Electrifying Los Angeles’ Affordable Housing Apartments

Affordable housing and homelessness

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Low-income Angelenos living in affordable housing are disproportionately impacted by climate change. They are more likely to live in parts of Los Angeles that are hotter, lack green space, and are closer to high polluting power plants. Since many buildings in Los Angeles’ affordable housing stock are older, residents are often dependent on older, inefficient gas appliances (stoves, furnaces, and hot water heaters). Old gas-burning appliances increase utility bills and negatively impact the health of residents. Over 12% of childhood asthma cases are linked to a gas stove at home.
The CO2 emissions from buildings contribute to roughly 40% of global emissions causing climate change. There are many local, state and federal incentives to make new, electric appliance accessible, but are difficult to access for renters and property owners. FutureFit solves this problem by acting as a one-stop-shop and project developer for electrification of Los Angeles’ affordable housing.

FutureFit is working with several programs to secure electrification incentives worth millions of dollars for hundreds of units of affordable housing in Los Angeles county, and has already broken ground installing dozens of electric heat pump water heaters. An LA2050 partnership would enable FutureFit to scale up these efforts by creating a roadmap for electrifying Los Angeles’ affordable housing stock. This stakeholder engagement work would help FutureFit identify the barriers and opportunities to county-wide action on behalf of affordable apartment tenants and owners. FutureFit will also build a new tool designed to automate most of the building eligibility determination process. FutureFit would deploy a new technology-enabled system that allows property managers to document and share all of the project requirements ahead of time, cutting down the project development timeline significantly. This would allow FutureFit and its partners to rapidly assess and vet which buildings are best suited to electrification, and help incentive programs more efficiently deploy capital towards projects. This will be an especially important step as the Inflation Reduction Act will make hundreds of millions of additional incentives available for building electrification. Lastly, FutureFit would deploy LA2050 funds to conduct electrical load studies on several buildings in the Los Angeles area which is a precursor to determining which electrification measures are possible.

FutureFit aims to serve the low-income tenants of Los Angeles County by creating safer and healthier living environments for them. Tenants benefit by gaining no cost upgrades to their units and paying lower utility bills with the installation of newer, more efficient appliances. They also benefit from removing gas appliances that can harm their health (a recent study from Stanford University shows gas burning stoves emit unsafe levels of benzene, a known carcinogen). FutureFit would help reposition low-income Angelenos on the vanguard of climate solutions through electrification. Additionally, affordable property owners in Los Angeles will benefit by receiving millions of dollars worth of no-cost or highly subsidized electrification upgrades. This reduces their expenses and encourages affordable development by making it more profitable. Lastly, Los Angeles as a whole would benefit by accelerating its adoption of climate solutions to make LA a safer, healthier city for all.

FutureFit measures success by the amount of value we provide low-income renters and affordable multifamily property owners. Our business is structured to maximize the amount of value we secure for the tenants and owners in the form of electrification upgrades. Often, electrification upgrades can be installed at no cost to the property manager after factoring in incentives in affordable housing settings. These no or low-cost fixes are an alternative to the costly process of replacing outdated appliances that require replacement every 8-10 years. FutureFit will not proceed with a project if the net cost of electrification exceeds that of a traditional gas approach. In this sense, we aim to create a win-win-win where tenants benefit, property owners benefit, and we all benefit by reducing CO2 emissions for the planet. In Los Angeles this year, FutureFit has already replaced gas water heaters that would have emitted an additional 48 tons of CO2 in one year alone.