SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—On a Wednesday in late September, Amparo Vigil showed a contractor around the modest, three-story building she owns in San Francisco’s outer Mission District. The contractor—just one of a handful visiting the building that week—toured the top floor apartment, where Vigil lives with her grandchildren, and the two one-bedroom units she rents out on the second floor. He took a close look at the kitchens, the furnaces and the electrical paneling and used a drone to get a good view of the roof.

The building—which abuts another one Vigil’s sister and father own and out of which her family operates Puerto Alegre, one of a pair of popular Mission restaurants—is about to undergo a comprehensive renovation as one of three demonstration projects funded by the San Francisco Department of the Environment’s Healthy Resilient Homes Project.

“I know enough about climate change to know that things are getting worse, and that things have already gotten worse,” said Vigil, who has lived in the building for 28 years. Just a week earlier the city famous for its cold summers had nearly a week of 90-degree days.

Like a patient preparing for long-awaited surgery, Vigil was reticent about how the renovation project would unfold, but looking forward to feeling more prepared for the increasingly unpredictable climate.

The list of changes include a small solar panel array, heat pumps and other all-electric appliances, an EV charger and improved insulation. The estimated cost of taking the building off natural gas completely and making it more climate resilient will be more than $125,000, but Vigil won’t be left with the bill. It will instead be paid by People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights or PODER SF, a group whose name means “power” in Spanish that works to ensure that Mission residents have a voice in shaping policy related to housing, transportation and community development.

But PODER’s project also has a larger purpose than helping Vigil update her building. It’s designed to help advocates gauge the cost of decarbonizing low-income rental properties across the city and beyond as a group of environmental justice advocates prepare a larger plan to bring these kinds of changes to a population that has until now been mainly shut out of the clean energy transition.

In a city that looks little like it did 20 years ago, San Francisco’s outer Mission District neighborhood has remained a place for Latino families to live and work. Its central artery, 24th Street, runs past taquerias and locally-owned stores selling fresh produce and tortillas. On the Day of the Dead, it provides a route for a small, annual parade that winds its way through the neighborhood to a festival of altars where community members from across Latin America honor lost loved ones.

The fact that this neighborhood remains more or less intact after multiple waves of gentrification displaced one third of Latino Mission residents between 2000 and 2019 is no accident. It’s the result of thousands of hours of organizing by a network of community-based nonprofits that work to anchor the people to the neighborhood. And at the center of this constellation is PODER SF. 

In 2023 the group saw a long-time plan come to fruition when Casa Adelante, an affordable 143-unit all-electric apartment building was finally completed. PODER had been advocating for the project since it took over a parking lot with four other groups of housing advocates in 2000. 

Then, earlier this year, when PODER SF and a handful of other groups were invited by the Department of the Environment to launch the San Francisco Healthy Resilient Homes Demonstration Projects, Vigil put her name in the hat. A long-time member of PODER and life-long Mission resident, she treated her renters more like family than clients—keeping the rent below market rate and making it possible for one family to stay for decades. When another family moved out, she filled their space with a woman who had cared for Vigil’s mother in her final years, along with the caretaker’s husband and nephew. 

Knowing this about Vigil, and aware that the choice to maintain what urban planners call “naturally occurring low-income housing” can keep renovations out of financial reach, PODER chose her building. 

“Her home is there and her family members live there as well,” says Antonia Diaz, PODER’s organizational director. “Since we are aiming to have the retrofits covered 100 percent, there would not be any pass-through costs to the tenants.” 

Building electrification is central to both the state’s greenhouse gas reduction and air quality strategies. Electric appliances can run on renewable solar, wind and hydroelectric power, and are more efficient with energy than gas appliances.The Bay Area’s air district will soon require all broken furnaces and hot water heaters to be replaced by electric heat pumps, and California aims to install 6 million heat pumps in the next five years. San Francisco’s Climate Action Plan aims to specifically phase out natural gas in all buildings by 2040.

While some state and federal funding has been made available for low-income homeowners to decarbonize, not much has made it to renters or landlords. That’s beginning to change, but some environmental justice advocates are concerned that this next wave of building electrification—like other renovations—could raise property values and increase owner turnover, resulting in rising rents and tenant displacement in communities that have already been hit hard by the state’s housing crisis. The Poder SF demonstration project, and others like it, are an effort to head off that likelihood.

“There are concerns about ‘renovictions,’ there are concerns about cost pass-throughs, and so tenant protection is a really big, explicit focus for us,” said Benny Zank, building decarbonization coordinator at the San Francisco Environment Department. The department has created a Climate Equity Hub aimed at replacing gas-fired hot water heaters with heat pumps in low-income tenants’ homes in a range of neighborhoods, in addition to the demonstration projects. 

Decarbonization Without Displacement

Chelsea Kirk, a research and policy analyst at Strategic Action for a Just Economy (SAJE), a Los Angeles-based tenant’s rights nonprofit, points to other policy shifts that have put renters in danger of renovictions in the past. In LA, for instance, a seismic retrofit ordinance required landlords to upgrade 12,000 buildings to better prepare them for earthquakes. 

“We’ve seen several cases of tenants being evicted, harassed and subject to illegal and shoddy construction that has made their homes unsafe as a result of that ordinance,” said Kirk, who authored a 2023 report on tenant protections in building retrofits throughout California. “Property owners used that [ordinance] as a pretext to displace people, and so we’re worried it’s going to happen again but on a wider scale” with renovations to combat climate change. 

Renter protections for California tenants vary greatly by city, but the SAJE report points out that every year more than half a million renters in the state receive eviction notices.

“Many cities allow evictions when the landlord wishes to move in, repurpose, or renovate the property or unit,” the SAJE report reads. “Decarbonization work that leads to rent increases that low-income households cannot afford or to buildings that are unsafe for tenants to live in, even temporarily, will trigger more evictions.”

Kirk said SAJE wants to see preventative policies passed to better protect renters.

Poder SF had a hunch that it was possible to electrify a range of affordable housing locations in ways that would benefit both the landlord and their tenants. The group sees the demonstration project at Vigil’s building as a trial run for the state’s $500 million Equitable Building Decarbonization Program (EBD), which will roll out in 2025 and scale up in neighborhoods like the Mission.

PODER SF was one of a handful of groups that worked to ensure that the state’s upcoming EBD included limitations on rent increases for five years for small buildings and 10 years for larger buildings. The EBD program also requires that property owners commit in writing that building retrofits done through that program can’t be the basis for just cause eviction. 

“It remains to be seen how well those are enforced, but it’s still really promising to see,” said Sneha Ayyagari of the climate justice-focused nonprofit Greenlining Institute, another group that advocated for inclusion of renter protections in the program. The question of enforcement is a big one, especially in the case of large corporate landlords, who are more likely to be beholden to investors than tenants.

San Francisco is known for having relatively strong protections for renters, but that doesn’t make it immune to the problems of displacement and gentrification, said Antonio Diaz, organizational director at Poder SF. Having to leave a rental unit during a renovation and look for housing in an expensive market for an extended period can leave working-class tenants in precarious situations that often push them out of the city, he said.

“Those of us working on building decarbonization from an equity perspective recognize that unless housing is a fundamental right and not a commodity for building owners to extract value from the land and tenants, vulnerable renters will be in precarious living conditions,” added Diaz. 

Cutting the Cost of Electrification and Electricity Bills

Building decarbonization is also shining a light on the lack of ongoing investment in low-income housing throughout the state. 

“You’re coming around talking about replacing expensive appliances, but a lot of us need to upgrade basic weatherization,” said Michelle Pierce, executive director at Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates—another group working on a pilot project with SF Environment Department. “Many of our city’s buildings are 100 years old or older, so you’re going to go in there, ready to do this, and the foundation is crumbling. Then you’re looking at a $200,000 install, as opposed to a $10,000 job.”

In one recent case Pierce said what was supposed to be a simple hot water heater installation took three times longer than scheduled because the building required new pipes to accommodate the appliance.

Energy costs for low-income tenants are also a significant focus of programs aiming to make the energy transition more just. 

Last year, Diaz and Christine Selig, a long-time Mission resident and member of the PODER SF advisory board who worked closely on the demonstration project, co-wrote a white paper with the Natural Resource Defense Counsel (NRDC), Physicians for Social Responsibility and several other groups about the need for an equitable transition to residential electrification. “Despite using less energy on average per household, lower-income communities and communities of color spend disproportionately more on their monthly energy bills than do wealthier households,” they wrote. The median energy burden of low-income households is three times higher than other households. Despite this fact, most decarbonization programs fail to “meaningfully engage communities in program design processes, decision-making, and implementation,” they added.

In San Francisco, those same communities are increasingly vulnerable to extreme heat and wildfire smoke because many of the city’s aging buildings don’t have central heating or HVAC systems. Vigil’s building, for instance, has neither. The addition of heat pump mini splits, which provide both heating and air conditioning, will be a major improvement.

“If we have one unbearably hot day, we open the windows, and we’re surviving,” said Vigil. “If we have two hot days, we’re kind of suffocating in it. And by day three, we’re like, ‘OK, we’ve got to get out. It’s not gonna work.’”

Investing in improved insulation is key, said Selig. Despite the added efficiency, one danger of simply switching gas for electric is that the latter costs a great deal more in the Bay Area. “When you simply electrify a low-income home, the electrical bill can go up a lot,” said Selig. The addition of solar panels alongside improved insulation is the best way to ensure that doesn’t happen, she said.

“There is little comprehensive data on the true cost of a whole-home approach to decarbonization because it tends to be so cost prohibitive,” said Selig. For that reason, it hasn’t been done for low-income households.

In addition to the $75,000 Poder’s demonstration project in Vigil’s building has received from two separate city programs, she said they’re hoping to stack several other state and federal incentives and rebates to cover the rest of the cost.

Fueling Community Buy In

Despite what may seem like an obvious windfall for Vigil and her tenants, home electrification isn’t always an easy sell for landlords or tenants, says Pierce, with Bay View Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA). The organization chose to work with a community center known for its kitchen rentals for a demonstration project focused on exposing more people to induction cooking. The group has also been conducting a study of residents in the majority-Black Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhoods to get a sense of how familiar they are with the concept of building decarbonization.

“One of the things that we’ve had to explain to government officials is that for our communities, a gas stove is the kind of luxury item that it can take a family a generation to own. So people are hesitant to have it taken away,” said Pierce. She added that many residents they have polled associate electric appliances with fires and electrocution. “We find ourselves explaining that this newer stuff that we’re talking about is less likely to catch on fire than a conventional electric stove or a gas stove,” she added. “These sentiments are fixed in the culture. So we have a lot of educating to do.” 

In the next phase of the work, Poder SF, BVHPCA and the national nonprofit Emerald Cities Collaborative, which is decarbonizing and retrofitting an affordable deed-restricted building as the city’s third demonstration project, hope to start planning for a broader effort to electrify all the city’s under-resourced eastern neighborhoods. Doing so would require an expensive transformer upgrade in the area and an education campaign about the values of disconnecting from the gas infrastructure. 

It won’t happen fast, but advocates say that large-scale decarbonization—and the emissions reductions it promises—is only possible if low-income households are included in the plan.

“If you look at the population of California, a very high percentage of people live in multifamily buildings and a very high percentage are rent-burdened,” said the Greenlining Institute’s Sneha. “So, if you’re truly going to address the problem, you need to figure out equitable pathways to do so.”

Selig echoed that sentiment. “People say, ‘How can we put all this money into transforming building stock?’ It’s going to be a very expensive project, but it does create good jobs, and it builds resiliency—and it’s not as expensive as climate catastrophes.” 

Kelechukwu Ogu contributed reporting.

This story was produced with support from the Climate Equity Reporting Project at Berkeley Journalism.