When U.S. Representative Jamaal Bowman visited his childhood home in Harlem’s East River Houses last winter, he was struck by a piece of graffiti at the entrance. The tag read, simply, “Help.”
For Bowman, it was a fitting testament to the state of New York City’s public housing, which aims to provide “safe, affordable housing” to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers. In recent years, however, the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, has become a poster child of environmental injustice and government neglect. The agency faces a $40 billion backlog of lead paint, mold, heat and gas outages, and myriad other problems to fix. This has translated into a public health crisis for its half-million residents — more than the population of Atlanta, Georgia — which, like so many other symptoms of inequality, has only deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
NYCHA’s neglected infrastructure also takes a toll on the climate. A study by the agency last year found that its outdated heating systems waste two-thirds of their energy. Those systems are overwhelmingly powered by fuel oil and natural gas. As a result, NYCHA buildings alone produce a whopping 3 percent of New York City’s total carbon emissions.
But soon, NYCHA may have the funding to address its habitability issues and emissions problem hand in hand. Top Democrats in Washington, D.C., are promising $80 billion in funding for public housing as part of their $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package. NYCHA, as the largest and most distressed of the country’s housing authorities, could be eligible for up to half of the total funding.
NYCHA’s updated sustainability agenda, published last week, offers a glimpse of what the agency could do with that kind of funding. The program highlights goals like deep energy retrofits, solar roofs, and community gardens as part of what Steven Lovci, NYCHA’s executive vice president of capital projects, calls a “holistic approach” to restoring the promise of public housing.
So far, these goals remain largely aspirational. But such a transformation is well underway in other cities around the world — perhaps none more than Paris, which has been retrofitting thousands of public housing units per year for more than a decade. The city’s ambitious retrofit campaign may offer some insights into how American housing authorities like NYCHA could make essential repairs while also reducing building emissions, and respecting tenants’ rights during tricky renovations.
Paris’ public housing stock has faced many of the same woes as its U.S. counterparts. Public or “social” housing construction boomed in Paris during what Americans think of as the New Deal era. As in the U.S., many of the public housing developments built at that time have since seen a dramatic decline, with some plagued by mold, pests, and crime. And in Paris, too, the waiting list for public housing has surged as tenants seek to escape spiraling rents in the private market.
In the past decade, Paris has worked hard to reverse these trends — and to align social housing with its larger climate goals. Socialist mayor (and now French presidential candidate) Anne Hidalgo has made social housing a cornerstone of local policy. And the city’s social housing agencies — a cluster of public and semi-public entities with roots in France’s “mixed economy” — are working to do their part to meet the city’s climate plan, which calls for 60 percent energy savings in residential buildings by 2030. Some of the city’s oldest and largest developments have been buzzing with construction as social housing agencies replace everything from cracked tiles to elevators to heating systems in a bid to make these buildings both more habitable and more energy efficient.
Among them is Paris’s tallest residential building, the 39-story Prelude tower, which stands in a monumental 1970s-era complex at the heart of the working-class 19tharrondissement, or district. By the early 2000s, the tower and other buildings in the complex were beginning to show significant wear, with chipping-off tiles endangering residents below.
In 2015, the social housing agency Immobilière 3F began upgrading the buildings from the outside in, adding an extra three inches of exterior insulation to the Prelude tower and encasing it in steel. 3F also replaced windows, heating systems, and electrical wiring.