Protecting Vulnerable Communities from Climate Impacts

Climate events like sea-level rise, extreme precipitation, and dangerous heatwaves and cold snaps—like the one Texas recently endured—stress our already vulnerable affordable housing stock and disproportionately impact low-income, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Preparing for climate shocks by assessing the vulnerability of buildings and communities to climate events and improving the resilience of affordable housing and neighborhood infrastructure are necessary to avoid future financial and social impacts on owners, residents, and communities.

 

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) invites you to a briefing hosted in coordination with the National Housing Trust and the Natural Resources Defense Council (national partners with the Energy Efficiency for All project) about the challenges and opportunities involved in protecting physically and socially vulnerable communities from the worst impacts of climate change. Speakers will discuss a new data resource developed by Climate Central that identifies federally-subsidized affordable housing at risk of chronic flooding due to sea-level rise; property-level climate risk assessment tools that are being piloted in Miami; a recently published scorecard of state flood-risk disclosure policies; and resilience measures in Los Angeles.

 

Highlights

 

Dr. Benjamin Strauss, President and CEO, Climate Central

Affordable Housing at Risk from Coastal Flooding

• Climate Central is a nonpartisan and nonadvocacy organization that researches, reports, and visualizes local information about climate change and thinks about solutions that can be implemented everywhere.
• Climate Central recently published a peer-reviewed article, Sea level rise and coastal flooding threaten affordable housing, and an accompanying tool.
• Research on affordable housing is important because it is threatened from three directions: the physical vulnerability of buildings, the socioeconomic vulnerability of residents, and increasing coastal floods from sea level rise.
• In the study, two large national databases of affordable housing were used: federally subsidized housing information from the National Housing Trust and naturally occurring affordable housing (also known as unsubsidized housing) data from the Co-Star database of housing.
• Some factors considered in the research include climate pollution levels (i.e., high- vs. low-emission scenarios), sea-level rise, flood heights and likelihoods, different timeframes (particularly 2050), and individual building footprints.
• The study finds that affordable housing exposure to flooding will triple by 2050, when compared to 2000 levels, especially for New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts.
• State-level risk analyses emphasize that New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts have the highest numbers of individual affordable housing units at risk. There are effects in every coastal state.
• There is certain amount of risk concentration: the 20 most threatened cities account for about 75 percent of the national exposure. This means that targeted efforts to mitigate and reduce the threat could address a large part of the problem.
• Resources are available at coastal.climatecentral.org, including the scientific paper, a report, a detailed webinar, the map tool, and fact sheets.
• The map tool provides a significant amount of information to visualize housing data and flood risk data:
  • To look at the affordable housing tool, select “choose map” and then select “affordable housing.”
  • The map is interactive and allows the user to change settings to visualize different flood risk scenarios. All information is available in English and Spanish.
  • By selecting the “Download” button, users are able to generate fact sheets for different states, cities, or Congressional districts as well as download CSV files of the data.
  • The interactive map for affordable housing includes all 25 coastal states and Washington D.C.

 

Laurie Schoeman, National Director, Resilience and Disaster Recovery, Enterprise Community Partners

Preserving Affordable Housing from Climate Risk

• Enterprise Community Partners is a nonprofit working to create opportunities for low- and moderate-income people through fit, affordable housing in diverse, thriving communities. Enterprise collaborates with partners at the federal, state, and local levels for a multi-sector approach.
• Communities of color and other frontline communities experience the first and worst consequences of climate change and are the communities Enterprise seeks to serve.
• One of the biggest issues we are facing is the extreme shortage of affordable housing. Nearly 11 million of the country’s 44 million renters have extremely low incomes. The United States has a national shortage of 8 million affordable housing rental units—especially in cities like Las Vegas, Houston, and Los Angeles. In these cities, on average, 40-50 percent of a person’s income is going to housing costs like rent and mortgages.
• Areas that are facing extreme shortages of affordable housing units are also extremely vulnerable to coastal flooding, hurricanes, extreme heat, earthquakes, and fire. There is a strong relationship between affordable housing and climate risks, which puts those dependent on affordable housing at extreme risk of losing housing.
  • As one example, 400,000 federally subsidized homes are in a floodplain.
• Some of the impacts of climate disasters include the loss of affordable housing, displacement of households, impacts to the workforce and the economy, lowered property values, and a lowered tax base. After climate events, Enterprise assists impacted communities through tools and programming.
• The tools that Enterprise deploys when dealing with the aftermath of a climate event have been co-created with those that will be receiving that assistance. It is important to keep impacted communities in mind when creating tools to mitigate impacts.
• An example of how Enterprise is shaping housing in real ways is the Moxey Rigby apartment community in Freeport (Long Island, New York). Enterprise worked closely with New York state authorities to create this resilient public housing option for the floodplain community.
• After Hurricane Maria, Enterprise took existing tools and worked alongside the University of Puerto Rico and other leaders to develop the Keep Safe guide for single-family resilient housing options. The guide includes a complete breakdown of the process, including choosing a site and meeting energy and water needs. The guide is available in English and Spanish.
• Keep Safe Miami is a collaboration of 70 community groups and the city to design and build affordable housing options that are resilient. They have established funds to help pay for retrofits in the multi-family housing sector. This kind of model program could be replicated in a lot of cities, especially in areas that depend on tourism. These areas need affordable housing to support the local economy.
• Lessons learned and best practices from Enterprise’s work:
  • Funding is needed to support pre-disaster mitigation and adaptation. There is a need to build forward and ensure housing has the funding to build and sustain resilient housing;
  • Technical assistance is needed for residents to identify risks and find solutions;
  • Stronger infrastructure is needed that includes housing and that is stable and secure. This also includes a resilient grid that consistently delivers wastewater treatment, potable water, and energy; and
  • Planning needs to be participatory, putting equity at the forefront, and sharing models of best practices from around the United States and around the world in order to expand resilient affordable housing options.

 

Anna Weber, Policy Analyst, Healthy People & Thriving Communities Program, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

Investing in Communities for the Long Term

• Atlas-14 is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tool that provides guidelines on how much rain to expect in different places, so infrastructure can be designed appropriately based on the conditions the area will experience.
  • These precipitation estimates are based only on past conditions. Historically, this has made sense, but climate change means that using backward-looking data and standards sets us up for failure before a project even begins.
• Current building standards require designing according to past climate conditions, assuming those conditions will continue into the future. With climate change, these standards actually make the nation’s housing and infrastructure increasingly vulnerable to damage from flooding and other natural hazards.
• FEMA flood maps are based on location-specific, historical data. Climate change means that areas outside of ‘flood zones’ are being flooded, especially in Black and brown communities. Since they are outside the FEMA flood zone, they are lower priority areas for flood risk reduction projects.
• We need solutions that ensure that decisions made today keep in mind the most at-risk communities and include future conditions. One such solution is investing in floodplain mapping with updated statistics and data.
• Some states do not require sellers to inform prospective buyers about a property’s flood history. There are almost no disclosure requirements for renters. Because of this, many people only learned about these risks after their homes had been flooded. The lack of disclosure also prevents many families from receiving aid after a flood because, if a past flood occurred in their homes, even if they did not know about it, they are required to hold flood insurance to get further assistance.
• Examples of solutions are: incentivizing the adoption of comprehensive flood risk disclosure requirements; creating a public, open data system to share the government’s flood risk and damage information; and guaranteeing homeowners and renters a “right to know” about home floods and flood insurance history.
• Pre-disaster hazard mitigation, which is taking action to reduce risk before something bad happens, lacks funding and is inaccessible to lower-capacity communities, especially to low-income households. Federal mitigation grants are not set up to help communities that need them the most. These grants are hard to get, and therefore they flow to places that have existing resources and the capacity to apply (i.e., dedicated staff, experience managing federally funded projects…). Hazard mitigation dollars tend to flow to whiter, wealthier, and more populous communities. This widens existing wealth gaps, leaving white families on balance wealthier after a disaster while leaving Black families even further behind.
• Some solutions for more equitable pre-disaster hazard mitigation include increasing the pool of funding available and making it more accessible to low-income communities on the frontline. Additionally, communities should be provided technical assistance for capacity building, planning, and project implementation. These changes need to be made in accordance with what communities need and want.
• The American Jobs Plan states that “every dollar spent on rebuilding our infrastructure ... will be used to prevent, reduce, and withstand the impacts of the climate crisis.” The infrastructure package gives us an opportunity to integrate climate considerations in all infrastructure decisions and design policies to assist at-risk communities.

 

Heather Rosenberg, Associate Principal, City Resilience Leader in the Americas, ARUP

Protecting Vulnerable Communities from Climate Impacts

• Discussions around climate solutions sometimes exclude at-risk communities on the frontlines.
• ARUP's work is focused on making the business case for investment in resilient housing, especially for existing affordable housing units. We need new ways of framing these problems, new ways of quantifying the impacts and benefits, and new ways of deploying comprehensive and systemic solutions.
• For vulnerable communities, solutions can become challenges when they are not reflective of what communities really need, especially at the unit level (owners of a rental unit and tenants).
• Multi-family affordable housing is often left out of policy and investment because there is a split incentive between renters and landlords and because you have people who do not have operational control of their units.
• We need to design policies to support low-income, multi-family housing (and low-income housing in general) and be aware of displacement.
• Electrification and decarbonization are critical goals for climate solutions. This will include decarbonizing the grid and electrifying buildings, which will require existing building retrofits and upgrades. For affordable housing, electrification needs to be considered in the context of many already existing stressors.
• For low-income communities and multi-family units, we need to understand the implications of different interventions and recommended improvements. Many houses are rent- and utility-burdened and have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. These communities are in crisis. When presenting policy solutions, we need to make sure they do not exacerbate existing stressors for these communities.
• Some competing goals we have include protecting existing affordable housing, avoiding displacement, protecting the energy grid and energy reliability, and moving away from carbon emissions. To prevent displacement, for example, we can look at triggers like rent burdens and COVID-19 impacts. Looking more closely at these triggers allows us to build better policies.
• We need to look at society benefits and other agencies that can benefit from policies. This also allows us to create and design appropriate incentive programs and subsidy programs that are targeted at impacted populations.
• When we think about energy resilience, electrification and decarbonization are a piece of the changes that need to be made. We need to understand the context of what communities need before making changes.

 

Q&A Session

• What other data do we need to advance our understanding of climate impacts? Do the needs vary by location? What does this mean for people who live near rivers versus those who live in coastal areas?
  • Strauss: In our research, we used data from the National Housing Trust on subsidized housing, but that is incomplete. As a starting place, we need more data on affordable housing. When it comes to floods, you need the information down to the address level. We are early in our ability to predict, track, and map inland floods. The First Street Foundation released a model looking at current and future inland flooding, which is just a start in the research we need to do on inland flooding.
  • Schoeman: The data that we need is easy-to-use future risk scenarios that can be used with existing planning efforts. Flood plain maps are critical because they determine the Nation Flood Insurance Program insurance rates. New York City is looking at a future floodplain mapping scenario. We need some investment-grade future flood risk mapping tools, and we need tools that look at rates of extreme precipitation events.
  • Weber: Most of our understanding of how floods affect people comes from the National Flood Insurance Program. However, the vast majority of people in the United States do not have flood insurance. When we are basing decisions on information from a program that not everyone is part of, we are leaving out a lot of information that should be relevant to decision-makers. Unsurprisingly, it is low-income people, people of color, and people who live in disinvested communities who are less likely to have flood insurance. If we are making decisions based on the past of the flood insurance program, we are not only failing to incorporate climate risks for the future, but we are also basing our decisions on a subset of the population that does not represent the people likely to be most at risk. There are commercial data sources available for a fee, but if you are part of a small community, you do not have access to this type of data.
  • Schoeman: We have to map the stability of our infrastructure. Our grid determines the habitability of our housing.
  • Rosenberg: There are many data gaps and gaps in knowledge about affordable housing. We have been trying to do a market characterization of affordable housing in Los Angeles, which you might expect to be straightforward—we have demographic data and some building data—but they are hard to correlate. We also need to be thinking about how to calculate co-benefit and social benefits data to inform policy decisions.
  • Strauss: There is a big need for comprehensive rainfall data. There are only a handful of weather stations in the United States collecting six-minute intervals of rainfall data, and an expanded network of monitoring at this resolution would be very valuable.

 

• What are some examples or case studies of communities that are leading in this kind of work?
  • Strauss: I want to draw a contrast between Miami Beach and Atlantic City. They are both similar-sized barrier islands and face similar flood risks due to sea-level rise. Miami Beach is wealthier and is already investing over half a billion dollars in self-assessed costs through bonds and taxes to raise streets, put in pumps, and implement a range of flood mitigation measures. Atlantic City is bankrupt and the only investment is from the Army Corps of Engineers that is protecting wealthier families on the beach. Army Corps investments were determined based on a cost-benefit analysis, and the assessment applies more benefit to protecting higher-value properties resulting in projects that protect wealthier people’s homes. It is not going to be possible for state and federal governments to support all communities to carry out adaptation and resilience work. Communities that are wealthier and more powerful have greater access to protection and assistance, leaving affordable housing sites behind, which is why the work we are talking about here is so important.
  • Schoeman: Many communities in the flood plain or on vulnerable coastlines are being told to leave. The truth is that these communities do not have many options of where to move to because there is an affordable housing shortage. In planning efforts, we need to think of ways to support receiving communities that have safe ground so they can improve their affordable housing and infrastructure. We need to invest in receiving communities. We need to start planning for the future, now.
  • Weber: NRDC and Enterprise have been working on the Strong, Prosperous, and Resilient Communities Challenge. They have been looking at models of community ownership for land (i.e., land banks, community land trusts). This is a strategy that has been used successfully to preserve affordable housing and also to preserve land for conservation and open space. There are a lot of opportunities to bring these projects together with climate change adaptation by looking at the intersection of affordable housing, open space, equitable access to open space, and making communities more adapted to climate change.
  • Rosenberg: Olympia, Washington, has been looking at how they allocate funds and the ways they bring different departments together to collaborate at the onset of a project so that all groups understand all the different pieces of a project together. There is a need for leadership, new policy tools, collaborative teams, and different processes working together. It is a model that others should follow.

 

• What are emerging policy tools that you think can make a near-term positive difference in addressing these issues? What are some policies that do not exist yet that you think can make a difference?
  • Strauss: We are working on an analysis to look at the intersection of toxic sites, flood risks, and socioeconomic vulnerability. There is always a possibility of contaminants being spread by floodwater.
  • Weber: Our team at NRDC is working on the idea of relocation and managed retreat from climate hazards that cannot be addressed in place. We have done research on existing programs for relocation assistance, such as home buy-outs where residents are fed up with flooding and want to leave. This is an example of how federal mitigation programs do not serve people well. There are many issues with funding mechanisms that make these programs hard to implement and participate in. NRDC is working to develop policy ideas that focus on helping to lower wait time for relocation assistance, helping make multiple options available to residents, and helping local governments conduct longer-term land use planning for areas that may need to be relocated. Forced relocation is hard to talk about, but there is increased interest in this area.
  • Rosenberg: I am excited for federal grants to be streamlined and directed towards a holistic approach to resilience. Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) funding and Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) are quite complicated, especially for communities that do not have dedicated staff or experience administering federal grants. A streamlined approach is needed before disaster strikes. We need new processes and approaches in our federal agency collaboration to think proactively before a disaster strikes on how to disburse money in ways that create value for the community.

 

• What does Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) funding mean to these efforts?
  • Weber: BRIC is a hazard mitigation grant program operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that is replacing a previous hazard mitigation program called the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program (PDM). It used to be an annual grant program that relied on appropriations from Congress. The exciting thing about BRIC is that the amount of money available through BRIC is tied to disaster spending, so if there is a lot of disaster spending in a year, a certain percentage of that money becomes available for BRIC grants. This new BRIC program will be a more consistent, larger, and certain funding program.
  • Rosenberg: We have been doing interviews with leaders in cities about their experience with BRIC and other related programs, and a majority say that BRIC has been complicated to work with. Only a few leaders, who have been very proactive, are figuring out how to apply for money and spending it, with a focus on getting the money to low-income communities. An example of a city working to get federal dollars is Houston, Texas.

 

Highlights compiled by Jocelyn Rendon