For low income communities and communities of color, building electrification and decarbonization is a powerful tool for climate resilience and safeguarding public health. But poorly designed policy could exacerbate the disproportionate harms already experienced by these communities by displacing renters from their homes or imposing unaffordable costs on low-income families. It is crucial for governments to center racial and economic equity in developing bold and equitable policy solutions to protect their constituents from fossil fuel impacts and promote housing justice.
The City of Los Angeles is one of many jurisdictions committed to reducing the increasingly harmful effects of climate change through building decarbonization efforts. The city is preparing to adopt a variety of new, powerful measures to make buildings cleaner and more efficient. Los Angeles for Resilient and Healthy Homes (LARHH), a coalition of which Public Health Law Center is a member, has created a new resource to help ensure those measures also protect and support the residents and laborers who are in the buildings on a regular basis. LARHH is dedicated to advancing equitable building decarbonization in L.A. that supports tenants’ rights, health equity, and environmental justice.
Drawing on the expertise of its members—including tenants’ rights, labor, environmental justice, and public health organizations—The Roadmap: A Path to Equitable Building Decarbonization in L.A. offers principles for strong climate policy that address the harms of past policy decisions and advance justice by implementing healthy housing policies for all residents. It shares what the L.A. building decarbonization goals are, then suggests policy priorities to help reach those goals. Each priority includes an objective, strategies for how to address priority in policy, examples, and colorful illustrations. The resource also shares some suggested equitable implementation strategies and implementation tools to help center equity in the design of the decarbonization policies to ensure that all residents, including low-income, can benefit from their efforts and not be harmed by them.