Congressman Dan Goldman Champions the Green New Deal for Public Housing
Generational Investment to Bring as Much as $234 Billion for Clean Energy Retrofits for Public Housing Units Across the Country
Goldman Working to Address Affordable Housing Crisis and Climate Crisis Head-On
Read the Bill Here
Washington, DC – Congressman Dan Goldman (NY-10) joined Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in introducing the ‘Green New Deal for Public Housing Act of 2024’ which would invest as much as $234 billion over the next ten years into the nearly 1 million public housing units across the United States. This funding would be used to weatherize, electrify, and modernize American public housing so that it may serve as a model of efficiency, sustainability, and resiliency for the rest of the country.
The ‘Green New Deal for Public Housing Act’ would transition the entire public housing stock of the United States into zero-carbon, highly energy-efficient developments that produce on-site renewable energy, expand workforce capacity.
“The climate crisis and the decrepit conditions of public housing are two of the defining challenges of the 21st century,” Congressman Dan Goldman said. “This transformational investment in our underfunded public housing stock is designed to truly meet this moment. It will create jobs while modernizing public housing, while simultaneously addressing the issues of climate resiliency and climate change that disproportionately affect those same communities. Public housing across the country is falling into disrepair, and this much-needed injection of federal funds is critical to allow the millions of rent-paying tenants to live with the dignity and care they deserve.”
The ‘Green New Deal for Public Housing’ would create two new grant programs to modernize our public housing stock through:
- Deep energy retrofits to increase energy savings in all 950,000 public housing units
- Addressing community workforce development needs by prioritizing good-paying job opportunities for residents
- Energy efficiency, building electrification and water quality upgrades
- Community renewable energy generation, the profits of which will be controlled by Public Housing Agencies (PHAs) to boost their coffers and increase self-sufficiency
- Recycling
- Community resiliency and sustainability
- Climate adaptation and emergency disaster response
Congressman Dan Goldman has made addressing housing affordability and refurbishing New York City’s public housing stock a top priority.
Last year, Congressman Goldman introduced the ‘Public Housing Emergency Response Act’ with Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez (NY-07), which would allocate $70 billion in funding for public housing capital repairs and upgrades throughout the country. $32 billion of the allotted aid would be expected to flow directly to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the nation’s largest Public Housing Authority.
Goldman also led his colleagues in calling on Congress to require HUD to abide by the statutory language in the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 to save NYCHA hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years. The 1998 Act states that “a public housing agency shall receive the full financial benefit from any reduction in the cost of utilities or waste management resulting from any contract with a third party.” The letter to the Appropriations Committee also directs that the savings be used by NYCHA to address potentially life-threatening harm to public housing residents, including loss of heat in winter, loss of air conditioning in summer, lead, mold, broken elevators and locks, and more.
Earlier this year, the Congressman and House Democrats pushed for the inclusion Low-Income Housing Tax Credit in the bipartisan tax plan, which would spur the creation of hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units in New York City and across the state alone.
In June of 2023, Goldman cosponsored the 'Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act' (AHCIA) to expand and strengthen the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and spur collaboration between private-sector resources and state-level government administration to build and rehabilitate millions of affordable homes across the country. The AHCIA would also support the creation of nearly 3 million jobs, $115 billion in additional tax revenue, and $333 billion in wages and business income.
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