Green New Deal for Housing

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 31, 2024

On March 21, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act. Its purpose is to take on the affordable housing crisis and the existential threat of climate change. The legislation invests up to $234 billion over 10 years to transition the entire public housing stock in the United States into zero-carbon, highly energy-efficient homes. 

The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act would dramatically improve living conditions for nearly 2 million people in public housing across the country. The legislation also creates up to 280,000 good-paying, union jobs per year, while reducing annual carbon emissions by roughly 5.7 million metric tons – the equivalent of taking over 1.26 million cars off the road.

A report called “The Case for a Green New Deal for Public Housing” has just been released by the nonprofit Climate + Community Project. It says:

This plan would deliver healthy green upgrades and deep-energy retrofits of the nation’s public housing stock to massively increase residents’ health and quality of life, finally remedy the long backlog of repairs in public housing, and eliminate all carbon pollution from public housing buildings, while creating badly needed, high quality jobs in the green economy for people in public housing communities.

The Case for a Green New Deal for Public Housing: https://www.climateandcommunity.org/gnd-for-public-housing-2024

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.