The Central New York Community Foundation is excited to join Home HeadQuarters, the City of Syracuse, Onondaga County and multiple community partners to help launch a new sustainable homes program in Syracuse. The initiative recently received a jump-start with a $1,000,000 grant from the Office of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman. The Community Foundation is assisting this effort with funding, convening and facilitation support. Read more about this exciting venture to help low-income families lower their energy bills and eliminate serious home health and safety hazards in the press release below.
NEW YORK – Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced that he is teaming with the Rochester Area Community Foundation and Home HeadQuarters, Inc. in Syracuse to launch a $2 million sustainable homes program. The program will help low-income families lower their energy bills and eliminate serious home health and safety hazards in older homes. The program is funded with money from a $9.5 million court-ordered settlement with American Electric Power (AEP), the largest U.S. power company, over violations of the federal Clean Air Act.
The $2 Million investment will create sustainable homes programs in both Rochester and Syracuse that are modelled on the highly-successful Buffalo Green and Healthy Homes Initiative (BGHHI). The Buffalo initiative is implemented by the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo with partial funding from the Attorney General’s office. That initiative has helped more than 379 of Buffalo’s neediest families to lower their energy bills and eliminate serious home health and safety hazards in older homes.
As with the Buffalo program, the monies provided by the Attorney General’s office from the American Electric Power settlement will be used by Rochester Area Community Foundation and Home HeadQuarters, and their implementing partners, to directly fund energy efficiency and weatherization improvements in targeted owner-occupied housing, while serving as a catalyst to attract parallel funding for health and safety improvements such as lead poisoning intervention, asthma trigger reduction (reducing mold, dust and vermin infestation), and correction of home accident hazards.
Much of the housing stock in Rochester and Syracuse is aged. For example, in Syracuse, more than 50% of the housing units were built before 1939 and, in some of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods, this rate rises to almost 90%. In Rochester, more than 60% of the housing stock was built prior to 1940.
Both cities have also faced chronic economic challenges, leading to low incomes and poverty. In Rochester, the median household income is 42% lower than the national average. In Syracuse, 30% of the population — and 60% of children — live below the national poverty level. The combination of aged housing stock and economic distress results in a deterioration of housing and unaddressed home energy efficiency, health and safety needs within both cities low-income communities.
The Rochester Area Community Foundation is a Rochester-based independent not-for-profit regional community foundation that works to improve quality of life by evaluating and addressing community issues, promoting responsible philanthropy, and connecting donors to the community’s critical needs in an eight‐county service area, centered in Monroe County and the City of Rochester, that also includes Genesee, Livingston, Ontario, Orleans, Seneca, Wayne, and Yates counties.
Home HeadQuarters, Inc. is a Syracuse-based independent not-for-profit housing and community development organization. Home HeadQuarters is one of the largest housing and neighborhood revitalization organizations in Central New York as well as one of the largest regional providers of affordable home improvement loans and grants for homeowners in Central and Upstate New York.
The Buffalo Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, which the Attorney General’s office helped create in 2010, is administered by the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo. The key innovation of the Buffalo program, which will be replicated in Rochester and Syracuse , is its use of “resource-braiding” to attract funding from a range of governmental and philanthropic sources. With additional resources, money is coordinated and focused on “whole-home” remedies. This approach has allowed the program to address the full range of energy efficiency and weatherization improvements, as well as health, and safety needs of homeowners through single, comprehensive interventions.
• Received numerous awards and recognitions, including Buffalo’s designation as the 15th national Green and Health Homes Initiative site by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
With additional financial support of $193,000 from Attorney General Schneiderman provided in 2013, the Buffalo program has worked to reduce communication and cultural barriers that prevent Nepali and Burmese refugees – groups with the highest rates of homeownership among Buffalo’s resettled political refugees community – from fully accessing the initiative. To date, the “New Americans Project” has reached over 1,000 members of Nepali and Burmese refugee community.
This matter is being handled for Attorney General Schneiderman by Assistant Attorney General Jane Cameron and Policy Advisor Peter C. Washburn of the Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Bureau, with support from Deputy Bureau Chief Monica Wagner, Bureau Chief Lemuel M. Srolovic, Executive Deputy Attorney General for Social Justice Alvin Bragg, and First Deputy for Affirmative Litigation Janet Sabel.