re failing in our obligation to reunite the family,” she said.

That obligation exists in part because the cost of delaying reunification can be significant, said Melissa Carter, who leads the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University and is a former director of Georgia’s Office of the Child Advocate.

The longer children are in foster care, the more likely they are to be bounced from home to home because of changes or conflicts with their foster placements. According to state data reported to the site Fostering Court Improvement for fiscal year 2023, 66% of children who were in Georgia’s foster care system for more than two years had been moved three or more times.

Carter said these disruptions can affect a child’s ability to trust and form attachments, stay connected to their siblings and keep up in school. “So it’s just this kind of compounded experience that comes from the destabilization and trauma that comes with removal,” she said.

This is why federal law requires states to pursue adoption, terminating the parent’s rights, if they haven’t met the requirements for reunification by 15 months — unless child welfare agencies can provide “compelling reasons” to keep the case open beyond that deadline.

K. was aware of that timeline from other parents in the child welfare system. As months and court dates passed and a pandemic unfolded, she said she was grateful that the judge continued to give her a chance. “By the grace of God, he kept giving me another six months,” she said. “But he knew the only thing holding me up was housing.”

When she was finally able to convince a property manager in rural Georgia to rent her a two-bedroom townhome, K. was full of excitement, writing on Facebook, “GOD IS SO GOOD, ON TIME, AND ABUNDANT!” She said the reunification with her children that followed was happy — at first.

It is so wonderful to look at them and see that they’re home.

But K. soon saw the consequences of the years her children spent in foster care.

She thought they would be glad to have their mom back. In reality, she said, they’re angry and resentful toward her. According to K., they tell her she abandoned them. They don’t believe she only needed housing for reunification. They tell her she was just using drugs the whole time.

“I didn’t abandon you,” she said she told them. “I was working to get you back.” But K. says her pleading is of no use.

She said her kids’ anger also comes out at school, leading to suspensions. The behavior has been severe enough that she had to let go of one of her jobs. DFCS did provide her with one month of rental assistance — but only after her children had already been home for months. But now K. is again struggling to make her rent.

As she tries to keep the home together, she’s weighed down by guilt from what her children went through.

The moments she’s able to appreciate her family’s reunification, after so much time apart, are often limited to the night, when her children are asleep. K. can’t help but watch them. “It is so wonderful to look at them and see that they’re home,” she said.

We analyzed data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System to determine whether a child removal citing “inadequate housing” was associated with longer foster care stays in Georgia.

The AFCARS data, obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, required steps to clean and deduplicate before we could analyze it. We used unique identifiers for children called AFCARS IDs and dates when a child was last taken into foster care to remove duplicates. We then filtered the dataset to removals that occurred from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2022, corresponding to Georgia’s 2018 to 2022 fiscal years. We then grouped by removal reason and calculated the median time between removal and discharge for cases in which children were reunited with their caretakers. For this grouping, we counted cases citing the removal reason alone or in combination with other removal reasons. For a case in which two different removal reasons are cited, its reunification time was included in the calculation for each of the removal reasons.

To further examine this issue, we developed several statistical models to isolate the effect of the housing removal reason. We controlled for other removal reasons and the age of the child, including interactions those variables had with the housing removal reason. In every model we tested, housing was associated with longer foster care stays to a high level of statistical significance.

The data used in this story was obtained from NDACAN via Cornell University and used in accordance with a terms of use agreement license. The Administration on Children, Youth and Families; the Children’s Bureau; the original dataset collection personnel or funding source; NDACAN; Cornell University; and their agents or employees bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Stephannie Stokes, WABE, with data analysis by Agnel Philip, ProPublica.

Opposition MPs and unions are criticising a proposal by New Zealand’s Ministry of Pacific Peoples to cut staff by 40 percent.

The country’s largest trade union — The Public Service Association — says the ministry has informed staff that it is looking to shed 63 of 156 positions.

Opposition MPs have slammed the decision, which they say will undermine the delivery of services to Pasifika communities in New Zealand.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Peoples ministry reports

Labour MP and former deputy prime minister Carmel Sepuloni said it also reduced a Pasifika voice in the public sector.

“Our overriding concern is not only the impact on direct support from the delivery of services to communities, but also the equality of advice that would be offered across government agencies in areas such as health, housing or education,” Sepuloni said.

“We would have a thought that Pacific people should be a priority given the fact that many of the challenges in New Zealand at the moment disproportionately affect Pacific people.”

The slash is the latest proposal by government to cut staff across the public sector. Within the last week alone, the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Ministry of Health proposed cuts amounting to more than 400 positions.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the cuts were needed to “right size” the public service.

Staff cuts had long been promoted by Luxon in order to fund a tax cut package.

“What’s happened here is that we’ve actually hired 14,000 more public servants and then on top of that, we’ve had a blowout of the consultants and contractor budget from $1.2 billion to $1.7 billion, and it’s gone up every year over the last five to six years,” Luxon said.

“And really what it speaks to is look, at the end we’re not getting good outcomes,” he added.

But critics say the cuts will only cause mass unemployment and undermine services needed across New Zealand. Public Sector Association national secretary Duane Leo said the cuts would have far-reaching consequences for the health and well-being of Pasifika families in Aotearoa.

“We know that Pasifika families are more likely to be in overcrowded unhealthy housing situations and challenging environments, and they’re also suffering from the current cost of living,” Leo said.

“The ministry plays an active role in supporting housing development, the creation of employment opportunities, supporting Pasifika languages cultures and identities, developing social enterprises — this all going to suffer.

“The government is after these savings to finance $3 billion worth of tax cuts to support landlords … why are they prioritising that when they could be funding services that New Zealanders rely on.”

The extent of staff cuts will be revealed next month when the New Zealand government is expected to announce its Budget on May 30.

Sepuloni said the massive cut indicated a move to get rid of the ministry, something that has long been promoted by Coalition partner — the ACT Party.

“We have to wonder if these are the first steps towards abolishing the Ministry,” Sepuloni said.

“It’s undermining the funding to an extent that it looks like they’re trying to make the ministry as ineffective as possible, and potentially justify what ACT has wanted from the beginning . . . which is to disestablish the ministry.”

In response to criticism about cuts to the Ministry of Pacific Peoples, Finance Minister Nicola Willis said all government agencies should be engaging with the Pacific community — not just the Ministry of Pacific Peoples.

Willis said the agency had grown significantly in recent years and a rethink was appropriate.

“It’s our expectation as a government that every agency engaged effectively with the Pacific community not just that ministry,” Willis said.

“We think the growth that has gone on in that ministry was excessive.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

My wife and I live in a green, two-story colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac in Burlington, Vermont. Each spring, the front of our home is lined with lilacs, crocuses, and peonies. The backyard is thick with towering black locust trees. We occasionally spot a fox from our office windows, or toddlers from the neighborhood daycare trundling through the woods. It’s an alarmingly idyllic home, with one exception: It runs on natural gas.

The boiler, which heats our house and our water, burns it. So do the stove and the dryer and even the fireplace in the living room. Some 60 percent of American residences are similarly reliant on gas, the primary component of which is the potent greenhouse gas methane. This dependence on fossil fuels didn’t particularly faze us in the past. When we had to replace the furnace in our last place in late 2018, it was the easiest option. Same for the other appliances. At least it wasn’t oil, we told ourselves. It didn’t help that our contractors weren’t well-versed in alternatives and that our decisions were sometimes necessarily made in haste. When we did have time to explore switching to cleaner sources, the price tag often gave us pause. Can an induction stove really be that expensive? 

Five years later, the landscape had shifted. The world was climbing dangerously toward 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, and residential energy use accounted for one-sixth of all planet-heating emissions in the United States. We also wanted to start a family, and burning methane indoors can have potentially profound effects on human health. Then came the Inflation Reduction Act, which unleashed billions of federal dollars to help make cleaner technologies more ubiquitous and affordable than ever before. By early last year, we were ready to decarbonize.

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He wanted to get his home off fossil fuels. There was just one problem.

Emily Pontecorvo

I harbored no illusions that it would be the simple “five-step” process some advocates imply it is. But, as climate journalists, my wife and I figured a few weeks’ research and planning ought to get us most of the way there. What unfolded was more than a year of cascading decisions and obstacles that strained our wallets,  tested our notions of comfort and sacrifice. While the late nights buried to my knuckles in spreadsheets calculating the payback periods on heat pumps and solar panels were, dare I say, fun, my nerves began to fray when the solar company we wanted to hire abruptly went out of business. They nearly broke when I saw what all of this would cost and shattered when I thought we’d have to upgrade the electrical panel. My wife found her limit when we were forced to choose between cutting emissions or cutting trees. 

Frazzled and flustered, I sought help.

“I’m not surprised,” David Lis with Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships said of my predicament. Once people discover that going electric is an option, most run headlong into the complexities. “Your experience of having to navigate a lot of market actors is a big barrier.” 

With each step, however, we became increasingly confident that decarbonization was possible. The question quickly became whether we were willing to bear the cost.

Every year, homes in the U.S. produce nearly 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s about twice as much as all of France. One-third of those emissions are the result of directly burning natural gas and other fossil fuels onsite. The remainder comes from generating the electricity residences consume. 

Our house is fairly typical. It was built in 1940, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and 1,672 square feet of living space. We combust about 65,000 cubic feet of gas each year keeping warm, cooking meals, and doing laundry, or about the norm in the Northeast. Going electric would shift those emissions to the cleanest grid in the country; almost all of Vermont’s electricity comes from renewable sources. Those savings are why climate advocates often push people to “electrify everything.” But doing that can, as we found out, become comically complicated.

“It’s definitely important to have a plan going in,” said Cora Wyent, director of research for the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which recently released a personal electrification planner to help people plot their path to decarbonization. I reached Wyent about halfway through ours and wished I had found her sooner. Making a roadmap, she said, helps folks maximize incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, some of which can be redeemed multiple times because they reset annually. It also can help avoid unexpected, and often costly, electrical work to ensure your house can supply the needed power, said Wyent. “Making a plan can also help you stay within the limits of your electric panel.”

As for what to prioritize, she says that depends on your motivation. If your goal is minimizing greenhouse gas emissions, for example, ditching fossil fuel heating would likely have the largest impact. Those concerned about indoor air quality might prefer to start with appliances (particularly stoves). If in doubt, electrifying whenever something breaks is often the simplest pathway to a lower-carbon home.

“When it dies, electrify,” quipped Wyent. That approach means paying only for things that need replacing anyway, and can split the unwieldy into smaller, more manageable projects. It’s where we decided to start early last year when our water heater was aging to the point of hazard. Then we’d turn to the stove and our heating system, in no particular order. The dryer was less urgent, but needed to go for us to disconnect the gas line. We also knew we wanted to get as much work done as possible while we were making other renovations, especially because we now had a baby on the way. We were in the fortunate position of having enough cash from the sale of our previous home that financing wasn’t an immediate barrier, so long as we decided an investment was worth it.

Our first foray into discarding gas was installing a heat pump water heater. It works a bit like an air conditioner in reverse by drawing warmth from the surrounding air to bring water up to temperature, and the technology is growing in popularity. Not only are heat pumps energy-efficient, they also can do a bit of dehumidification, which our musty basement sorely needed. The process went deceptively smoothly.

We gathered several quotes — something Wyent and others told me is critical to managing costs. The lowest was $2,825 to install a 50-gallon tank, a price that was on the high end of Energy Star guidance but hundreds less than the others. A $600 instant rebate from the state and an $800 post-purchase one from the city brought the figure to $1,425. I happened to have a friend who needed one too, so we both got another $150 off for doing them together. The IRA provides a tax credit of 30 percent of the total cost (up to $2,000), though we won’t get it until after we file our taxes. 

All told, the bill will come to $428, plus a couple hundred more to have an electrician wire it. Installation took less than a day and the water heater is now humming happily in our basement. Although the emissions savings will be negligible because we still need our boiler for space heating, it was a confident first stride toward reducing our dependence on gas. 

Buoyed by the success, we took aim at the stove and the dryer. 

Electrifying appliances isn’t yet a major climate win. The average dryer uses around 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas a year, with CO2 emissions roughly equivalent to driving about 300 miles. Gas stoves consume about the same amount. At best, going electric fully displaces those greenhouse gases. But the advantages are even smaller beyond Vermont, where local utilities aren’t as clean. The nation still generates 60 percent of its electricity with fossil fuels (43 percent of that from natural gas) and until that changes, junking a gas stove is roughly a wash for the planet.

Our main motivation for jettisoning gas appliances was the blinking light on our air purifier. We’d read the research showing that cooking over gas produces benzene and nitrogen dioxide. But seeing that little diode change from a soft blue to a harsh red every time we cooked was a menacing reminder of the risks. It grew even more unsettling when we found out we’d become parents, as gas stoves have been linked to nearly 13 percent of the nation’s childhood asthma cases.

The consensus among climate experts and, perhaps equally importantly, chefs is that the best alternative is an induction stove, which uses electromagnetic energy to heat cookware. It requires less energy than a traditional electric range and offers greater temperature control. But as we started exploring options, we quickly realized the technology doesn’t come cheap. The least expensive models start at around $1,100, or almost twice the price of a basic gas stove. Advocates of the tech say prices should come down as it becomes more widespread, but that didn’t do us much good, and our city’s rebate was just $200. We hoped Black Friday would further blunt the financial blow, though that meant waiting a few months. We used the time to weigh whether we wanted features such as a convection oven (we did) and, come November, headed to Lowe’s. 

Given my proclivity for buying power tools I don’t need, my wife hustled me directly to the appliances. Alas, the store had just one induction model on display, and it wasn’t the one we wanted. But the conventional stoves were similar enough that we could get a sense of how the induction version might feel in the kitchen. After much pressing, twisting, hemming, and hawing, we chose a Samsung induction model with knobs rather than buttons, which we knew from a relative’s experience could be finicky. The list price was $2,249, but we got it for nearly half off with the holiday sale.

On the way out, we solved our dryer dilemma when we happened upon a well-reviewed electric model similarly marked down to just $648. We pulled out our phones and compared it to a heat pump dryer, which would have used less electricity and spared us the trouble of installing another outlet and a vent. But aside from being considerably more expensive (even with an extra state rebate), the heat pump version had just half the capacity. Given the mountains of laundry newborns produce, we chose the traditional tech, with the hope that larger models are available next time we need a dryer. 

Leaving the store, I nearly blew our savings on a track saw. Good job I showed restraint, as installing outlets to power our purchases was much more expensive than expected. The electrician charged more than $600 for the stove hookup, and the dryer outlet, when our basement revamp is ready to accommodate it, will likely run about the same. Although that’s about two-thirds the cost of appliances, we saw the benefits of ditching gas almost immediately.

My wife does most of the cooking and swoons when she switches on an induction burner. Water boils far faster than with the gas stove and even more quickly than in our electric kettle. “It feels almost instant,” she said. “The bubbles are crazy.” The heat is also precise enough to keep pasta sauce at a simmer and food perfectly warm while we gather our dinner plates. 

Best of all, it’s been months since we’ve seen the red light on our air purifier. 

With the relatively small stuff tackled, that left our biggest energy glutton: the heating system.

Heating and cooling account for more than half of a typical home’s energy use, according to Department of Energy data from 2020. Given that our gas meter hardly budges during our northern Vermont summers, it’s safe to assume the vast majority of our methane usage goes toward heating. That amounts to about 3.6 metric tons of planet-warming gases annually, or roughly what we’d spew driving 9,200 miles. That carbon footprint would largely disappear if we went electric. 

We started with a home energy audit to ensure we didn’t have any major weatherization issues to fix. Sealing leaks, experts say, can be among the easiest and most cost-effective ways to reduce your energy bills and carbon footprint. The auditor deemed our house moderately porous — no surprise, given its age — but didn’t see anything obvious to plug. He said it wasn’t bad enough to warrant a big investment like new windows, but he did suggest insulating the basement, which we’ll get to eventually. 

Our boiler, like other modern gas heating systems, converts around 90 percent the energy it uses to heat. That sounds great until you realize that heat pumps can be two to five times more efficient. This seeming feat of alchemy is possible because heat pumps transfer heat rather than create it — they push warmth into a building to bring the temperature up, or draw warmth out of to cool it. Heat pumps are also great for retrofitting a home because they can be used with or without ducts in the floors or walls. 

They come in two basic flavors. To extract, or sink, heat, ground-source heat pumps rely on a network of tubing buried a few feet to a few hundred feet underground, where temperatures rarely fluctuate. Also known as geothermal, these systems circulate a mixture of water and antifreeze through the loop and back to the house. Air-source models instead utilize ambient air as their source.

Geothermal systems are more efficient, quieter, and last longer than their air-source counterparts. Because subterranean temperatures remain relatively constant, the weather also doesn’t affect how they operate. Although the buried piping can last 50 years or more (the components inside the house last about half that), installing it requires expensive drilling or digging. Contractors told us that outfitting the average home with geothermal can run $25,000 to $45,000 or more, even with government rebates and incentives.

“The higher upfront costs are the main reason I typically don’t talk to people about geothermal,” Wyent told me. But, if you can afford the initial financial hit and plan to be in your house long enough to reap a slower payback, they’re definitely worth considering. “The efficiency is fantastic.”

Compared to geothermal, air-source models use more power, have a lifespan of around 15 years, and lose some efficiency in very cold weather. But they generally run tens of thousands of dollars less — a factor that helps make them much more common, with sales outpacing gas boilers last year. It largely drove our decision as well. (Not that any of the geothermal installers I called were particularly convincing. A couple outright told me I shouldn’t do it.)

Because our house currently has baseboard heaters rather than ducts, we gravitated toward a “mini split” system. It consists of a condenser, installed outdoors, and an indoor unit called a “head,” with a thermostat and a fan that blows hot or cold air. The first contractor we spoke with suggested stationing two condensers outside and five heads throughout the house. He recommended systems designed specifically for colder climates,which are guaranteed to operate at temperatures well below zero. 

That guy never followed up with a quote, though. The next bid came in at $25,950, which felt high. We gathered two more estimates, the lowest of which landed at $19,637. That included a few state rebates applied at the time of purchase; add in a $2,500 city rebate and the $2,000 IRA credit we’ll get at tax time, and the final cost will be about $15,000.

But there was a hitch: We heard that heat pumps could drive our electricity bills to untenable levels. Indeed, an estimate from Efficiency Vermont, the states’ energy efficiency utility, pegged the system’s consumption at 10,000 kilowatt-hours annually in heating alone. At our current rate of around $0.17 per kilowatt-hour, we’d spend $1,700 annually compared to the $1,100 or so we spend burning gas to keep warm.

That would make heat pumps too expensive to operate.

As we pondered how to make heat pumps affordable, the sun came to mind. It emits more than enough energy to power the world, and each gigawatt of power we harness from that star can avoid hundreds of thousands of tons of greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. is increasingly tapping this essentially inexhaustible resource, with generation jumping from 5 gigawatts in 2011 to over 145 in 2022.  According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, 7 percent of homes nationwide now sport photovoltaic panels. We hoped that becoming one of them could help lower our energy costs.

We asked our neighbors who installed their system, and a lovely salesman came by to prepare an estimate. Pointing to the peak of our roof, he noted that the ridge cap was getting wavy — a telltale sign that a new roof is in order. Given that the solar panels we would install are warrantied for 25 years, we’d want to take care of that now, because removing and replacing them down the line would be outrageously expensive. That sent me back to the phone to seek even more quotes, this time from roofers. The best of them came in at $10,000. Yet another project and expense, but an unavoidable one if we wanted solar.

By the time we sorted out the roof, the founders of the solar company had retired and shuttered the business. We had to negotiate with another installer called SunCommon and landed on a 26-panel system, with a capacity of 10,530 kilowatt-hours and a price of $31,765 before rebates. That’s slightly less than the average price per watt in our area and thousands less than the company’s initial estimate — another win for haggling.

Vermont doesn’t offer incentives for installing photovoltaic panels, but the IRA extended the 30 percent federal tax credit through 2032, bringing our eventual outlay to $22,236. The installer claimed we could lump the cost of the roof into that credit, but our accountant said IRS rules clearly exclude it. (The myth is persistent enough that everyone from solar companies to Reddit users are posting about it.) In any case, the next step for us was to have SunCommon verify that the satellite imagery it used to estimate the system’s output aligned with the realities of our roof. 

A technician arrived on a dull gray morning in early December. After grabbing a few gadgets, tools, and a ladder from his truck, he spent the better part of two hours poking, prodding, and climbing on our house. Did we meet all the roof set back requirements? Are our rafters strong enough to support panels? How much shade is there? The answers to these questions and others could affect how much energy we could expect our array to generate.

The results would lead to one of the toughest decisions in our journey.

Black locusts start to leaf out each spring and become bushy caricatures of a tree within weeks. More than a dozen of these gorgeous giants horseshoe our backyard, providing a home to at least one owl, an assortment of songbirds, and, come winter, a roost for a murder of crows. At over 100 feet tall, they cast long shadows — not quite long enough to reach the front of the house, where 14 panels would soak up enough rays to return 83 percent efficiency. But the 12 panels at the rear would see only enough sunlight to perform at 55 percent of their potential, substantially lower than what SunCommon recommends to make an installation worthwhile.

With all that leafy cover, our system would be expected to produce just 6,900 kWh per year — much less than the company’s model predicted. Cutting down half a dozen or so trees would gain as much as 2,000 kWh a year, but come at a financial and climate expense, since trees are carbon sinks. Moreover, my wife would just as soon lose a limb of her own than needlessly fell a tree.

The black locusts would stay put. With that decision made, we finally had enough information to calculate what electrification would cost us — and whether it was worth it.

My spreadsheet, named HOME DECARBONIZATION in all caps, is a mere three tabs across. Two of them examine the merits of different size solar arrays — the entire roof, or only the sunnier front side — while the third is dedicated to the various heat pump configurations. Despite its meager size, it took hours to build. I’d find myself waking at all hours to fix an equation, adjust a parameter, or gaze into the grid hoping for answers. It was an affront to the hope that, as Lis at Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships put it, the marketplace will present an “easy, affordable choice to decarbonize” — a utopia he acknowledges we have yet to reach. 

No matter the benefits that an electrified home powered by renewable energy provides, the expense can range from daunting to laughably unattainable. The IRA seeks to address these inequities by providing billions of dollars in funding, much of it targeted at those without the means to make the transition off fossil fuels. That money is expected to become available in the months ahead and could, for example, cover the entire cost of a heat pump or induction stove for low-income families. Some states or cities also offer income-based financing — in Vermont, for instance, interest rates start at 0 percent. 

One of Wyent’s favorite suggestions, that almost anyone can take, is to buy an induction hot plate, often for less than $100. They are essentially a single-burner induction stove and, she said, “an electrification project that works for renters, too.” Energy audits are another great place to start, she suggested, as they can pay for themselves in utilities savings (plus there’s a federal tax credit of up to $150). But even for homeowners ready to take larger steps, the process can entail a lot of hand-wringing. 

“More guides would certainly be helpful,” said Wyent. I turned to my spreadsheet to help maneuver the maze. 

As I tweaked the cells, they quickly showed me that, if we were to go solar, installing the full system made the most financial sense. Although only putting panels on the front was tempting, installation costs wouldn’t drop proportionally. Certain design, permitting, wiring, and other outlays are largely fixed, making each panel successively cheaper. Assuming they operate for the 25 years they’re warrantied, going all-in would fix our electricity rate at $0.136 for 6,900 kWh annually. Doing just the front system would raise that figure to $0.142.

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To evaluate the returns on a full system, I assumed our electric rate would continue rising at the state average of 2.28 percent annually and that our system’s productivity would degrade at the warrantied rate of 0.5 percent per year. Given that, the system would pay for itself in about 17 years and net more than $14,000 in energy cost savings after a quarter-century, for an annual rate of return of around 2 percent on our initial investment. That doesn’t factor in labor costs for any repairs (the warranty only covers parts) or the expense of replacing our roof earlier than planned. Financing the system at current interest rates — which are currently starting around 7 percent — also would cut into any financial gains. Paying cash is offset by the opportunity cost of doing something else with that money, such as investing in the stock market, which often sees long-term annual returns north of 8 percent.

Perhaps most relevantly, the climate benefits of going solar are limited in Vermont, because the grid is already so clean. Rewiring America’s model showed that our system would eliminate about a ton of carbon emissions annually, or roughly what a car generates driving 2,500 miles. Given our other concerns — from aggressive sales tactics to the need to replace our roof — we decided to hold off until we can find a way of bringing the overall price down. We may also explore community solar, which allows individuals to invest in larger projects. 

“You’re in a particularly unfavorable area for rooftop solar to net out economically,” Wyent said. The technology makes more sense for people in other locales; she lives in California and estimates a household with a $500/month electricity bill in Los Angeles can save $62,000 over 20 years with a $0 solar loan. “The investment makes sense on financial merit alone.”

Although disappointed that solar didn’t work out, we found comfort knowing we didn’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars right before our baby arrived. And we remained optimistic about heat pumps. But that math was a bit more complex, so we turned to Efficiency Vermont for help. Almost immediately, senior engineering consultant Matt Sharpe noticed that our design, with two condensers and five heads, wasn’t as efficient as it could be.

The ideal ratio for air-source heat pumps is one outdoor unit for every indoor unit, Sharpe explained. This ensures that the system is running steadily, rather than in short, inefficient spurts. But that isn’t always achievable, especially with larger systems such as ours — which would require an unsightly five outdoor units around our home. Instead, he suggested installing three condensers, one for each floor, and ductwork in the attic to reach the upstairs bedrooms. Beyond being tidier, it would consume 30 percent less energy than the initial proposal. Although the redesigned system would run $3,000 more, the city offers an extra $1,750 in rebates for ducted systems like this, and making this switch would reduce our annual heating costs by about $600, to around $1,100, accelerating the payback period.

This would bring the operating costs of heat pumps to about the same as the gas boiler. And, in the long-run, it would likely lead to savings, several experts told me. As more people ditch natural gas, they said, the cost for remaining customers could rise more quickly than electricity rates. “Both sides are going to be trending more expensive … [but] electricity rates are historically much more stable than natural gas prices,” said Lis.

Still, there is little chance we’ll recoup our $15,000 investment in heat pumps on operating costs alone. That doesn’t include the gas hookup fee of 88 cents per day that we pay to keep the boiler on standby, which Efficiency Vermont recommends doing at least for a couple of winters to ensure the heat pumps can handle the load job on the coldest days. (We plan to keep the baseboard heaters on the first floor awhile longer for that reason.) 

Of course, the new ductwork and wiring will outlive the heat pumps; that’s money we won’t have to spend again. And eventually, heat pumps allow us to get rid of the baseboard heaters, which I find unsightly and limit how we arrange our furniture. Heat pumps also provide air conditioning, which we’d been poised to purchase as Vermont summers grow hotter with each year. That would be an outlay we could sidestep.

Removing the one-time expenses brings the price tag of our heat pumps to around $10,000. That’d be an easy choice if our boiler was broken, as a gas system plus an air conditioner would be about the same outlay. But because it could last another decade or two, that reasoning is largely moot. From a climate perspective, though, getting rid of gas is a bonanza.

“The heat pump is the biggest emissions saver in your home,” said Wyent. Over a 15-year lifespan, ours could eliminate about 54 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. A 2022 study published in Nature calculated the societal damage of each metric ton at $185, which nets $9,990 in abated harm and makes the switch a justifiable public good. Research has also shown that people are more likely to make climate-related changes in their behavior if they see others do it first. 

Ultimately, we signed the paperwork. 

Just before Christmas, we cut a check to Phillip Martin of Red Merle Mechanical and scheduled him for early January. Then we put the electrician on notice that he would need to hook up the heat pumps — a conversation that left me queasy.

He asked for the model numbers of the units, hung up to do the math, and called me back. “Bad news,” I recall him saying. Our additions — the stove, the dryer, the heat pumps, and an electric vehicle charger — were pushing our home’s 200 amp panel beyond its maximum capacity. It was exactly the sort of problem that Wyent had said could happen— and an upgraded panel would be at least $5,000. 

The terror very nearly caused me to cancel the whole project. Amid my panic, I called Sharpe at Efficiency Vermont, who eased my worries. The problem, he reassured me, is both common and relatively easy to remedy with what’s called a circuit splitter, which allows two devices to safely use a single breaker. It reduces the maximum load on the panel by automatically alternating between two high-powered appliances that typically would not be used at the same time — say, an induction stove and an electric vehicle charger. (We typically charge our plug-in hybrid overnight.) It would be just $750 to install one.

With disaster averted, Martin showed up in his white truck, pulling a trailer laden with shiny heat pump parts. His first job was to run the ductwork in the attic and cut vent holes in the ceilings. We scheduled the work for while we were out of town and out of his way. I got a text message telling me our home’s thick plaster ceilings were chewing through drill bits and saw blades. Eventually he got through, installed the ducts, and then lined up the condensers in a neat row under the deck. We came home in time for the final wiring.

“I don’t know who’s more excited, me or you,” Martin said as he programmed the thermostat. With a rush of warm air, our heat pumps whirred to life. That night, the soft hum of a fan replaced the clanking of our baseboard system. In the morning, my wife and I took a saw to the water lines feeding the upstairs baseboard heaters and tossed them into a pile in the backyard. Removing them meant we could finally set up our baby nursery. And, with every cathartic heave, we weaned ourselves off natural gas. When we were done, I switched the boiler off. 

Then came a call I didn’t expect so soon. Our neighbor had seen Martin’s truck in our driveway and wanted to hire him. Within weeks, she had heat pumps too. My father says he’s next.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Here’s what happened when two climate reporters tried to ditch natural gas on Mar 21, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

Ten days into 2024, Port Moresby descended into chaos as opportunists looted and burned shops in Waigani, Gerehu and other suburbs.

That morning, police, military and correctional service personnel gathered at the Unagi Oval in protest over deductions made to their pays that fortnight. Unsatisfied with the explanations, they withdrew their services and converged on Parliament to seek answers.

It took just a few hours for the delicate balance between order and chaos to be tipped to one side.

• READ MORE: Other Black Wednesday reports

In the absence of police, people took to the streets. They looted shops nearest to them and forced the closure of the entire city. Several people died during the looting.

The politicians — the lawmakers — were left powerless as the enforcers of the law became spectators allowing the mayhem to worsen.

While many saw the so-called Black Wednesday, 10 January, 202, as a one off incident caused by “disgruntled” members of the services, the warning signs had been flashing for many years and had been largely ignored.

Two weeks back, I asked a constable attached with one of Lae’s Sector Response Units (SRU) about his take home pay. It is an uncomfortable discussion to have.

Living conditions
But it is necessary to understand the pay and living conditions of the men and women who maintain that delicate balance in Papua New Guinea.

He said his take home pay was about K900 (NZ$385). When the so-called “glitch” happened in the Finance Department, many RPNGC members like him had up to one third of their pay deducted. That’s a sizable chunk for a small family.

Policemen and women won’t talk about it publicly.

They also won’t talk about the difficulties and frustrations they face at home when there’s a pay deduction like the one in January.

Black Wednesday showed the culmination of frustrations over years of unpaid allowances, poor living conditions and successive governments that have ignored basic needs in favour of grand announcements and flashy deployments that prop up political egos.

Why am I raising this? What does Black Wednesday have to do with anything?

That incident showed just how important the lowest paid frontline cops are in the socioeconomic ecosystem that we live in. The politicians, make the laws, they “maintain law and order” and we’re supposed to obey.

Oath of service
Police, military and correctional service personnel, entrust their welfare to the state when they sign an oath of service. This means the government is obliged to care for them, while they SERVE the state and the people of Papua New Guinea.

But for decades, successive governments seem to have forgotten their obligations.

Out of sight. Out of mind.

Politicians have opted for short term adhoc welfare “pills” like paying for deployment allowances while ignoring the long term needs like housing and general living conditions.

The Acting ACP for the Northern Division, Chris Kunyanban has seen it play out time and time again. He said, as a commander, it is difficult to get a cop who is struggling to fix his rundown police housing to work 12 hour shifts while there’s a leaking roof and a sick child.

It’s that simple.

The government says it is committed to increasing police numbers. Recruitments are ongoing. But there is still a dire shortage of housing for police.

Republished from Lekmak with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with WBUR.

Every night, Graciella Carter puts her 5-year-old son to bed with the same routine. She tucks Oscar under some blankets, kisses and hugs him, and stays with him until he drifts off to sleep, no matter how long it takes.

But nothing else is routine. They stay in a different place almost every night. The bed may be a sofa in a friend’s or relative’s living room anywhere in western Massachusetts. Carter usually has to sleep sitting up, at the end of the couch or on a nearby chair, leaning on her fist like a pillow.

Carter and Oscar have been couch surfing since being evicted from their Holyoke apartment in October. She said she fell behind on the rent because she’d been injured in a car accident and couldn’t work for several months. Oscar had to give away his beloved dog, a poodle-Chihuahua mix named Luna. When friends didn’t have room for both Carter and Oscar, she would sit by his side until he fell asleep and then spend the night in her car — until it was repossessed a month ago. Now she gets rides from friends or takes buses, hauling around a pair of laundry bags with their clothes and other necessities.

“It’s hard,” she said recently while playing with Oscar in a small park in downtown Northampton, 20 miles north of Springfield. “It’s just bouncing around.”

The 28-year-old, a high school graduate who has worked off and on as a certified nursing assistant, has been waiting for a state-subsidized apartment for nearly five years, since Oscar was a few months old. She has applied for state-funded housing in 11 cities and towns without getting a single placement, even though some of those communities have vacant family units.

To the disappointment of the Carters and other families desperate for refuge from the winter cold, the state failed to achieve its goal, proclaimed last September, to “significantly reduce” vacancies in state-subsidized public housing by Jan. 1. The “90-day push” followed an investigation by WBUR and ProPublica, which revealed that almost 2,300 state-funded units were vacant, despite a waitlist of more than 180,000 people. The findings came as the number of homeless families increased sharply, prompting Gov. Maura Healey to declare a state of emergency, which remains in effect.

Yet the 90-day initiative barely made a dent in the vacancy totals. According to the latest data available, the number of vacancies has dropped by only 72 since July. As of March 1, the figure stood at 2,219, with most of the decline occurring in the past two months after WBUR asked why the state hadn’t made more progress. More than three-quarters of the vacant units have been unoccupied for at least 60 days, the deadline that the state gives local authorities to fill a unit. Apartments that remain empty beyond that time limit need a state waiver or the local authority may face fines.

The state had pushed to “significantly reduce” vacancies last fall, but it made little progress.

The state also has not fixed key problems that contribute to vacancies, WBUR and ProPublica found. It still doesn’t screen applicants for eligibility when they first apply for housing, and it allows people to sign up in as many as 230 places, including towns too far away for them to realistically relocate to. Almost 13,300 candidates for priority status, which is largely reserved for people in dire need of housing due to situations like fires, domestic violence or a condo conversion, are still waiting for a vendor hired by the state to determine if they are eligible and potentially bump them up the list.

In most states, low-income residents seeking affordable apartments rely on federal public housing or vouchers for private housing. Massachusetts has those options, but it’s one of four states — the others are New York, Connecticut and Hawaii — that also offer state-funded public housing. The state’s 41,500 subsidized apartments are in high demand because Massachusetts has some of the highest housing prices in the country.

Until 2019, local housing agencies in Massachusetts were responsible for maintaining their own waitlists for the subsidized units. That year, the state created a central list with the aim of making it easier for people to find public housing. Instead, the system has become a bureaucratic quagmire.

The waitlist “is not going to get fixed with iterative steps,” said John LaBella, president of HousingWorks, a Boston company that helps people find affordable housing. “It needs a fundamental redesign.”

All the communities where Carter has applied for state-subsidized apartments are in western Massachusetts, and she would be glad to live in any of them. Agawam, a Springfield suburb, has a pair of three-bedroom units that have been vacant since 2021, along with seven empty two-bedrooms that would be suitable for the Carters. But the waitlist functions so ineffectively that the Carters and many other families have yet to receive offers.

When applicants reach the top of the list, Agawam’s housing authority notifies them, then spends hours verifying their information and reviewing their criminal backgrounds, income and references. Ultimately, most of them don’t respond, don’t qualify, or decline to move to Agawam. On average, Agawam vets hundreds of applicants to fill one vacancy, said Maureen Cayer, director of the housing authority there.

The continuing abundance of vacancies “is a failure,” Cayer said. “It’s a failure for the state. It’s a failure for the system. It’s a failure for the housing authority.”

Kevin Sbardella, director of the Fall River housing authority, similarly blamed the state’s centralized waitlist for the nearly two dozen empty units there. He said he wishes agencies could go back to using their own lists. “If I could just go local, I’d fill my vacancies up in a week,” he said.

After WBUR asked in February about the failure to fill more vacancies, state officials made a new set of promises to local housing directors. Ben Stone, director of the state division of public housing and rental assistance, pledged to track vacancies better and provide extra funding to help agencies reduce high vacancy rates. In an email to local housing directors, Stone said the state aims to cut the vacancy rate almost in half, to 3%. That would mean reducing the number of vacant apartments by nearly 1,000.

State housing officials didn’t set a deadline to achieve the 3% mark. They told WBUR that it is a “long-term” objective, and that the medium-term goal is getting under 2,000 vacant units. They said they have been tracking the number of vacancies since 2016, and 2023 was the first year that it declined. “I think we made a little bit of headway,” Housing Secretary Ed Augustus said in an interview.

Augustus said he was surprised to hear that local housing officials were complaining about the waitlist. He said they have told him the system has been working much better since the state hired an outside vendor last year to help screen applicants who requested priority to move up the waitlist.

“They’ve all told me they’ve seen improvements,” Augustus said. “Not perfection. Not every bug has been taken out of the system, but marked improvements.”

The contractor handling the priority review has screened out far more applicants than it has approved. As part of a three-year, $3.3 million contract, Archipelago Strategies Group, a Boston marketing firm, is working its way through a backlog of 45,000 requests to move up the waitlist. So far, it has approved 640 completed applications and denied another 1,435, according to state housing officials. They said the firm has discarded more than 30,000 other applicants because they withdrew, did not respond to requests for more information, or were deceased or otherwise no longer eligible. Most of the applicants approved by Archipelago for priority are still waiting for housing offers, according to the state.

Archipelago has sifted through more than two-thirds of the priority requests, and it is “helping the most vulnerable applicants move forward as quickly and fairly as possible,” said Josiane Martinez, the company’s chief executive officer. “Our centralized screening is saving housing authorities thousands of screening hours, which they can now use to finalize housing placements.”

One priority applicant Archipelago rejected was Carter, the homeless mother in western Massachusetts. One reason she gave for seeking priority was that her injuries made it difficult for her to climb the stairs to the second-floor apartment where she and Oscar had been living. “Your documents show that the Primary Residence was not the impediment to your health,” Archipelago wrote her on Oct. 12. Once she was evicted, she remained ineligible because nonpayment of rent is typically considered the tenant’s fault. To receive priority, applicants must show they lost their housing through no fault of their own.

“I have a 5-year-old, it’s winter, how does that not make someone a priority?” Carter said. “I don’t care about anything other than finding somewhere to stay.”

Waitlist woes aren’t the only reason for vacancies. More than 100 apartments have been repurposed for uses such as offices, storage or laundry. Hundreds more need major renovation. Augustus said he’s asked his team to make sure there are good reasons for taking such units offline.

Last fall, Healey proposed a bond bill that includes $1.6 billion in funding for capital expenditures in public housing, more than double the previous allocation. The funds would help renovate hundreds of uninhabitable or rundown apartments. But the Legislature has yet to approve it. Augustus estimated that the state has “over $1 billion worth of requests in the pipeline” for public and private development from local housing authorities.

One stalled project is in Fall River, where the state approved an $8 million grant in 2020 to rehab 40 apartments, about half of which are vacant. But the state has yet to sign off on final plans, so the authority can’t seek bids or start construction. One unit has been empty for almost eight years.

“That’s been just moving at a snail’s pace,” said Sbardella, who runs the Fall River housing authority.

A spokesperson for the state housing agency said it agreed to reimburse local housing authorities for $1.5 million in minor repairs and staff overtime during the state’s push to fill vacancies last fall. But some local housing directors said the 90-day window for funding was too short for them to learn about the program, line up workers and win approval from their boards.

“I need a solid four to six months at least,” said Paula Mountain, executive director of the housing authority in Wenham, 25 miles north of Boston. She was only able to take advantage of the offer for two months, she said.

Cayer, in Agawam, said she didn’t tap the money because her state liaison couldn’t explain where it was coming from and what strings, if any, were attached. Stone told housing directors in February that the state plans to extend portions of the aid beyond 90 days.

Meanwhile, Carter and her son are still waiting and hoping to find a place to live. Although Carter has largely recovered from her car accident, she said she had to quit a recent job as a medical assistant because she didn’t have reliable child care or a home to invite a sitter to. She’s separated from Oscar’s father, who is not currently providing any financial help, she said.

In the Northampton park, she watched Oscar leap over a stump, then chased him across the wet grass and spun him around on a carousel.

“You want to spin?” she asked him. “Are you sure? OK, tell me when you have a good grip. You ready?”

Oscar can’t ride his bike or play with his toys at the park; his mother had to put them in storage. Instead, after playing with her and riding the carousel, he entertains himself by collecting sticks.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Todd Wallack, WBUR.

She remembers the smell of the barbeque pit charring hot dogs and how neighbors would gather on every surface outside to watch: on top of cars, in folding chairs, and on porch steps. 

“To look at the skyline at night, downtown, every night in different colors, and when they light it up — it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” said Glenn. 

Over the years, however, this crowd got smaller and smaller. Neighbors fell sick. Others moved away. 

Buried beneath the Fifth Ward and its neighboring community, Kashmere Gardens, is an expansive toxic plume of creosote derived from coal tar. Historically, creosote has been used in the United States to preserve wood such as railroad ties and utility poles; it has also been linked to health issues such as lung irritation, stomach pain, rashes, liver and kidney problems, and even cancer, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Glenn remembers the old Houston Wood Preserving Works plant in the neighborhood that sat adjacent to the Englewood rail yard, which is the biggest rail yard in the city and one of the largest in the Union Pacific system. 

For decades, its creosote was ever-present in the community: Strong odors permeated the neighborhood. Kids swam in a lagoon filled with waste from the factory. And when it rained, a rainbow oil slick would coat the streets. 

While the actual facility is long gone, shut down in 1984, the creosote plume it created persists. The site is currently owned by Union Pacific Railroad, which acquired it in a merger with the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1990s. 

Glenn can clearly recall when the cancer cases started. It was the early 1990s, and the first person on her street to get sick was Carolyn, only 35 when she died, according to Glenn. 

“So it really started at the corner with Carolyn,” she said. As more people started getting sick, “it just started trickling down the street.” 

When Glenn talks about the people who have passed away, she mentions there’s not enough time for her to name all of them. But she starts ticking off people on the list: Mr. CL, Ms. Osborn, Mr. Johnny, Ms. Barbara Beale, her former friend and collaborator, and, of course, her mother Lucill. 

Finally, in her late 30s, Glenn left after dealing with ongoing stomach issues for years. She often experienced a combination of coughing and pain that would get so bad she would throw up. Sometimes she coughed up blood. To this day, she has to take medication.

In 2019, the Texas Department of Health and Human Services established three separate cancer clusters in the Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens. A 2021 report from the Texas Department of State Health Services established one childhood leukemia cluster, confirming what residents had been saying for years. 

When it comes to creosote, “this was a very, very high exposure area,” said Loren Hopkins, chief environmental science officer for the Houston Health Department. “We know that exposure to these chemicals causes these cancers,” she told Grist. 

She also noted that in cancer cluster studies, the only types of cancers investigated were ones known to be caused by creosote and other cancer-causing chemicals found at the Union Pacific Railroad site. 

It’s hard to flesh out what illnesses are caused by past exposure to creosote from when the facility was open versus current exposure to the plume lurking beneath residents’ feet. The U.S. EPA is currently conducting comprehensive testing in conjunction with Union Pacific to understand these competing timelines and exposure risks. Testing could take up to a year to complete. 

Last July, after years of pleas from residents and several scientific and public health studies, Houston’s City Council announced a plan to relocate residents. In September, it approved $5 million to help residents move away from the contamination. Then-Mayor Sylvester Turner celebrated the funding, but warned it needed to be just the beginning: His office estimated relocating all 110 lots on the plume would cost about $24 million. As of last summer, 10 families have signed up for the buyout plan. 

Last month, Houston’s new mayor, John Whitmire, allocated the first $2 million of those funds to Houston’s Land Bank to begin relocations. 

There is a long history in the United States of companies paying to relocate residents rather than cleaning up polluted communities, from Diamond, Louisiana to Detroit, Michigan. But it is a rarer case when a city steps in to remediate this company-caused harm. Public health and environmental justice experts told Grist that Houston may be one of the first major cities in the United States to facilitate residential buyouts not on the basis of a climate disaster, but because of pollution. 

After years of residents in the area trying to get Union Pacific to come to the table to discuss remediating the area, the city took an unprecedented step of offering the voluntary buyouts to residents on its own dime. 

That response “feels unique and somewhat novel, in the history of U.S. environmental justice movements,” said Manann Donoghoe, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institute. He also lauded how quickly the city seemed to acknowledge and act once the cancer clusters were established. “What’s most interesting for me, as somebody who writes about climate reparations, was to see the city’s response,” he said. “To see immediately the mayor coming out and saying that, ‘Yes, this is an injustice, this is something that should be addressed.’” 

But with city money involved, concerns are being raised by members of IMPACT, a local group that advocates for the people who live near the creosote plume, about what will happen to the land once residents are relocated. Further complicating the issue is that no one is sure about the risk. 

When current Fifth Ward resident Mary Hutchins, 61, looks around her neighborhood, it’s clear that things are changing. Streets have been resurfaced and there’s a new, massive residential and retail complex that opened last year in Fifth Ward, which includes a sprawling apartment complex with 360 units, nearly 250,000 square feet of office space, and over 100,000 square feet of retail, according to the Houston Chronicle. 

Hutchins is concerned that just as plans have solidified for residents to relocate, this development could price the original homeowners out of the area — meaning that any future cleanups would only benefit newer residents. 

“So people who once lived in this neighborhood, they could never come back here, never. Because they can’t afford it,” Hutchins said. “Now it’s like they’re building all around us — everything is up-and-coming.” 

At a recent city council meeting, Steven David, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Whitmire, presented new research that confirmed what Hutchins had observed: Since 2019, the city has issued 88 permits for new construction of single-family homes and 17 permits for new multi-family homes. Another concerning development is that the incomingresidents weren’t warned about the cancer cluster. In response, Mayor Whitmire put a pause on development in the Fifth Ward. He also thinks the bill for cleanup should be funded by Union Pacific. 

“They have to assist with the cleanup of the mess that they created,” he said. 

Meanwhile, residents are left in limbo. Do they stay or do they go? 

Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood is a part of the city’s original ward system. Founded after the Civil War by a racially mixed group of Black freedmen and white residents, by 1880 the neighborhood was predominantly Black and became an epicenter for Black culture in Houston.

Glenn, Hutchins, and others who grew up in the neighborhood describe it as extremely tight-knit. 

“If your mom was gone all day, or had some business to take care of, you could always knock on the door and say, ‘My mom ain’t home,’” Glenn said. Whoever answered always invited you in. 

“‘Okay, come on over here and go get the rest of ’em. Y’all gone eat.’” Glenn recounted. “It was a loving neighborhood.” 

The memories of creosote are just as strong. 

What angers Glenn was the silence in the wake of so many deaths, and the fact the neighborhood had to look for answers on their own.

“And nobody still didn’t say anything after all these people had died,” she said. “We just knew it was something, but we couldn’t figure out what it was.” 

Glenn is the president of IMPACT. The group has been raising awareness of the issue since 2014, when she cofounded the group with Sandra Small, the former president who passed away in 2021 from cancer. 

The group started by gathering residents to talk about what had happened to their neighborhood, but it evolved into organizing protests and attending public meetings to incite action. At its first protest, Glenn created the group’s unofficial mascot, creosote man: a skeleton with a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Creosote killed me.” The group has used him ever since to raise awareness of lost neighbors and loved ones to cancer in the area. 

IMPACT soon started to collaborate with scientists and the city, zeroing in on the old wood preservation plant as the likely source of the creosote contamination that was sickening residents. Next, IMPACT focused on finding solutions. The relocation option came out of early conversations with residents, according to Hopkins from the city’s health department. 

She was present at those meetings in 2019 and remembers how important a voluntary buyout option was to residents. 

“This was a request by the community,” said Hopkins, “and their reasons were not associated with a specific contamination level. It was associated with the stress and concern, and the devaluation and the injustice of it.” 

Often the choice between staying and leaving isn’t much of a choice. Most of the people located in this part of Houston grew up here, in houses that were passed down from generation to generation. 

Reverend James Caldwell grew up in the Fifth Ward; his parents moved there in the early 1950s. He spent years as an assistant pastor at the Fifth Ward Baptist Church. He now is associated with the St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in Humble, Texas. 

In 2008, he founded the Coalition of Community Organizations, or COCO, in Houston, an organization that calls for action on environmental injustice, disaster recovery, and fair housing in Houston.

“The creosote issue, it has been decades old, decades,” Caldwell said. “It’s nothing new. A lot of lives have been lost. And there are still a lot of illnesses, sicknesses as a result of it.” He’s lost two people to cancer in the area, including former IMPACT member Barbara Beale and a friend who died at 11 from childhood leukemia. 

Caldwell lists all the burdens put upon the people of the Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens: the cancer clusters, the reluctance of Union Pacific to do cleanup, the years of begging someone to do something. 

“Do you have to lose your history, your culture, or your identity in that process?” Caldwell asked. 

Denae King, the associate director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University, grew up in Kashmere Gardens.

You have to take racial inequities into account, she said, when you ask people in her old neighborhood to leave their homes. 

“In the Black community, it’s quite an honor to own property, to have property be passed down from your grandparents or your parents,” King told Grist. 

That is going to weigh on the minds of the residents who have to decide whether to stay or go. It would be hard not to think, “But my family fought hard and my parents worked hard to buy this property,” she said.

Robert Bullard, founder of the Bullard Center at Texas Southern University, has studied the links between race and toxic pollution for over 50 years. His first seminal work, which established him as the father of environmental justice, focused on landfill-associated pollution in Houston in 1979. 

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Given his deep ties to the city, he understands what’s at stake when a community is contaminated — and even more so when it is threatened to be torn apart. 

“Relocation means loss of community and loss of neighborhoods, loss of familiarity, of one’s history,” Bullard said. “It’s very hard to leave a community that you grew up in, and you thought was going to be your homestead and your American dream.” 

The city’s plan to relocate residents away from the toxic creosote plume was the result of years of careful planning, collaboration, and conversations with the community, according to Hopkins.

Union Pacific, which has owned the land for more than 25 years, has so far denied all responsibility for illnesses in the community. Last year, the company narrowly interpreted data released by the state as having found no cancer risk, according to the Houston Chronicle. A spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services told the Chronicle that the results of the report “should not be considered a comprehensive assessment.”

In a comment to Grist, Union Pacific noted its current testing collaboration with the EPA to study air and soil contamination at the former Houston Wood Preserving Works site, and said it remains dedicated to understanding the pollution risk and conducting remediation. “Since inheriting the site in a 1997 merger with Southern Pacific, we have completed extensive remediation and cleanup,” a Union Pacific spokesperson said in an email, referring to work done at the site of the former wood preserving plant.  

“While the latest round of testing is underway, our collaboration with the Fifth Ward community, the City of Houston, Harris County, and the Bayou City Initiative remains active and steadfast, and we will maintain transparency and open communication throughout the process.”

The results of testing will prove vital to the community’s next steps. Many residents are caught between having to stay and wanting to stay. Houston is an expensive city to live in, Glenn says, and many of the neighborhood’s longtime residents are at retirement age, and therefore living on fixed incomes. 

“A lot of them ain’t choosing to stay there. They have to stay there,” she said. 

For Hutchins, she just wants to be sure she knows her risk before leaving her home. 

“If it’s not safe [in the Fifth Ward] then of course I wouldn’t want my grandkids nor my daughter here,” Hutchins told Grist. “I believe we would need to get out.”

But she wants to be sure. She’s skeptical after seeing the revitalization happening in parts of her neighborhood, and is questioning the motives of people who might want to develop in the area, since the contamination is still an issue. 

“Why would they waste their money and do that?” she said. 

Even if residents do voluntarily participate in buybacks of their property, the question of where they will go next is difficult to parse. A Bank of America report published last year identified Houston as one of four cities that are experiencing housing shortages amidst rapid population influx as people seek to take advantage of robust economic opportunities. This could affect the city’s plan of helping residents locate new places to live. 

The city is planning on using its land bank — a nonprofit group that recycles abandoned and condemned properties into new housing — to facilitate payouts and identify potential relocation spots for affected Fifth Ward residents. 

The city also wants to provide support in securing health insurance for those affected by the cancer clusters, which could be one way that experts say Houston could lead the way with legacy pollution problems.

For residents, long-time activists, and politicians alike, this has been a long and arduous process. 

“The relocation and the buyout and the payments for property and homes, it might sound like a success story,” said Bullard. “But that’s often not the end of the story. The end of the story is where will people find housing, replacement housing, within this area, where affordable housing is very limited.” 

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While the details of Houston’s relocation initiative remain in debate, from its timeline to its financing to its logistics, there’s one thing echoed across stakeholders: Residents, advocates, scientists, and politicians all want to see Union Pacific pay. 

“We didn’t ask to be contaminated,” said Glenn. “We didn’t go over there bothering Union Pacific. Union Pacific bothered us.” 

Glenn wants more aid for those affected, from top-of-the-line cancer care to assistance with everyday expenses. 

“I hear some people say, ‘Well I ain’t got food, because I had to pay this bill and I had to get my medicine, I had to go to chemo,’” she added. 

These bills add up and the community has been paying the cost literally and figuratively for decades. Residents of the Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens filed a $100 million lawsuit against Union Pacific in 2022 for wrongful death on behalf of deceased residents in the area. It eventually was ruled as abated in early 2023, the term for when lawsuits are halted because the suit cannot go forward in the form it was filed in. 

“Union Pacific should have set up a fund — just a once-a-month fund to try to help them out with what’s going on,” she said. 

City Council Member Tarsha Jackson, who represents the Fifth Ward, thinks a lot more could be done to address the problem, which has been decades in the making. She’d love to see the same political will aimed at helping residents in the Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens as there was for people affected by Hurricane Harvey.

“Harvey was a disaster,” she said. “In my opinion, this contamination, it’s a disaster.” 

Hutchins, meanwhile, wants to see investment in revitalizing the area. She wants to see cleanup of the area on the table as a real option. 

“I would love for this to be a community again. It’s like a ghost town,” said Hutchins. 

But only, she said, “if it was safe for families to come back.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Industry poisoned a vibrant Black neighborhood in Houston. Is a buyout the solution? on Mar 6, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Siri Chilukuri.

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Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s lawsuit last month against a large dairy farm over alleged labor abuses, including millions of dollars in unpaid wages, was unusual in more than one way. It was his office’s first wage theft lawsuit against a dairy farm. And it put a spotlight on another issue that’s widespread but rarely addressed: substandard housing for immigrant dairy workers.

According to the attorney general’s complaint, workers at Evergreen Acres Dairy lived in “squalid” conditions, including in converted barns and a garage, that did “not meet Minnesota’s standards for habitability.” Several living spaces lacked heat. There was no toilet in one barn where workers lived. Photos included in the complaint show bathroom and bedroom walls covered in mold, disconnected sink pipes and cockroach infestations.

While the lawsuit targeted a single farm operation outside the Twin Cities, the reality is that substandard housing is widespread on dairy farms across the country. That’s because state and federal laws meant to ensure adequate housing for agricultural workers often exclude those on dairy farms. As a result, employer-provided housing for dairy workers rarely, if ever, gets inspected, certified or even tracked by any government agency.

Over the past year, ProPublica has reported on conditions for undocumented immigrants on dairy farms in Wisconsin, which is home to thousands of mostly small farms. We’ve seen and been told by workers about housing there that appears to be in even worse shape than what was depicted in the lawsuit. We’ve also talked to workers, attorneys, advocates and researchers in other states, including New York, Vermont and Michigan, who say workers there live in run-down, overcrowded, unsafe and unsanitary housing.

Last year, for example, we reported on the death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin, and noted that the boy lived with his father above a milking parlor, the barn where cows are milked day and night. (In a sworn deposition, the farm owners said workers only stayed in the rooms above the parlor between shifts or when the weather was bad. More than a half-dozen former workers and visitors to the farm told us the boy, his father and other workers lived there.)

Less than an hour away, we visited another farm where more than a half-dozen workers lived in a large, rundown house. Black mold covered the bathroom ceiling and walls. Thick electric cables lay exposed on the hallway between bedrooms. The kitchen ceiling was crumbling.

At other homes, we’ve seen makeshift walls, exposed insulation and kitchens that lack stoves and other appliances. Workers sometimes use space heaters because their homes don’t have functioning heating systems — a significant problem in Wisconsin’s winter.

One worker said he was assigned a closet that was barely large enough for a twin-size mattress. He said he slept there for months.

“They said I’d be there for 15 days, but four months passed,” said the worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works on a farm and fears losing his job. “It got very cold in the winter because the apartment had a broken window.”

Federal laws meant to protect migrant and seasonal agricultural workers establish some basic housing standards, such as an adequate water supply, toilets and limits on how close sleeping quarters can be to livestock.

But those federal protections don’t generally apply to dairy workers because cows are milked year-round, unlike other agricultural jobs such as picking apples, which are temporary or seasonal.

States also can regulate housing for agricultural workers, though not all states conduct regular inspections.

Again, dairy worker housing is exempt from state scrutiny because the work is year-round.

Wisconsin’s migrant labor law only applies to agricultural workers whose permanent homes are elsewhere but work in the state for 10 months a year or less. As a result, dairy workers are excluded.

José Martínez, who chairs the Governor's Council on Migrant Labor in Wisconsin, said ProPublica’s reporting has “shed light on the need for regulation and oversight” for dairy work conditions, including housing. He said the council will discuss whether to recommend that Gov. Tony Evers support legislation to expand the state’s migrant labor law to cover dairy workers.

The issue has gotten some attention in recent years in other states. Bridge Michigan has reported on housing with faulty electrical wiring and “animal feces in an air vent, a dead rooster in the basement and a nest of rats gnawing at the insulation in the bathroom.” Vermont Public toured one worker’s home above a dairy barn, where a toilet sometimes leaked into the kitchen area and scalding water came out of the bare pipe he used to take showers. And in New York, the Times Union has reported on soft, wet, spongy floors, bedbugs and even skunks living under worker housing.

In theory, workers could file complaints about their housing with local public health or building departments. In some cases, they could sue their employers under state landlord-tenant laws. But advocates say complaining or filing a lawsuit isn’t a realistic option for undocumented immigrant workers who fear getting fired, evicted and deported.

“The fear of losing their housing or losing their employment or both — it’s a real issue,” said Griselt Andrade, the lead attorney at the Agricultural Worker Project of the nonprofit Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services. “Sometimes they just prefer to endure those conditions and to work.”

That’s what made Ellison’s lawsuit so unusual. Many of the workers at Evergreen Acres were undocumented immigrants from an indigenous community in the Mexican state of Oaxaca whose primary language is Zapotec, according to the lawsuit.

(A spokesperson for the Wisconsin attorney general’s office said lawyers there were unaware of any lawsuits related to substandard housing for farmworkers or similar cases in the state.)

Katherine Kelly, an attorney who manages the civil rights division in Ellison’s office, said the attorney general got involved after workers complained to a local Latino advocacy group about having their wages docked and, in some cases, not getting paid at all. During the investigation, many workers spoke to the office about housing conditions.

The lawsuit against Evergreen Acres and its owners relies on the state’s broad landlord-tenant protections to make the substandard housing allegations. Under Minnesota law, workers who are provided housing in exchange for their labor can be considered tenants; the laws aren’t so broad in many other states, making it hard to classify workers as tenants without evidence they paid rent. In the Evergreen Acres case, the lawsuit notes that the farm also deducted rent from workers’ wages, which makes the workers more like traditional tenants.

The farm “did not keep the premises in reasonable repair during the term of the lease,” according to the lawsuit.

Courtney Blanchard, an attorney for Evergreen Acres, declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. The farm and farm owners have not yet filed a response to the complaint.

Andrade said she is grateful that the lawsuit has shone a spotlight on substandard housing conditions for dairy workers.

“It’s widespread,” she said. “And it’s not just in certain areas. It’s throughout the state.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel.

To do it, she’s betting on energy trapped deep below the surface of the earth known as geothermal, which could be an answer to heating and cooling homes more efficiently and a path to building decarbonization. 

Davis heads Chicago’s Blacks in Green, an environmental justice group which has dedicated the past 17 years to figuring out the blueprint for self-sustaining, climate-resilient Black communities everywhere. 

“We’re hit first and worst, resourced least and last, and we contribute the least to global warming,” said Davis. 

Last year the group won the support of the Biden administration with the Environmental Protection Agency awarding a five-year $10 million grant. The money will enable Blacks in Green to work with other environmental justice communities in the Midwest to take advantage of historic funding made available through the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The Chicago organization is already beginning to work on sustainability projects in Cleveland.

Back home, Davis is focused on carbon-free energy: how to generate it, how to make it affordable, and how to get it out of the ground. Her aim is to ensure that her community won’t be left behind as the rest of the city becomes sustainable.

“We’re not going to be the ones left on the gas bills with the spiraling costs and the technology that is continuing to pollute us,” she said, adding for emphasis, “No.”

In 2023, Blacks in Green was one of 11 community partners across the country chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to design and develop a community geothermal heating and cooling district. That will mean building out a shared geothermal network across four city blocks containing more than 100 multi-family and single-family homes.

The goal is to decarbonize buildings and reduce energy costs for families. To get there, Blacks in Green received nearly $750,000 to kick off the initial phase of the pilot, which includes hosting community meetings and determining household needs.

Davis said Chicago’s West Woodlawn neighborhood — located about 9 miles south of the city’s downtown — is ready to experiment with geothermal energy. 

But at the Blacks in Green community meeting, neighbors like Debra Gay and her mother Retta Ford have questions about what exactly it’ll take to bring geothermal energy to the South Side. 

“Given that our city lots are so tightly spaced, how would you do that for an existing home and will that create some disruption?” asked Gay. 

Ford, Gay’s mother, worried whether the project could destabilize the foundation of older homes. 

Not necessarily, according to Andrew Barbeau, president of the Accelerate Group, a clean energy consulting firm working alongside Blacks in Green to design and deploy the geothermal pilot project. 

The key to geothermal in these old neighborhoods: the alleys.

“Out in front, you got water, you got gas, you got sewer, and other things are alleys,” Barbeau said. “There’s nothing under that ground.”

The plan is to leverage the earth underneath the alleys behind homes and businesses to build out a community geothermal system. That will mean a series of deep, 400-foot holes that pipe water into the ground, absorb the temperature of the earth, and bring it back up to the surface to make use of it.

By building the community heating system beneath the alleys, the project sidesteps the major challenge that major American cities like Chicago face: lack of open, workable space. Once installed, buildings along the alleyway can connect to the underground heating system at their own convenience. 

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This all works because the earth functions as a kind of thermal battery. The sun beats down on the earth, and it absorbs some of that energy. So much so that between 20 and 40 feet below the surface of the earth, the temperature hovers consistently around 12.8 degrees C (55 degrees F) year round, according to Andrew Stumpf, a geologist with the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“So you circulate water in a pipe, and you exchange the heat from the pipe into the water, and you’re pulling that temperature out,” Stumpf said. 

Experts call geothermal energy a nearly inexhaustible energy source, and it isn’t limited to just Chicago. It can be brought online almost anywhere. Back in 2019, the DOE released a study charting the path to massively scaling geothermal across the country. It found significant economic opportunity for geothermal district systems throughout the Midwest and Northeast, with Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania leading the pack.

With 23 geothermal districts across the country, the U.S. lags behind Europe, where nearly 400 are in operation. 

While the DOE is investing in geothermal districts which rely on the earth’s near surface temperatures, they’re also betting big on larger-scale enhanced geothermal systems, which typically require drilling miles underground. Enhanced geothermal works by pumping fluid deep into the earth, which is then recovered as steam and put to work to generate electricity.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced $60 million for three enhanced geothermal system pilots in California, Oregon, and Utah. An analysis from the DOE last year found that by advancing enhanced geothermal, the U.S. could be on track to generating 90 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power 65 million homes by 2050.

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Geothermal in West Woodlawn is a long way out. Once the community engagement phase wraps up, Blacks in Green will have the opportunity to be selected for up to $4 million in grants to actually go out and build the system. 

But there are still major questions left. Who owns the geothermal network? Who decides the rates? West Woodlawn could develop public benefit corporations or local co-ops that share benefits with residents. 

The hope isn’t just to break ground on geothermal but explore new ownership models that center equity along the way. 

Back at the Blacks in Green meeting, resident Rosazlia Grillier said she thinks a lot about what people sacrifice when they’re unable to pay their energy bills. She said the more that people know about geothermal, the more likely they’ll be on board.

“Prices around energy costs are skyrocketing,” said Grillier. “And so we can either just complain about it, or we can educate ourselves about it and make the change that we know needs to happen.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A geothermal energy boom could be coming to Chicago’s South Side on Feb 23, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco.