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During a press conference for the Green New Deal For Public Housing Act, a new bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rallying cry emerged: “Clean this place, don’t displace,” said Kari Fulton, a policy fellow at the Climate Justice Alliance.

The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act calls for a $180 billion investment over the next 10 years to modernize public housing, transition its buildings to carbon-free energy, and to fund workforce development, which would involve training and hiring residents of public housing to complete those retrofits.

It’s the first example of what the Green New Deal—a House resolution introduced earlier this year to decarbonize the economy, build sustainable infrastructure, and create millions of jobs for frontline communities—could look like in practice.

“The Green New Deal centers frontline communities and that’s why we’re going with public housing first,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the conference. “Public housing is infrastructure, and this is an infrastructure bill.”

Across America, public housing is facing decades of disinvestment that have left millions of residents in substandard living conditions, and nowhere is that problem clearer than at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Home to an estimated 400,000 residents, NYCHA is the country’s largest public housing system and a glaring symbol of the country’s failure to provide stable and livable housing to the communities most in need. It’s saddled with a $32 billion maintenance backlog to repair broken elevators, toxic mold and vermin infestations, and malfunctioning heat and hot water systems. Other issues include leaky roofs, lead paint, unsecured doors, and lingering damage from Hurricane Sandy. Mismanagement of NYCHA led the Department of Housing and Urban Development to appoint a federal monitor to oversee the agency.

“These things don’t happen overnight,” said Lakeesha Taylor, a 45-year resident of NYCHA and tenant activist. “It’s from years of neglect, scandal, and mismanagement of funds, and we are hoping that a Green New Deal will bring us out of it. This is the change we’re looking for. This is why we’re standing behind the Green New Deal.”

Data for Progress, a progressive research group, issued an independent report about what the bill’s impact could be for public housing, using New York City, which would receive $48 billion over a 10-year span to retrofit buildings, as a case study.

“NYCHA is the single entity that defines public housing now and it’s in crisis, it’s in need of help,” says Daniel Aldana Cohen, a senior fellow at Data for Progress and the director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative at the University of Pennsylvania. “If we get [NYCHA] right, we can transform how public housing is perceived and get it back to what it was: a beautiful and healthy place to live, and an integral part of a broader housing system. We see this kind of green investment as a green infrastructure strategy that will transform the housing landscape for everyone.”

Updating heating and cooling systems with new technology like heat pumps and energy recovery ventilators; eliminating gas and updating appliances; and switching to renewable sources for electricity, could lead to a 2.3 million-ton reduction of carbon per year, which is the equivalent of taking 453,243 cars off the road. These energy-efficiency retrofits, which also include replacing a building’s overcladding and insulation, could save NYCHA $200 to $398 million a year in utility costs.

Completing this work would generate 325,519 jobs in New York City over the course of 10 years, most of which would be union jobs. The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act also specifies hiring requirements that prioritize training and employing residents of public housing.

There are health benefits, too. The report emphasizes completing deep systems retrofits and capital repairs simultaneously, which would address lead paint and mold in apartments, and estimates an 18-30 percent reduction in asthma rates.

Adapting to climate change—caused by the combustion of fossil fuels, which leads to high levels of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere—and resiliency is part of the policy. This includes wet-proofing lower floors of buildings to reduce flood damage, creating community cooling centers, and outfitting the buildings with emergency power in the case of extreme events. And in the longer term, this means building new public housing that is outside of the 10-foot sea level rise zone.

“What we’re seeing at NYCHA is criminal neglect allowing children to be exposed to lead, to let their brains become poisoned, to let people experience criminally high rates of asthma,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “[The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act] is not just filling the gap of criminal neglect, but leaping into the future to show what economic justice could be when we center frontline communities.”

New York City is already calling for building retrofits in the Climate Mobilization Act—referred to by some politician’s as the city’s own Green New Deal—which passed in April. However, NYCHA buildings were exempt from the law.

The report issues a big caveat that these estimates do not take into account current retrofit plans and initiatives—and would require changing a number of federal laws, like procurement requirements, income requirements, and repealing the Faircloth Amendment, which limits the construction of new public housing units—but is meant to be a “conversation starter” about what equitable, sustainable federal housing housing policy looks like.

During the 1930s, there was a fork in the road for public housing policy, Cohen points out. In Europe, there was a concerted effort to make public housing a high-quality, beautiful, dignified place to live; the classic example is Vienna’s social housing. The United States took a different route: making public housing the last resort, designed specifically so it would not compete with what the federal government wanted “worthy” middle-class housing to be, which was single-family homes. The federal government continues to substantially subsidize that side of the market through programs like the mortgage interest tax deduction while neglecting funding for lower-income earners. Each year, $195 billion in federal subsidies go to wealthy and middle-class homeowners. Meanwhile, just $46 billion goes to affordable housing.

“The housing mistake of the 1930s we know is redlining, and we’re obsessed with correcting it,” Cohen says. “The second defeat is public housing as a dignified place to live, and the Green New Deal for Public Housing is about correcting that second mistake. For most people, the Green New Deal has been about green jobs, decarbonization, and investment in frontline communities. People were clear about what the first two are, but no one knew what the third one meant. It made it easy for critics [of the Green New Deal] to say, ‘You’re confusing climate policy with social policy.’ What this bill does is show how you tackle social issues and carbon emissions at the same time, in the same place.”