By Jilly Edgar
Founded 90 years ago under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is the largest public housing system in the country. It serves more than 500,000 low-income New Yorkers across 335 developments and 2,411 buildings, providing increasingly rare affordable housing in one of the nation’s most expensive cities. Due to its size, NYCHA is often described as a “city within a city”–its population ranks 35th among U.S. municipalities. Given its scope and public management, NYCHA is a critical player in achieving the goals of New York City’s building decarbonization policy, Local Law 97 (LL97).
Buildings are the central target to reduce New York City’s overall climate footprint, unlike most cities, where heavy car-dependency makes reducing transportation emissions the top priority. Accounting for over two-thirds of the city’s total emissions, buildings surpass the combined output of the two subsequent highest-emitting sectors: transportation and waste. Their high proportion of emissions is largely due to the operational carbon that comes from functions like heating, cooling, and cooking. Many buildings, for example, still utilize oil-fueled boilers for on-site heating that are energy intensive and contribute to dangerous indoor air pollution, while others are heated through ConEd’s enormous steam network powered by natural gas. These fossil-fueled systems are particularly inefficient in old buildings like NYCHA developments. Poor insulation compounds their energy-intensiveness, as leaky walls and windows necessitate more power to heat and cool the building.
Recognizing the steep challenges buildings pose for New York’s climate goals, the City passed LL97 as part of its ambitious 2019 Climate Mobilization Act. The law mandates buildings larger than 25,000 square feet reduce their emissions 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. This process of decarbonizing existing large buildings–eliminating their emissions and improving energy efficiency–requires a host of new installations and retrofits (from electrified heat pumps to thicker window panes) that would not only cut greenhouse gas emissions, but also tangibly improve living conditions for thousands of people in New York City’s most vulnerable communities by reducing energy bills and cleaning up indoor and outdoor air.
These changes, especially when it comes to public housing, are easier said than done. Though it was initially established during the Great Depression to address the dire conditions of the city’s overcrowded tenements, New York City’s public housing system has suffered from decades of federal disinvestment that has left NYCHA buildings in worse conditions than many privately-owned buildings. Residents routinely face long waits–sometimes over 15 minutes–for elevators or find that they are out of service. Basic preventative maintenance, like annual boiler servicing, is often neglected. Meanwhile, leaky walls and roofs allow rain and sewage to infiltrate apartments, fostering mold growth that can take months to address.
Climate change impacts exacerbate these challenges. Nearly half of NYCHA buildings are located in FEMA’s designated flood-prone zones, and as Hurricane Sandy–one of the city’s first major climate disasters–demonstrated, years of delayed maintenance can make recovery even more difficult. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was called in to assist after the hurricane, it was initially unable to execute repairs because NYCHA lacked updated records of what electrical equipment the buildings needed. In the aftermath, broken heaters led to instances of carbon monoxide poisoning as residents resorted to using ovens to heat their apartments–an unfortunate necessity even on clear winter days.
To account for NYCHA’s unique issues, LL97 rules are slightly less stringent for its properties and for other types of affordable housing. Reductions in emissions are measured across the NYCHA portfolio, as opposed to building-by-building. If developments demonstrated progress in implementing the prescriptive energy conservation measures identified in Article 321 by the end of 2024, such as repairing leaks in heating systems, installing responsive temperature controls, upgrading lighting to more efficient options, and improving insulation in pipes, windows, walls, and roofs, they earned additional time to comply. NYCHA’s Climate Mitigation Roadmap also cites “beneficial electrification”–the electrification of heat and hot water–as its long-term strategy to meet LL97’s targets. Connected to the existing NYC grid, electrification has the potential to reduce emissions by up to 40%, and when combined with a fossil-free grid, reductions could jump to 70%. Though this work is essential, it is slow: the Roadmap points out that even moving at “a hypothetical pace of 100 buildings per year, it would take NYCHA 30 years to address the needs of all its buildings.”
The benefits of electrification are also minimized without improving insulation in NYCHA’s more than fifty-year old buildings. One firm making strides in this effort is Paul Castrucci Architects, which has contributed to projects like the Metro North Plaza and Gaylord White Houses in East Harlem and Sack Wern Houses in the Bronx. Specializing in passive house design–an integrated and continuously improved building methodology focused on reducing operational carbon–the firm typically helps define the scope of retrofit projects early on. It is currently serving as the building envelope and sustainability consultant for the East Harlem development. Replacing thermal envelopes (which encompass the physical barriers between the inside of a building and the air, light, and noise of the exterior environment) can reduce heat loss by 50 to 80%, making them a crucial component of green retrofits that can be accomplished with residents in place. Oftentimes, however, replacing envelopes “hasn’t been found to be affordable,” according to Ana Leopold, Assistant Project Manager and Energy Analyst at PCA. For context, estimates suggest it would take $78 billion to fully repair New York City’s public housing stock—nearly 9.5 times the amount allocated in NYCHA’s 2024-2028 capital budget. Due to these funding constraints, as well as changes in municipal administration that can cause midstream revisions to the scope of work, projects that would typically take 2 to 4 years to complete construction can stretch out for as long as 10 years. PCA has experienced such delays while working on NYCHA rehabilitation projects necessitated by Hurricane Sandy.
To unlock more funding, in 2016 NYCHA turned to a new program called Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT), which is part of a HUD initiative that allows private partners to finance the work and take over management of complexes. Even with this new funding, “there’s still not usually a huge budget,” Leopold says. PACT also has a mixed record in terms of its impact on residents: in Ocean Bay Houses in the Rockaways, reports from residents and Human Rights Watch have shown eviction rates of over 19% following PACT conversion, while in the Stephen Wise Towers in the Upper West Side, issues like broken elevators persist three years after the switch. On the other hand, some tenants praise PACT’s process and ability to improve conditions: in the NYCHA Journal, Resident Association President of Sack Wern Houses, Loretta Masterson, comments that the change “has really been a good experience. The PACT partner team…listened to what we had to say…and worked to make things better.”
Recently, residents were given the right to vote on whether or not they wanted their development to join PACT, and, while the results have been uneven (with many actively protesting conversions), the Metro North Plaza/Gaylord White Houses is among the latest developments being converted to access this funding. The question remains: will PACT bring better results when it comes to climate mitigation retrofits? According to NYCHA’s latest sustainability progress report, deep retrofits like electrification and space heat/domestic hot water upgrades have so far only occurred in traditional Section 9 (public) housing. Hoe Avenue-East 173rd Street is the first building to be substantially electrified, while full electrification apart from gas stoves is complete at 830 Amsterdam. Additionally, the first heat pumps were installed (with glowing reception) at the Section 9 Woodside Houses in Queens through the state-led Clean Heat for All Challenge. On the other hand, NYCHA’s decarbonization map, which shows “where NYCHA is headed, and what can be done with increased funding,” identifies most PACT developments as solely suitable for “steam system optimization” (which continues to rely on boilers), though a handful in East Brooklyn have been identified as suitable for electrified window unit heat pumps in line with NYCHA’s Climate Mitigation Roadmap.
Currently, PACT is the City’s primary mechanism for increasing federal NYCHA funding in line with its needs, but budgetary constraints and resident complaints persist. At the same time, NYCHA has not made sufficient progress on its overall emission reduction goals: a representative from the agency shared that “in 2022 and 2023…emissions decreased 11% and 17% respectively from the 2005 baseline. The slight emissions decrease from 2022 to 2023 was due to fewer heating days.” Though city officials and firms like PCA are working to improve both living conditions and the environment, the agency requires greater funding to achieve their goals on time. Earlier this year, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reintroduced a federal bill called the Green New Deal for Public Housing to allocate funding to the nation’s deteriorating stock of publicly owned and managed residential buildings while accelerating the country’s slow transition away from fossil fuels. Although the bill failed, the urgency of such a measure is exemplified by Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s home city.
Jilly Edgar is a climate justice activist working to tackle the intertwined challenges of environmental sustainability and economic inequality. By pursuing her career in urban planning, she aims to contribute to projects that implement a just transition, decarbonizing our cities while tangibly improving the lives of all city-dwellers.
