By SAJE Staff
March 25, 2025
Our climate crisis is escalating, marked by unprecedented extreme heat and drought, destructive storms, and wildfires, from Los Angeles to the Carolinas. One way to slow it down: decarbonize building stock. Because buildings account for almost 40% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, mandating retrofits like LED lighting, new insulation, zero-gas water heaters, ranges, and stoves will make a huge difference in mitigating the crisis.
But, policymakers must ensure the cost of these upgrades won’t be borne by renter households that are already stretched thin. Tenants at the Center: An Equitable Path to Building Decarbonization, a new report from SAJE and the Public Health Law Center, supported by the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT), makes this clear. In addition to the full report, a summary of the report is also available here.
“Decarbonization policies must be designed and implemented carefully to protect renters, who are more likely than homeowners to be Black, brown, or low-income—groups that already disproportionately bear the negative effects of climate change,” says report co-author Chelsea Kirk, SAJE director of policy and advocacy.
More than 45 million households in the U.S. rent, and many of them are struggling to make ends meet. Decarbonization has many benefits for health and economic equity, but passing the cost of decarbonization on to renters through rent raises or fees will cause eviction, displacement, and fuel our housing affordability crisis.
The report uses Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City as case studies, looking at difficulties renters face in each city’s housing market and how decarbonization policies risk making those difficulties worse. It also proposes model policy elements to minimize such risks, including:
- Institute strong tenant protections: Establish caps on rent raises and just-cause eviction protections to prevent arbitrary evictions, including for renovation work related to decarbonization retrofits.
- Minimize disruption: Decarbonization retrofits should have reasonable timelines, tenants should be temporarily relocated if they create habitability issues, and property owners who undertake illegal construction work should be subject to stringent fines.
- Prioritize enforcement: Ensure city agencies charged with enforcing tenant protections have sufficient staff and funding to do their work.
This report was produced as part of SAJE’s campaign to ensure decarbonization measures are implemented equitably in Los Angeles and beyond. It joins two previous reports, Decarbonizing California Equitably: A Guide to Tenant Protections in Building Upgrades/Retrofits Throughout the State (2023) and Los Angeles Building Decarbonization: Tenant Impact and Recommendations (2021), all developed with the input of SAJE members. The majority of SAJE members are working-class renters in South Central Los Angeles. Their challenges around housing affordability, landlord harassment, and building code violations, and helped identify some of the unintended consequences of decarbonization policies.
