Neighborhood-Scale Building Decarbonization: A Toolkit for Advocates and Implementers

The dominant approach to decarbonizing homes today is for individual building owners to switch to electric appliances and, in some cases, install solar. In reality, this ad-hoc strategy has led to wealthier homeowners electrifying their homes and pulling themselves off an aging gas grid, leaving low-income families and renters behind with polluting appliances and high gas bills. 

Neighborhood-scale building decarbonization presents an exciting alternative: shifting the unit of building decarbonization from the building to the block, from the individual to the community. 

By approaching decarbonization at the scale of a block or a neighborhood, all residents in the chosen geography benefit and per-home project costs can decrease through economies of scale. Importantly, it also helps manage the gas transition and ensure that lower-income households are not stuck on aging gas infrastructure.

When done right, it can also offer an opportunity to go beyond simply installing electric appliances to also  address environmental toxins, improve energy efficiency, and install solar and battery storage. This approach lowers utility bills and creates healthy homes for all residents, regardless of whether they are rich or own their home. 

The concept of neighborhood-scale building decarbonization is new in the United States. Its scale also requires stronger coordination from advocates, with major potential positive outcomes in terms of efficiency and equity. In this toolkit, we outline how to kick-start a project and provide support on making key decisions: 

• High Roads Implementation: While neighborhood-scale building decarbonization has inherent traits that make it amenable to equitable decarbonization, implementation still has to be intentional in delivering those benefits. We provide a list of principles to ensure high roads implementation. 
• Project Phases: Neighborhood-scale projects can be thought of in four phases: laying the groundwork, organizing and design, implementation, and learning and evaluation. Each phase will require different stakeholders and expertise.
• Site Selection: There are three approaches to site selection for neighborhood-scale building decarbonization, each with their own benefits and drawbacks: starting with a specific anchor tenant, allowing blocks to self-nominate, or choosing sites based on gas decommissioning.
• Financing Pathways: Since neighborhood-scale building decarbonization is such a new strategy, it will require innovative and flexible finance pathways. We point to different pots of public funding and financing for projects.
• A Team to Win: Winning neighborhood-scale building decarbonization requires strong community organizing, including relationship building and collaboration between unlikely allies– from anchor tenants to lead community organizers. 

Neighborhood-scale building decarbonization has the potential to transform how we decarbonize building stock. Moving beyond a building-by-building approach allows for a more managed transition off gas infrastructure, provides an economy of scale to both drive down costs and increase labor coordination, and facilitates opportunities for households to decarbonize.