It was a hot summer day in Corvallis, Oregon, when the aging air conditioning unit in Alice Davis’s manufactured home finally quit. “It was horrible, I don’t wish that on anybody,” Davis says. “We took lots of cold showers. We borrowed an AC unit from somebody—one of the ones that just sits in your living room—and then we went down to Safeway and got one of those Styrofoam buckets and filled it up with ice and put a fan in front of it.”

The HVAC unit had been original to the 1992 home—making it more than 30 years old, just like the aluminum-framed single-pane windows that barely kept out the elements. Davis was on a waiting list to get an energy efficiency retrofit through a state program for low-income residents, but in the meantime, she was able to enlist a partner organization called Seeds for the Sol to replace the old HVAC unit with a cold climate heat pump to restore cooling.

The difference in her electric bill was shocking: “When they installed the heat pump, that alone reduced my bill by $80 a month,” Davis says.

Despite their relatively small footprints, which help reduce overall heating and cooling loads, manufactured homes use 50 percent more energy per square foot than site-built homes, often due to poor insulation, air leaks, and inefficient equipment. More than half of manufactured home residents experienced some form of energy insecurity in 2024, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), many forgoing medication or food to pay their energy bills.

That’s one reason federal energy standards and state or local programs designed to retrofit or replace older, less-efficient manufactured housing can make a huge difference in the lives of residents, lowering their utility bills and increasing their comfort and safety.

Eventually, Davis’s name was drawn for the state retrofit program, and an organization called Community Services Consortium (CSC) added insulation, sealed leaky ductwork and gaps beneath the home, swapped out its single-pane windows for dual-pane ones, and installed vapor barriers and ventilation fans, among other measures. The upgrades lowered her electric bills even further. Davis had been paying between $200 and $300 a month for electricity. “Now it’s hovering around $119 a month,” she says. “It’s crazy. My kids are like, ‘Can we keep the AC on?’ And I’m like, yeah, you can!”

‘You’re Basically Inside of an Oven’

In Oregon’s temperate climate, efficiency updates help with comfort, air quality, and savings. But in the desert heat of an Arizona summer, home efficiency can be a matter of life and death.

When temperatures routinely reach triple digits Fahrenheit during the day, and then stay above 90 degrees at night—which happened 29 times in Phoenix this summer—living in an inefficient mobile home or park model recreational vehicle can be life-threatening, says Kath Noble, president of the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home Owners (AAMHO).

“The old metal ones, it’s harder to cool them in the summer,” she says. “Even if you have a really good AC system, you cannot get the temperature more than about 10 or 12 degrees below what it is outside. So if it’s 110 outside, you could maybe get it down to 100 or 98 degrees inside … and if the power goes out, you’re basically inside of an oven.”

In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, manufactured homes and RVs account for just 5 percent of the county’s housing stock, but roughly a quarter of all indoor heat-related deaths in recent years.

“A lot of people who live in park model RVs are winter visitors,” Noble says. “But with housing costs the way they are, with people getting older and living in senior parks like ours, many people are starting to make Arizona their only home, so they’re now spending summers here, too. And in a park model, your electrical costs can really skyrocket.”

For seniors or others on a fixed income, that can lead to some hard choices. “What a lot of people are doing is they’re turning off their air conditioning,” Noble says, “even if it’s still over 85 or 90 degrees every night—that’s the low, not the high—so it’s really dangerous.”

In some older mobile home parks, outdated electrical infrastructure presents its own challenge. Until recently, some park owners would forbid tenants from installing air conditioners, even in deadly heat, because of the strain it placed on dated electrical equipment. Arizona had to pass a law in 2024 guaranteeing tenants the right to install cooling devices.

Meanwhile, in a manufactured home community, the park landlord is often the direct customer of the electric utility, while residents pay their utility bills to the landlord. That means residents can’t always qualify for utility company programs designed to help them, such as low-income fuel assistance, energy audits, efficiency rebates, or even balanced billing arrangements.

“We don’t qualify for many city, county, and federal programs that would help us do upgrades,” Noble says. “Even if one of the big companies offers, for example, energy assessments, where they come out and look at your home to see if they can help you with energy efficiency, we don’t qualify for that. They don’t know who we are, because we’re not individual customers.”

Utility companies are often a main source of funding for residential retrofits. In Oregon, for example—as in more than 30 other states nationwide—small ratepayer surcharges on utility bills help fund rebate programs for upgrades such as insulation, air sealing, and high-efficiency heating and cooling equipment.

They Don’t Make ’Em like They Used to (Sometimes That’s a Good Thing)

Early mobile homes were built to varied and often subpar standards. But since 1976, all manufactured homes have been constructed to meet a national building code set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

That code has been revised many times over the years, with HUD issuing major updates as recently as 2024. But the last time HUD substantially overhauled the code’s energy efficiency standards was also the first time—over 30 years ago, in 1994. As an indication of the prevailing attitude toward air quality at the time, at that point one could still smoke on international flights.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that Congress passed in 2026, however, may finally deliver long-awaited energy efficiency updates to the HUD code. The law requires HUD to produce updated standards for manufactured homes within one year, and subsequent updates every three years, says Arica Young, director of housing access and affordability at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It gives deadlines, and it means hopefully the code will be evergreen.” (The act also did away with a 1974 rule requiring all manufactured homes to have a permanent steel chassis—even though only 10 percent of them are ever relocated—which is expected to reduce prices by up to 9 percent.)

Ensuring that all manufactured homes coming off the factory floor are more energy efficient will result in lower utility bills for homeowners, year after year. And it’s something the industry can easily handle, Young says, because companies are already building two types of energy-efficient manufactured housing. “There’s the Energy Star certified homes, which are probably more energy efficient than a lot of site-built homes,” she says, as well as the DOE Efficient New Home program. “So there’s already a template. It’s not like they have to reinvent the wheel.”

Some builders, such as Clayton, the largest producer of manufactured homes in the US, have already updated their factories to be able to meet higher efficiency standards in response to a since-expired tax credit that was in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Purchasing an Energy Star–ready manufactured home adds about $6 to $24 a month to a homeowner’s monthly mortgage payment, depending on the region and size of the home, but will save between $12 and $63 each month in energy costs, according to EnergyStar.gov estimates, essentially creating positive cash flow for owners.

And those savings are compared to the baseline HUD code; for older mobile homes built before HUD added efficiency standards to its code—especially those in poor condition—it can be more cost effective to simply replace the home. So in addition to funding retrofits, some states, including Maine and Oregon, offer programs to help low- and middle-income residents replace an old manufactured home with a new, energy-efficient one.

In Oregon, for example, about 60 percent of manufactured homes were built before HUD’s first energy standards took effect in 1995. “The way those homes were built can make energy-saving improvements more difficult, expensive, and less effective,” says Scott Leonard, senior project manager at the nonprofit Energy Trust of Oregon. The wall cavities in such homes are often too thin—just two inches deep—to add a meaningful amount of insulation, for example, and the electrical systems may require major upgrades before new HVAC equipment can be installed.

Instead of putting more money into a home than it’s potentially worth, it can make sense for some homeowners to replace a pre-1995 manufactured home with a new, energy-efficient one. “We’re lowering costs for families now and in the future,” Leonard says. “They see lower energy bills right away, and they’re also not having to pay for other repairs needed for an aging home.”

As a program navigator with Energy Trust of Oregon, Eddie Sepeda works directly with homeowners who are interested in replacing older, often deteriorated mobile homes. He helps them apply for the state’s forgivable loan program, manage contractors, and sometimes acts as a counselor during what can be a stressful few months. “I really enjoy helping seniors, because they’re living on limited income and they can’t do much more, they’re barely surviving,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s life-changing for them.”

Sepeda recalls a woman whose mobile home was built in the 1970s. “During the summer, she couldn’t be in her home because it was too hot—she had to go over to the community room to cool off,” he recalls. In addition to efficient heating and cooling systems and a tighter building envelope (“insulated at R-41 in the ceiling, R-33 in the floor, R-21 in the walls,” Sepeda notes), her new home also had wider doorways and closets to accommodate her mobility issues.

She was beaming when Sepeda came to check up on her in the new home. “She was just going through, showing me around: ‘This is my kitchen, this is my laundry room,’” Sepeda says. “And all I could do was smile. I said, ‘I’m so fortunate that I was able to help you with this, I really am.’ And she started crying.”

‘Too Good to Be True’

In communities where Sepeda has helped residents in the past, people are now on the lookout for him, eager to learn about the program from someone who has earned their trust. But when he first started his outreach in 2023, “it wasn’t like that,” he says. “The state program was new, and nobody had heard about it, so it just sounded too good to be true.” People would ask him, with no shortage of skepticism, “‘What are you getting out of this?’” he says.

Elise Foerster, energy projects specialist at ROC-NH, knows the feeling. When she hosts pop-up events at resident-owned communities (ROCs) around New Hampshire to explain the energy efficiency rebates and other available grants, she says, “There is a lack of trust sometimes, where people think the opportunity is too good to be true. Like, what’s the catch?”

Others simply don’t want someone coming inside their house to do an energy audit, feeling it’s too intrusive. But those who pursue such opportunities—like Len Stuart, resident of the Medvil Cooperative, a 55-and-older community in Goffstown, N.H.—are typically very glad they did.

“This place in the wintertime was cold,” Stuart says of his early-1980s manufactured home. “You could feel the cold air bleeding in through the walls and windowpanes.” Through NHSaves, a statewide weatherization program funded by small surcharges on New Hampshire residents’ utility bills, Stuart received a home energy audit and a $6,000 grant that covered about two-thirds of the recommended energy efficiency work.

“They added six more inches of insulation blown in underneath, which was the principal thing that made the big difference, between that and the air sealing and the doorways,” Stuart says. “They did a [blower door] test in the doorway to measure the air exfiltration of the building, and I think when all was said and done, they cut the actual air exfiltration by half to two-thirds.”

After getting the work completed, Stuart used 13 percent less propane last winter—one of the coldest in years in New Hampshire—while keeping cozy and comfortable. And unlike in years past, he says he rarely had to turn on the electric baseboard heat in his three-season sunroom, either. “It really made a difference in the comfort of the home,” he says.

“I think in the past, there had been a misconception that you couldn’t weatherize manufactured homes,” Foerster says. “But you can, and you should. It really improves the life of the person living there, and the life of the house itself.”

Affordable Now—and Later, Too

Before moving to Medvil in 2018, Stuart had lived for decades in a single-family ranch across town. But by the time he retired, he’d grown weary of maintaining the one-acre yard, so he and his wife chose to downsize. The manufactured home community offered an easy and affordable option near his grandchildren. “Both of my children at that time were in town, so I wanted to stay near them, and this was the only affordable option,” Stuart says. With the median sale price of a single-family home in Goffstown reaching $539,000 in August, he adds, “Were I moving here today instead of 35 years ago, I wouldn’t be moving here—I would be totally priced out.”

Stuart, who served on the town’s zoning board of appeals for years, sees manufactured housing as one way to help ease our housing shortage. “Allowing manufactured homes on any qualifying residential lot is something that I think would solve a great deal of problems,” he says.

Back in Oregon, with the median price of a house in Corvallis approaching $600,000, Davis says her manufactured home park offered an affordable option in a place she and her children love. “The schools here are phenomenal,” she says, and there’s a free transit stop nearby. But it’s also the sense of community within the park itself. “Everybody’s looking after each other. My can opener broke, actually, two days ago, and my neighbor opened my can of soup.”

That cooperative spirit of generosity doesn’t surprise Davis, who grew up in manufactured housing. But now, with a dramatically lower electricity bill each month, Davis and her family can afford to dream a little bigger, putting those energy savings toward a family vacation fund. “We’re hoping to go on a family trip to Australia to visit our friends,” she says. “We’ve been just hoarding money, staying at home and saving for that, and we’re almost there.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A new double-wide manufactured home is delivered and installed in two sections. Credit: Greg Kelton/Getty Images.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Land and Water impact area and Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), together with World Wildlife Fund (WWF), announced the launch of a new digital Freshwater Basin Threshold Tool (BTT), developed in collaboration with the Freshwater Hub of the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN). Designed for corporations, NGOs, water researchers, and other decision-makers, the publicly available BTT Online Beta turns complex freshwater science and data into accessible, actionable information. The tool helps users understand environmental needs at the basin scale, establish science-based freshwater targets, and identify where action and investment can have meaningful impact, while making the evidence and methodologies behind those insights more accessible. 

“The health of watersheds is central to the sustainability of all ecosystems,” said John Farner, executive director of Land and Water at the Lincoln Institute. “The Basin Threshold Tool provides crucial insight into fostering sustainable water systems and maintaining ecosystem health in the context of our changing climate.” 

In its new form, the BTT is an open-source platform that compiles and displays basin surface water flows, levels, storage, and quality around the world. Previously, applying this guidance to set science-based freshwater targets would require specialized GIS analysis, technical expertise, and significant manual work to identify basin boundaries, interpret datasets, and calculate appropriate thresholds. Today, the new BTT brings much of that process into a repeatable digital workflow. 

The Freshwater Hub of the Science Based Targets Network is a collaborative effort co-led by WWF and World Resources Institute (WRI), along with Pacific Institute, The Nature Conservancy, CDP, and Conservation International. Together, these partners developed some of the leading science used in the frameworks, tools, methods, and guidance for water impact assessment, management, and reporting. To support this effort, the Lincoln Institute has made a $300,000 in-kind contribution of data management and software development services to WWF through CGS, a nonprofit technology partner focused on turning complex data into practical decision-support tools. CGS is providing the geospatial, data-integration, and product-development capabilities needed to transform the BTT from a spreadsheet-based resource into an accessible online decision-support tool, supported by data infrastructure that connects user-facing results to the methodologies, studies, and source data behind them. 

“The challenge is not a lack of freshwater science or water data, but making that information easy to apply in real-world decisions at scale,” said Kyle Onda, director of data science and engineering at the Center for Geospatial Solutions. “Rather than building the BTT as a one-off application, we designed an underlying open data foundation that can evolve with the science, support new applications, and extend the value of this work to the broader freshwater community.” 

The Lincoln Institute and WWF will be unveiling the BTT on September 23 at Climate Week NYC. The event, which will also be livestreamed, will include a panel discussion on corporate water engagement and policy and a technical demonstration of the tool focusing on the Rio Grande Basin.  

“The appeal of this tool is its simple interface. It is easy to use, but the data making up the foundation is extremely well researched, detailed, and specific,” said Angela Bowman, senior director of US Waterscapes and Freshwater Metrics at WWF-US. “CGS understands how to make that kind of data accessible to every user and you can feel the ease when you’re using the tool. From a business perspective, that means teams can start using the insights right away and quickly integrate science-based targets into decision-making.” 

Learn more about the BTT.

Kristina McGeehan is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute.

Lead image: Backwater Wetlands of the Mississippi River in the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. Credit: Wildnerdpix via iStock / Getty Images Plus.

That we need to build much more housing, affordably and quickly, is hardly in dispute. It’s the details of where, what, and how we build that can sometimes evade consensus. But at a Lincoln Institute convening last fall, two groups that are sometimes perceived to be at odds over such details—the pro-housing community and climate action leaders—found far more common ground than disagreement.

The quest to build more affordable housing quickly, cheaply, and in as many places as possible can appear to conflict with goals related to energy efficiency and climate resilience. “There’s a perception that modernizing building codes or applying energy and resiliency standards to new housing will drive up construction costs and slow down supply,” says Solomon Greene, former executive director of Land and Communities at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a co-organizer of the convening. “But the research doesn’t bear that out—it’s possible, and necessary, to advance housing supply and resilience together.”

Once you account for the full lifecycle costs of a home, Greene points out, building less resiliently or less efficiently isn’t necessarily cheaper. When homes are built in hazardous areas, are unable to withstand climate risks, or consume excessive amounts of energy, the costs are borne by the eventual homeowner or renter, in the form of higher costs for insurance, energy, and disaster prevention and recovery.

Greene had encountered some of these tensions during his time leading the Office of Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where proposed updates to resilience and energy-efficiency standards often encountered pushback from some segments of the housing development industry. “Ultimately our goals were not that dissimilar,” he says. “But because the housing crisis and climate crisis were increasing in at least equal measure, and because resources to contend with both were scarce, it created a sort of a false sense of competition.”

Committed to addressing that disconnect, Greene partnered with Heather Clark, a senior fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to bring housing and climate leaders together at the Lincoln Institute event, where participants discovered many shared objectives. “What both groups are really looking for is more housing, a variety of housing types, in well-connected, accessible places, close to jobs and close to services,” says Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute, who attended the convening. Climate advocates and housing supporters may have different reasons for seeking those goals, she notes, but “they’re asking for the same thing.”

And yet, that vision is not being realized in much of the US. We’re still not permitting and building enough new housing to meet demand in most areas, and when we do, we continue to build homes in precarious places, even as climate change causes wildfires and storms to grow more frequent and intense. Often the same legacy zoning and permitting regulations that have made it too hard to build housing have pushed new homes into higher hazard areas.

For example, in the years since 2017, when Hurricane Harvey dumped over 40 inches of rain on Greater Houston and flooded hundreds of thousands of homes, one in every five new housing units—more than 57,000 homes—has been built in a floodplain, an area prone to periodic flooding. As one convening attendee said, “A house that floods every other year isn’t affordable, no matter what you paid for it initially.”

And it’s not just Houston, says Clark, who is also chief executive at Biome Studio and coauthor of a Housing Multiplier Project policy playbook inspired by the convening. Nine out of 10 new homes built in Arizona and California between 2020 and 2022 face significant wildfire risk, Clark notes, compared with around 40 percent of older homes. And in North Carolina, for every home bought out after a disaster between 1996 and 2017, 10 more new homes were built in high-hazard areas. “Why do we continue to build in those locations?” Clark asks. “I think there’s a strong perception that we have to—that we’re desperate.”

With a background in affordable housing development, Clark understands that impulse—she agrees that we urgently need to build much more housing—but disputes the idea that we have to build everywhere, including in high-risk places, to achieve that goal. “There is enough land to solve our entire housing shortage in existing neighborhoods that are lower hazard and close to jobs, transit, and services,” Clark says. “We can get there by changing regulations to make it easier to build homes in those locations, whether that’s from new construction or by repurposing existing buildings.”

She points to a recent analysis by the Center for Geospatial Solutions—a nonprofit data and mapping enterprise launched by and operating out of the Lincoln Institute—suggesting that today’s housing shortage could be addressed by building on publicly owned land in lower risk existing neighborhoods. Ongoing analysis by World Resources Institute (WRI) also shows the potential to solve the housing shortage in existing connected neighborhoods—on parcels like parking lots and underutilized commercial buildings.

Drawing from pro-housing policies that are already working across the country, the policy playbook coauthored by Clark identifies six priority actions communities can take to get more affordable and resilient housing built in more places more quickly. As we build our way out of the housing shortage, Clark says, policy choices related to where, what, and how development occurs can unlock even more community benefits, in addition to moderating home prices and rents.

Where We Build

When homes are scarce but cheaper to build or buy in high-risk areas, many homebuyers and renters are forced to trade risk for affordability, Cotter says. “People are moving to places that are more affordable, even though they face greater risk,” she says. “That puts more people in harm’s way—more people who will be victims of disasters, and more expensive disasters for us as a society to have to deal with.”

Building a lot more housing in safer locations could change that. “If there are sufficient available, affordable home opportunities for people in the US that they don’t need to accept more risk—if they can readily find homes in places that are safer—then there won’t be such a premium on homes that are in safer places,” Cotter says. “That could go a long way toward putting us on a path to a housing market we can continue to insure, and that people can afford to get into.”

Adding infill housing to existing, transit-served neighborhoods reduces emissions, improves health for residents, and cuts household transportation costs by allowing them the option to drive less and live closer to their friends, jobs, and community. Beyond that, research suggests, it’s fiscally smart for communities to encourage infill housing. New homes built in existing neighborhoods near jobs, stores, and transit save a community an average of $21,000 per unit in infrastructure costs compared to the cost of building on the outskirts of town, according to a new study by WRI, ECOnorthwest, and Pew Charitable Trusts. The savings are ongoing, too, with such infill housing costing a community half as much to maintain each year, while producing about 13 percent more property tax revenue per acre.

What We Build

Adjusting the types of housing that can legally be built can also create immediate and enduring affordability. That means encouraging right-sized housing at prices people can afford.

In 2021, Portland, Oregon, legalized duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, cottage clusters, and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in areas formerly zoned only for single-family homes. In the next three years, some 1,400 of these smaller homes were permitted; they sold for $250,000 to $300,000 less, on average, than new single-family homes built in the same neighborhoods.

While most residential land in the United States is zoned exclusively for single-family homes, many Americans cannot afford a detached house on a large lot. Smaller starter homes and multifamily homes, though, cost less to build, purchase, heat, and cool, making them affordable to more people at the outset as well as year after year.

And because compact and multifamily homes in connected neighborhoods require less energy to heat and cool and allow more residents to walk or take transit, solving the housing shortage with this type of development would result in direct emissions savings comparable to half the country’s new car sales being electric vehicles by 2035, according to research by RMI.

That’s just the direct emissions benefits of more multifamily homes in existing neighborhoods. Housing is such a dominant segment of the US economy that “solving the housing shortage strategically has gigaton-scale emissions reduction potential,” the policy playbook states. A shift in the built environment toward efficient and grid-interactive homes can hasten the transition to clean energy and the adoption of more sustainable construction methods, improve grid resiliency, and cut household utility costs, the report suggests.

How We Build

Homes that are truly affordable—not just to buy and rent, but to live in, year after year—should be built to operate efficiently and to withstand climate risks like wildfires and hurricanes. That doesn’t cost as much as people assume.

“There’s the perception that it’s too expensive to build a resilient home or an efficient home,” Clark says. “Our analysis shows that’s actually not the case.”

New research from the University of Alabama shows that adopting hazard-resistant building codes does not systematically increase home prices or constrain supply—and that, while delaying code adoption is unlikely to improve affordability, doing so increases vulnerability to future hazards.

Regulatory requirements such as minimum parking mandates, meanwhile, can also add significantly more expense to construction than do energy efficiency measures, Clark says. Rules requiring at least two parking spots per unit, for example, add between $50,000 and $100,000 per unit to development costs. But energy efficiency upgrades on a four-story multifamily building add just $18 per apartment, according to research by HUD—a cost recovered in less than two months through the resulting energy savings. Similarly, an RMI study across nine major US cities found that all-electric single-family homes were less expensive to build and to operate than mixed-fuel houses.

Uninsurable = Unaffordable

Still, resistance to resilience standards persists—and Greene says it’s time for the housing and climate camps to join forces.

“We need to improve resiliency, because people are increasingly exposed to extreme weather and climate-related risks,” says Greene, now the inaugural executive director of the Center for Housing Research and Innovative Solutions at the University of Denver. “And neither HUD, as a public agency, nor the households living in harm’s way can afford to keep on incurring those costs and those losses. The most promising path forward is working collaboratively with developers, insurers, and communities to align incentives so that resilient, affordable housing becomes the norm.”

Greene says the biggest emerging issue facing HUD during his tenure was the growing insurance crisis. Average home insurance premiums rose 9 percent in 2025 and have more than doubled since 2019, driven largely by claims related to wildfire, hurricanes, and other climate-related hazards, and some insurers have abandoned risky markets or entire states. For examplee, State Farm, California’s largest home insurer, in 2023 stopped writing new homeowners policies in the state, while more than a dozen insurers, such as Farmers and Progressive, have stopped issuing policies in Florida. A home that costs too much to insure, or that cannot be insured at all, can hardly be considered affordable; the best way to lower those costs, Greene says, is to reduce the risk in the first place by pairing smarter land use decisions with building more resilient homes.

Meanwhile, building codes—which provide the foundation for stronger, more resilient homes—have, in many places, not kept pace with accelerating climate hazards. “If we are going to build in certain locations, we really need to make sure higher standards are in place, like what we see in Louisiana,” Clark says. “They’re requiring homes to meet a base building code and be built above a certain elevation. And Louisiana is also requiring an energy code, so the housing that’s built is more affordable over the long term.”

Likewise, Alabama has updated its building codes for new homes in certain high-risk areas, and offers incentives for owners of new and existing homes to meet Fortified Roof standards—which were shown, in a University of Alabama study, to reduce insurance claims and losses by over 70 percent after Hurricane Sally. “That work has completely changed Alabama’s insurance market for the better,” Clark says.

That said, some portions of building codes could be tweaked—particularly in lower-risk areas—to expedite construction. “We should also be looking at, for example, parts of the building code that might not make sense, like the requirement for dual staircases in small plexes—that adds a lot of cost to a building,” Clark says. So does requiring a three- or four-family house to meet the stricter commercial code, instead of the residential code required of single-family homes and duplexes. “As we increase the adoption of building codes to reduce hazard risk, let’s figure out how to make it less expensive in other ways.”

How to Supercharge Affordable, Resilient Housing

Layering together the where, what, and how of housing yields a powerful policy playbook for accelerating affordability and sustainability in tandem.

The first urgent policy action Clark and her coauthors recommend is eliminating red tape in lower-hazard existing neighborhoods. Unlike the price of lumber or labor, regulations such as parking mandates, minimum lot sizes, and zoning rules are policy choices that local governments can directly change. Other priority actions identified in the policy playbook include using city- and state-owned land in low-hazard areas for housing, normalizing disaster-prepared building standards, simplifying public financing for low-income housing, embedding energy affordability into new construction, and reforming utility rates and programs to strengthen the grid and encourage efficiency.

Colorado stands out, Clark says, for having passed a series of housing bills in recent years to make it easier and faster to permit and build housing by right—that is, without special variances required—particularly near transit. “You’re seeing more housing get built on the ground as a result,” Clark says. “What’s also exciting, though, about Colorado, is that they’re not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They’re not saying we’re going build housing everywhere and we’re going to do it without consideration for energy or resiliency.”

In conjunction with the pro-housing bills, Colorado created a Wildfire Resiliency Code to ensure new homes can better withstand wildfire risk, told insurers to factor resilience into their rate structures, and established a Model Low Energy and Carbon Code that rewards efficiency or Passive House construction. “That’s going to make sure new housing that gets built is efficient, grid interactive, and all-electric, so people are going to benefit from lower energy bills.”

Colorado also passed a bill on grid interactivity to allow for virtual power plants—meaning homeowners and renters with, say, heat pumps or solar panels and a backup battery or an electric vehicle can get paid for feeding energy back into the grid during times of peak demand. These types of agreements with utility companies help diversify and stabilize the electric grid, which is under increased stress from data centers and other demands, and can reduce the need for new fossil fuel power plants.

The reason Colorado was able to pass all those bills, Clark says, “is because they’ve built this successful coalition where they’ve brought together people who are concerned about housing, and the people who are concerned about energy and fire and resiliency, and all those different groups are supporting these various bills.”

In fact, Clark says, one of the groups that has been most effective in advocating for housing in Colorado isn’t a pro-housing organization at all—it’s a regional energy nonprofit called SWEEP, or the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project. “If we’re going to get some of these bills passed that create more resilient, affordable communities, you need to have people break down those silos and really work together so that we can build more housing in the right locations.”

Building a lot of resilient housing in existing, lower-risk neighborhoods is a winning proposition for just about everyone, says Cotter of the Lincoln Institute. “There are all these cobenefits—in addition to creating more affordable housing supply and reducing emissions, it makes fiscal sense for communities, it doesn’t require as much infrastructure maintenance or initial capital investments,” she says. “There are health benefits to getting people out of their cars and being closer to community, there are health benefits when you take cars off the roads. The case for it just continues to stack up.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A fourplex in Portland, Oregon. Credit: Mark E McClure/Sightline Institute via Flickr.

Global leaders, local policymakers, and grassroots changemakers will gather September 20–27 for Climate Week NYC, the world’s largest climate event. This year’s convening, focused on the energy, impact, and action we drive together, will have dozens of breakouts, roundtables, plenary sessions, and side events. 

The Lincoln Institute will participate in several events as part of Climate Week NYC: 

Resilient Communities and Affordable Energy  

September 23, 1–3 p.m. ET, Inclusiv Headquarters (by invitation only) 

Earlier this year, the Center for Impact Finance (CIF) at the Lincoln Institute published “Resilient Communities and Affordable Energy: Charting Roles for Community Finance,” which reflects perspectives from the community finance sector about the strategic opportunities and challenges ahead. The report highlights how community lenders have continued to work to expand access to clean, affordable energy amid shifting federal support. 

Building on the report, CIF will join Inclusiv, a nonprofit network of community development credit unions, for an interactive session where community lenders will discuss different types of collaborations and how to leverage strategic partnerships to expand reach and impact. 

Driving Freshwater Resilience for Climate-Threatened River Basins 

September 23, 5–6 p.m., presented by Panda House 

Science Based Targets Network’s (SBTN) Freshwater Hub is a collaborative effort led by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and World Resources Institute (WRI), along with the Pacific Institute, The Nature Conservancy, CDP, and Conservation International. Together, these partners have developed some of the leading frameworks, tools, methods, and guidance for water impact assessment, management, and reporting. To support this effort, the Lincoln Institute and its Center for Geospatial Solutions have joined the WWF to accelerate the development of the Basin Threshold Tool (BTT), an open-source platform that compiles and displays basin water flows, levels, storage, and quality around the world. Its database includes data, methods, and supporting information designed to help companies as they set science-based freshwater targets.

The Lincoln Institute and WWF will be launching the Basin Threshold Tool at Climate Week NYC with a panel discussion on corporate water engagement and policy and a technical demonstration of the tool, focusing on the Rio Grande River. We look forward to a great discussion on how the BTT can aid stakeholders in tracking basin conditions at different scales, advancing net-zero goals, and making informed water management decisions. 

Architecture, Planning, and International Law: Building Postcarbon Futures 

September 23, 6:30–8:00 p.m., presented by the Center for Brooklyn History and the Architectural League 

The Brooklyn Public Library’s Center for Brooklyn History and the Architectural League are hosting a conversation about what it will take to build a more just and sustainable future, inspired by the Lincoln Institute’s newest book, Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions, by Billy Fleming. Drawing on the 29 innovative climate justice projects highlighted in the book, Fleming will join Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Keller Easterling to explore how to reduce emissions while creating more just, equitable, and resilient communities.  

More information about Climate Week programming can be found on the Climate Week NYC website.

Kristina McGeehan is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute.

Lead image: Open lawn in New York City’s Central Park, featuring colorful autumn trees in front of the Manhattan skyline. Credit: StockSeller_ukr via iStock/Getty Images Plus.