By Noah Wharton
Imagine a window in a very old building. The paint has been mostly worn away and the wood frame is dull and rotting in one corner. It’s giving weathered, neglected, decrepit. If this were your home, what would you do with this window? Many professionals will tell you to replace it with a modern, double-glazed energy efficient window. The Old House Eco Handbook: A Practical Guide to Retrofitting for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability by Marianne Suhr and Roger Hunt encourages you to ignore the replacement window salespeople and repair it instead. Suhr & Hunt point out that with most modern windows, like those made with PVCu (vinyl) frames, it is often necessary to replace the entire window even when only a small section of the window or frame is damaged. However, with timber windows and doors, like those often seen in older buildings, it is “relatively easy to cut out a broken or rotten section, such as the bottom rail of a sash window, and insert a replacement part.” This reduces both the waste and resources consumed—instead of sending the whole old unit to a landfill and replacing it with a modern replacement that will likely also be sent to the landfill within a few decades, you have a window that is once again in good working condition and could last another 200+ years with proper maintenance.
A home is more than just a place to lay your head at night. Housing resilience and sustainability is not just about energy efficiency, or sophisticated building technologies. It is about thermal comfort, healthy indoor air, and homes that can weather increasing climate disasters, the deadliest of which is longer and hotter heat waves. A home is a place of refuge that people often form deep emotional attachments to. The state of your home affects not only your physical health but also your psychological well being. Thoughtful resilience and sustainability retrofits are a key part of making sure our homes support our health and well being.
The Old House Eco Handbook (OHEH), written in 2019, may seem like an unlikely resource for residents of New York City, where 40% of units are in multifamily buildings and 69% of households rent. OHEH is, after all, a practical guide clearly written for an audience of British homeowners with the resources to be choosy about home upgrades. Furthermore, many of the homes OHEH is written for are over 400 years old, with thatched roofs and stone walls. And yet, its guiding principles—research, repairability, a holistic approach, thoughtful use of materials, preserving aesthetics where feasible—are valuable to New Yorkers as well, as we all face an urgent need for durable, climate-friendly transformations of our built environment.
OHEH asks us to consider: How can we make our homes resilient and sustainable in a thoughtful way, making moderate changes in a logical order that takes into account any systems that may already be approaching their end of life as well as the way various measures interact with each other? For example, installing solar panels when your roof is in need of repair; or replacing your boiler with a heat pump system as it approaches the end of its useful life as a decarbonizing measure. Weatherization and building envelope improvements should be made before selecting your heat pump, so you can right-size it instead of installing a pump with more capacity than your home will actually need once the windows are properly sealed.
Suhr & Hunt also remind us of the value of traditional materials like timber, clay bricks, and lime plaster that have stood the test of time. These materials are natural, non-toxic, and durable. They have demonstrated longevity and compatibility, and can be reused, recycled, or biodegraded safely; in stark contrast to many modern building materials like vinyls, asphalt shingles, and spray foam insulation that are made with petrochemicals and, as we are learning, often pose significant risk to human health. Traditional materials also tend to be low carbon (meaning they produce significantly less emissions compared to materials like concrete and steel) and create well-insulated buildings that can still breathe, avoiding the moisture-trapping and temperature control issues that have plagued modern buildings since the 1920s and 1930s with the introduction of modern insulation and lightweight multilayered construction techniques. Additionally, while petrochemical building materials can be cheaper to install, they often end up costing you more in the long run as they tend to break down more quickly and often need to be replaced rather than repaired. Sometimes they aren’t even a better option anyway: wood-framed windows, like the ones mentioned above, are more insulating than vinyl- or aluminum-framed ones.
Historic structures, made from natural and often locally-sourced materials, are among some of the most beloved and highly valued buildings in NYC today. Take, for example, the brownstone. These townhouses were built primarily in the second half of the 19th century with brown sandstone from American quarries, the foremost of which was located in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. Today they sell for anywhere from $2.5 to $20 million. Often built with parquet wood floors, detailed molding, and intricately carved designs, each brownstone retains its own unique aesthetic quality and sense of craftsmanship. Beyond just brownstones, most of NYC’s multifamily properties were built before 1940, according to the Urban Green Council. This means they are an important target for reducing building emissions and improving thermal comfort for NYC residents. Historic buildings are also often excellent candidates for adaptive reuse and conversions from single-family to multi-family or vice versa, unlike the modern office buildings that have proved so challenging to convert to housing post-pandemic.
Preserving historic buildings is also valuable from an environmental standpoint due to embodied carbon. Embodied carbon is the carbon that is released in the construction phase of building a home (including the manufacturing and transporting of building materials), which then becomes “embodied” in the building itself. Buildings account for 70% of NYC’s carbon emissions. The construction of new buildings requires massive amounts of carbon, so every new-build that can be avoided by simply maintaining and upgrading an existing building provides important environmental benefits in avoided additional carbon emissions. This is especially true in an era of globalization, where many materials are sourced and produced in different countries and exported all over the world, generating substantial emissions along the way.
OHEH chides people for their tendency to want to make things like new—to restore old buildings to their original state. What if we made room to appreciate the beauty of age? What does it mean to repair, rather than restore? To repair, rather than replace? To join new wood to old in the corner of the window frame and let the repair be visible? At one point, they tell the reader not to discount materials like marble or granite that “might initially appear to have a high environmental impact…[because] things of beauty and value tend to get passed on as part of the building rather than being ripped out and dumped in landfill.” In a world that is dominated by the economic demand to consume, where planned obsolescence has produced appliances that last a fraction of the time they did fifty years ago, where the manufacturers may stop making replacement parts after only 3-5 years, what would it take to change course?
In 2019, NYC passed Local Law 97, which requires buildings over 25,000 square feet to meet certain greenhouse gas emissions limits beginning in 2024. These limits will be lowered in 2030 and again in subsequent years until reaching the stated goal of net zero emissions by 2050. It will take a substantial effort for NYC’s larger building stock to make the transition, and even LL97’s hefty fines may not be enough to spur building owners to comply. Beyond motivation, owners and boards need guidance on how to update their properties, especially in a very tight market where tenant relocation while retrofits are being performed is often infeasible.
Building Energy Exchange, a building decarbonization hub in NYC providing “education, exhibitions, technology demonstrations, and research” related to energy efficient building solutions released a new report in March titled “High Rise, Low Carbon.” This report profiles fourteen high-rise multifamily buildings that have undergone deep energy retrofits that “resulted in annual operational carbon emissions at or below LL97’s 2030 carbon cap.” One of these buildings was at 172 E 4th St. in NYC. The twelve-story building, built in 1929, is home to a co-op with an “active” and “financially disciplined” board that managed to reduce its energy use by 32% between 2001 and 2011 through a series of incremental changes: adding a TRV to each radiator (thermostatic radiator valve—a device that detects room temperature and adjusts the radiator accordingly), switching from a fuel oil to a high efficiency natural gas boiler, and several other changes like switching to LED lights and sealing windows.
This approach, which in fact was motivated not by environmental concerns but by a desire for energy cost savings and the end of useful life of the old fuel oil boiler, fits in well with the advice of OHEH—a series of unobtrusive smaller changes (two larger changes, one that addressed existing overheating issues and another that was a natural time to replace a system that was approaching its end of useful life) over a several year period, with minimal disruption to tenants or the building itself. As the report states, “the building’s co-op board president began a retrofit journey with a mindset of long-term investment rather than the previous approach of as minimal investment as possible.” However, this long-term investment mindset is far from common among NYC buildings as evidenced in the “High Rise, Low Carbon” report, which notes that “most retrofits were not part of a long-term capital plan.”
This is at the heart of OHEH’s message: care for your building. This means thoughtfully maintaining it through regular repairs and planned upgrades as needed, of course, but it also goes beyond the physical needs of the structure. Emotional attachment and loving long-term investment into a building is part of what roots people in their homes, creating conditions conducive to the development of strong communities. Beauty matters, healthy materials and systems matter, and routine maintenance that keeps a building in good physical condition as opposed to allowing small problems to compound over time matters a great deal. People who see a building as a long-term home are more motivated to care for it, while those who see it as merely a means of passive income are less likely to treat it with the thoughtful care it requires. New Yorkers are familiar with landlords who only put in the minimum effort to keep it in rentable condition, which makes some naturally occurring affordable housing barely habitable. Landlords like these are extremely unlikely to invest in decarbonization or energy efficiency improvements even when incremental and affordable changes could save them a lot of money later.
This is why pilot programs like NYCHA, NYSERDA, and NYPA’s Clean Heat 4 All window heat pump challenge, that led to the design and implementation of saddle style heat pumps that can be installed in less than two hours by staff with minimal specialized training and plug into a 120V outlet like a window AC unit, are so important. They don’t involve invasive and highly skilled installation or very particular building specifications and, once widely commercially available, will put decarbonization and improved thermal comfort within the power of tenants as well as landlords. This is just one of many ways the public and private sector can work in tandem to further building decarbonization among older multifamily buildings even without complex and expensive renovations. Bills like the NY HEAT act and Intro0994/Tenant’s Right to Cooling are also vital, as they prevent continued expensive gas infrastructure build out, push landlords to take action to ensure tenants have access to cooling, and will hopefully further encourage updates that increase energy efficiency and decarbonization. It is also vital that Con Edison refrain from continuing to jack up the price of electricity, both to ensure New Yorkers can afford cooling in increasingly brutal summers and to encourage decarbonization. One key finding from the “High Rise, Low Carbon” report was that “The economics of electrification need to evolve before we see conversions at scale. The cost of natural gas relative to electricity makes it hard for full load electrification to make economic sense as a standalone measure.” Meanwhile in January of 2025 Con Edison proposed an 11.4% rate increase for electricity.
Ultimately, however, fulfilling the promise of the values expressed in OHEH–repairability, whole building approach, non-toxic low-carbon high-quality materials, preserving craftsmanship and beauty–will take a paradigm shift. As seen at 172 E 4th St, there is an economic case for green retrofits, but it often takes financial discipline and a long-term outlook and approach to carry them out for the average building without millions of dollars in reserves to spend on retrofits.
We are in an age of financialization of real estate and increasing corporate landlordship, which incentivizes quick profits to the detriment of everything else. This has led to an increasingly depersonalized system where there is often no one who has a deep connection to and investment in the structures we call home. Tenants perhaps come the closest, but besides the fact that they have the least power to insist on thoughtful and loving investment in their homes, they also face waves of rent increases and other conditions pushing them in and out of various homes over the course of their lives. A new dynamic will need to be forged between tenant and owner that incentivizes both parties to care deeply for their building. Fulfilling OHEH’s promise will require putting more power over building retrofits and maintenance into the hands of tenants and helping people root themselves in their homes through policies that prevent displacement and staunch the flow of families leaving the city due to economic pressures.
Noah Wharton (they/them) is a graduate student in the Master of Urban Planning program at Hunter College. They are interested in green retrofitting, decarbonization, and how planning shapes wellbeing, familial and platonic relationships, and community ties. In their spare time, you can find them baking, reading, or dancing tango.
