Natural Resources Defense Council Shares Perspectives Article Highlighting Staff Member Experiences Pursuing Housing Justice and Energy Affordability

By Julie Walker, NLIHC Project Manager, Opportunity Starts at Home 

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an Opportunity Starts at Home (OSAH) Steering Committee member, shared a recent perspectives article, “My Quest for Energy Affordability and Housing Justice is Both Personal and Professional,” that details the experiences of Jasmine Valdovinos, NRDC Climate & Energy Advocacy associate, navigating housing and energy assistance programs with her family in Oakland, California. As renters with low-income, her family faced barriers to accessing complicated energy affordability, housing, and weatherization assistance programs. Jasmine connects these experiences to the national issue of exclusion of the most vulnerable families from programs meant to serve them, and recommends program reforms to make them more flexible, accessible to renters, and trauma informed. She also recommends the creation of community-based navigation and advocacy systems to support residents in completing applications and communicating with government agencies. 

Jasmine describes her family’s rental home in Oakland, California as one that holds generations of family traditions and memories but also comes with an array of structural issues. The author describes her family’s challenges with unfinished repairs, mold, electrical issues, pests, insufficient insulation, no ventilation, minimal weatherproofing, and unsafe temperatures without central heating and cooling. These physical conditions impact her family’s health and daily functioning. Energy bills for the house are consistently high, and information about energy assistance programs was not readily available. Programs also did not provide sufficient support in Spanish for her family. The programs they did receive assistance from did not offer enough relief, so Jasmine pursued additional options, including Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), and the Energy Savings Assistance Program (ESA), to further reduce the home’s energy bills and improve structural conditions. Researching these programs revealed barriers including requiring landlord permission, turning many applicants away due to limited funding, or promising long delays. Barriers faced by Jasmine’s family reflect a larger system that does not adequately provide for families with the lowest incomes, particularly immigrant and multi-generational households.   

In her role at NRDC, Jasmine draws from her research on energy burdens and housing resilience and her personal experiences to advocate for housing justice and climate equity. While this brings a personal drive to her work, it also means addressing family crises in the moment and comes with emotional costs. As her family’s challenges are shared by many families with low-incomes, Jasmine recommends two key shifts to increase households’ access to housing and energy assistance programs. The first, creating community-based navigation and advocacy systems, would fund community organizations to provide direct and sustained support to residents to complete applications in their preferred language, advocate with landlords, and interface with government agencies. The second recommendation is to make assistance programs more accessible to renters by not requiring landlord approval, making the application process more streamlined and easier to understand, and accounting for the emotional and material hardships that households with low incomes face.  

Read the article here.