Safe Housing is a Human RightResidential building code improvements are vital to addressing climate change and protecting people from harmful climate conditions. However, such improvements can place undo burden on low-income homeowners, increase evictions, harassment, rent burden, and further displacement of working-class people if the right policies are not in place.
In collaboration with LISC Phoenix, InSite’s goal is to develop a framework to center low-income homeowners to offer support and protections into Arizona + New Mexico’s residential building code efforts so as not to worsen the affordable housing crises in the Southwest, while simultaneously improving living conditions in climate impacted environments. We are particularly interested in building with Native communities and low-come homeowners to ensure that building upgrades are affordable and culturally specific. Our goal is equitable community engagement that centers the knowledge and expertise of Indigenous, Black and people of color, we also believe that policy and advocacy are a part of this engagement. Our desire is to create culturally specific performance building codes that, 1) can attend to the histories of racism and displacement, 2) develop workshops that center Indigenous knowledge and are joyful and informative for families to participate share knowledge, 3) advocate for political solutions to safeguard vulnerable people, 4) and eliminate the undue financial burden inadvertently caused by the implementation of residential building energy, performance standards, reach codes, and incentive programs. |