From fixing our homes to fixing the climate

A blog post by Aaron Downey, Campaign Lead, Tenants for Climate Justice 

I’m really feeling the cold, you know… and the rest of the complex needs attention, big attention big time. The children's playground has gone completely moldy. That needs to be done again. And there is moss growing all over it as well. 

We need to talk to this council. They need to be pushed, you know? They need to be pushed because they don't listen to the people.

~Testimony from a resident of Emmett Buildings, Watling Street, who spoke at a recent Friends of the Earth workshop.

Residents of local authority housing across Ireland suffer with the challenges of cold, leaky housing in a major way compared to homeowners. Over 80% of such housing has a BER (Building Energy Rating) of C or lower and nearly 40% with a D, E, F, or G. The impact this has on residents of public housing is immense. In a recent survey carried out by the Just Housing research project in Maynooth of Emmett Buildings in Dublin 8, 90% of all residents who responded to the survey reported they have one of the following issues: mould, old/faulty windows, difficulty affording energy costs, their heating system does not function properly and/or insufficient insulation. This building is not an outlier, and serves as a prime example of similar situations faced by tenants in other complexes around the city and nationwide.

These interrelated issues of energy efficiency, ventilation, and heating combine to put pressure on people’s health, wellbeing, and finances. Overall, 900,000 people in Ireland are living in enforced deprivation, in part due to high housing and energy costs. However, tenants in private rental and social housing are much more likely to be facing energy poverty due to low energy efficiency, pumping more heat into their home to stay warm, and therefore receiving higher bills. It is best imagined as trying to constantly fill up a leaky bucket.

Ireland has one of the highest rates of excess winter deaths in the EU, many of which can be attributed to energy poverty and cold housing. Cold homes also impact our children the most. Children living in cold homes are over twice as likely to suffer from respiratory problems than those living in warm homes.

Not only this, but as we have long pointed out in Friends of the Earth through our work on heat and energy poverty, decarbonising the residential sector offers a major opportunity to tackle dirty, polluting fossil fuels and their associated emissions, as well as delivering a better standard of living for those most affected by high energy prices.

Design by: Iris Aghedo

As it stands tenants, both in social housing and the private rental sector, are locked out of upgrading their homes. For both private landlords and policy makers, there is little incentive to improve the conditions of housing that they do not live in. Despite the fact that the most common complaints regarding public housing conditions relate precisely to what we would call retrofitting - for example higher quality windows and doors, insulation, and upgraded heating systems - the state aims to retrofit only around 25% of social housing stock by 2030 and not necessarily prioritising the lowest quality housing and furthest behind first. Local authorities are also given funding by the central government on a purely annual basis, making it very difficult to plan ahead with long-term projects.

This creates a two-tier system of who is allowed to access warmer homes and contribute their part to the fight against climate catastrophe - wealthier homeowners can afford upgrades and avail of grants, while tenants are stuck paying higher bills in damp and cold homes, on top of increasingly high rents. This carries serious risks for generating buy-in for policies addressing the climate crisis.

There are challenges with retrofitting non-owner-occupied homes, challenges which have been exacerbated by the growing scale of the housing crisis over the last decade. Given the scale of the housing crisis it is often argued that imposing any minimum standards will reduce supply further by forcing landlords to flee the private market. Meanwhile, issues have emerged in regenerating public housing, such as the Pearse House development, where the Department of Housing has rejected plans from the City Council regarding its regeneration due to the loss of overall apartments after the proposed retrofit, a compromise that has had to be made due to the building’s architecture being a protected structure.

These arguments only hold sway because of decades of policy relying on the private market to provide housing and the managed decline of the state’s role in housing delivery and management. More people have been forced into the private rental market than ever, and scarcity of public housing in the scale of the housing crisis has meant that modernising complexes like Pearse House flats has proven controversial.

Source: Text from recent Community Action Tenants’ Union (CATU) leaflet

On Monday 12th of May, residents from a number of social housing estates across the city protested outside the regular Dublin City Council meeting to demand the council officials sit down and negotiate with them through their tenants’ union CATU Ireland. While complaints can be complex and varied - from transfer lists to council policies regarding successive tenancies, from common areas to overcrowding - some of the most common issues are regarding the previously mentioned mould, damp, and cold. These are issues that in the end can only be addressed by deep, structural renovations in the form of retrofitting.

So although at first glance some might wonder what a protest around social housing conditions has to do with the climate, I hope the above has made it clear. A core concept in our work in Friends of the Earth is climate justice, the idea that those who have done the least to cause the climate crisis are most affected by its impacts. Both globally and nationally, climate justice means that we need to make sure that action against fossil fuels is both fast and fair, and that those with the least agency to get off fossil fuels are not the worst impacted by increasing energy prices or extreme weather conditions. It means that the ability to live in safe, warm homes with clean air should not just be open to those who can afford it while the rest of us are left burning dirty oil or gas to keep our damp, leaky homes heated.

A key part of a climate justice approach is giving those most affected by the issues of an unjust transition the confidence and the tools to fight for better. For these reasons I hope you support the ongoing struggle by tenants across all types of accommodation to demand improvements in their living conditions and their fight for a fair regeneration or energy improvements. And as Anthony pointed out in the quote at the beginning of this article, people feel unheard and isolated unless they can come together. Organised tenants have won commitments on retrofitting recently, such as Davitt House in Dublin 12 which is in the process of installing new windows, doors, and insulation, and seeing energy bills plummet as a result. This can serve as a model for us all.

Friends of the Earth have 3 key demands on this nationally:

• Be more bolder where the state already owns the stock: 100% of social housing should be retrofitted by 2030, starting with the worst-performing homes, and providing greater and multi-annual funding for local authorities to ramp up their retrofit programmes.
• Don’t leave renters in the cold: Minimum energy efficiency standards for private rentals, targeting the worst performing first.
• Address the most leaky homes: Extend the Warmer Home Schemes to be accessible for HAP tenancies, on the condition of a long-term lease (5+ years) being offered to the tenant.