Over the last few years, there have been significant investments to address climate change and improve U.S. infrastructure, such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021. Although historic in their reach, the laws are insufficient to meet the climate justice and housing needs of the moment. Earlier this summer, Just Solutions released the first brief from the Housing and Climate Equity series. It took a deep dive into two federally funded programs from the IRA and IIJA that directly benefit EJ communities and low-income tenants: the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP) and Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) and concludes that the two programs alone are still not sufficient to meet the needs of housing and climate justice.

In this second brief in collaboration with Ground Works Consulting, we embarked on a landscape scan and needs assessment by interviewing thirteen EJ leaders, including three from grasstops organizations and ten from grassroots advocacy and coalition organizations. This brief takes a bottom-up approach to assess the innovative practices at the intersection of climate and housing justice emerging from environmental justice (EJ) organizations and the needs on the ground to amplify this crucial work.

Authored by Miriam Zuk, Ph.D., Idalmis Vaquero, Zully Juarez, MURP., and Lin Chin