No. 144: Green Affordable Housing

I often say the world is far more complicated than people give it credit for, and many of the social impact issues we discuss are tangential to each other, if not deeply interwoven. This week, we're diving into the intersection of housing policy and climate change with a case study on Vienna, Austria, whose approach to city-subsidized housing is inspiring American policymakers at home.

If you are interested in social impact product development, be sure to check out the Social Innovation Design program I'm sharing as this week's resource. The early application deadline is a little over a week away. I also have a great Director of Product role to match, alongside a quick primer on virtual power plants. You might be participating in one and not even know it – that was one of my own realizations this week.

~ Greg

What we're reading

Cities across America are looking to Vienna's innovative public housing program as a blueprint for tackling two crises at once: the affordable housing shortage and climate change. (NPR)

• Half of Vienna's residents live in subsidized "social" housing that costs around $700 monthly for a one-bedroom apartment – nowhere near what we pay for rent in the United States. Because the government has a significant interest in local housing, they can use it to further other initiatives.
  • For example, housing developers compete to build city-subsidized housing, and Vienna gives additional consideration to designs that are climate-friendly. As a result, they've encouraged adoption of geothermal energy and solar panels, and homes are installed with heat pumps.
  • This is easier to do with new designs, but this philosophy extends to retrofitting as well. In our cities, one of the reasons we struggle to build new housing is due to the lack of available land, so I'm especially interested in the retrofit approach.
• Speaking of American cities, they're starting to take notes from Vienna. Policymakers from Chicago, Seattle, Denver, and others traveled to Vienna last year to learn more about this combined approach to affordable housing and climate change.
  • Chicago has committed $135 million toward creating similar climate-friendly public housing, for example.
  • And under the Biden administration, the federal government created a $1 billion program to retrofit older housing to be more energy efficient and climate resilient.
• I like this approach a lot, but I can imagine how challenging it would be to get the American public on board with the idea of subsidized housing. It comes with a stigma here that simply isn't present when half of a city like Vienna lives in city-subsidized housing.
  • That said, this model demonstrates how municipal governments could use housing policy as a powerful tool for emissions reduction and stabilize our lower- and middle-class families. Sign me up.

Job of the week

It's a good week when I learn something new, and the featured job this week gave me a new perspective on how utilities take advantage of renewable energy. I tend to focus on big solar installations, power plants, and other centralized resources, but utilities integrate with VPPs as well – virtual power plants – that are collections of smaller energy resources like solar panels, backup batteries, electric vehicles, and IoT devices.

I came across this indirectly in my own home when an installer implied that my utility could interface with my smart thermostat, but it makes sense in the VPP context: there is software designed to take advantage of these distributed energy resources to lower the impact on the grid, particularly during peak usage. Infrastructure and software? I know, we're in the Greg sweet spot here, but I think you're going to like this company, too.

The company in question is EnergyHub. They work with utilities to build virtual power plants, and they're looking for an experienced Director of Product to develop product strategy and lead a team of software product managers. The role is remote and pays rather well. That's true of most of the roles on their career page if you're looking for a different kind of opportunity.

Community roundup

• Japanese scientists have developed a new plastic that dissolves in soil and salt water and are working on coatings that would allow it to be used for commercial purposes. (The Independent)
• AES has completed the first half of the biggest solar and storage installation in the United States, which is set to provide 2 GW of power – enough to power 467,000 homes annually. (Electrek)
  • Although it helps to couch the power output in terms of homes, this installation is primarily designed to provide data centers with clean power. They have a 15-year contract with Amazon, for example.
• A growing number of companies are turning to geoengineering to reduce ocean acidification and sell the resulting carbon credits. (The Guardian)
  • Oceans are getting more acidic as they absorb excess atmospheric carbon. The idea is to add alkaline materials to the oceans to counteract acidification, but doing so could create pollutants and disrupt ecosystems.
  • One concern I have about this industry in general – carbon removal – is whether it gets used as a crutch instead of reducing our emissions. We seem to be on a path to normalize high emissions as long as we can capture and dispose of them later.
• The FDA approved lab-grown salmon from a company called Wildtype, adding to a growing number of lab-grown meat products on the market. (Popular Science)
  • It's meant to be eaten raw, so keep an eye out for it at your local sushi restaurant. Crab has imitation "krab". What should we call imitation salmon?

Civic corner

• The Miccosukee Tribe is partnering with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation on a conservation project that aims to connect 18 million acres of public and private lands to preserve wildlife. (The Guardian)
  • One of the immediate challenges is funding: federal and state funding sources are at risk, and they'll need to raise additional money from other sources. Lawmakers are reevaluating a $2 billion budget for conservation that they passed in 2021.
• Federal officials recommended Endangered Species Act protections for the pangolin, which is native to Africa and Asia and considered the most heavily-trafficked animals in the world. (NYT)
  • You may remember from No. 141: Ecosystem Protections that the federal government is looking to rewrite its understanding of the ESA to reduce habitat protections, so this story caught my eye. As a foreign animal, receiving endangered protections means new prohibitions on import and export activity as well as the potential for financial assistance for conservation efforts.
• Recently, Congress revoked California's clean air waivers that allowed the state to set more stringent emissions standards. Those waivers gave California the ability to prohibit the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035, which is now in jeopardy. (Inside Climate News)
  • California has since filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to reinstate its vehicle emissions standards, and 10 additional attorneys general have signed on.
  • I'm curious to see how the industry itself responds over the next couple of years. One of the things we've seen with policymaking in general is that companies want a stable regulatory environment – they're making significant investments that take years, if not decades, to generate a sufficient return.
  • If you're an automaker and you think the next administration could reinstate California's waivers, you wouldn't want to roll back your EV investments. Keep an eye on their vehicle portfolios and whether they change course in the next few years.
• If you visit one of our national parks this summer, you may notice new signs. The Department of the Interior has asked the National Park Service to post signs soliciting feedback from visitors on any park content that paints America in a negative light. (NPR)
  • This has echoes of similar behavior at the Smithsonian and NASA, where the government is responding to the DEI executive order by removing mentions of women and people of color.

Hot job opportunities

• Enterprise Account Manager – Afresh – Remote
• Marketing Operations Specialist – Uplight – Denver, CO or Boston, MA
• Scrum Master – Xylem – Boise, ID
• Clean Grid Campaign Director – Oregon Environmental Council – Portland, OR
• Recruiting Lead – Lemonade – New York, NY
• Territory Sales Manager – Unirac – Chicago, IL
• Customer Care Representative – Ampion – Boston, MA
• Solutions Marketing Manager – Posit – Remote
• Senior Software Engineer – Opus – Remote
• Sr. Director of Corporate Development – Oklo – Remote

Resource of the week

I keep finding unique educational opportunities in the social impact space, and the one this week ought to speak to the product manager and designer types in a big way.

The University of Pennsylvania offers an Executive Program in Social Innovation Design that merges design thinking and social impact strategy. Initially, the program helps you explore your personal passions and challenges that need to be addressed in the world. Then they teach you human-centered design tools to help you design solutions to those challenges. This culminates in a project of your choosing where you get to put those skills into practice.

I could see this being a great opportunity if you are interested in product development or entrepreneurship in a social impact context. The time commitment is minimal at 4 to 6 hours per week, though there's an in-person component in October so you can network and prepare for the studio project. The main downside is the cost: we're talking about college education after all, and tuition is $4,200 for seven months of instruction.

If you're interested in the program, be sure to check it out this week. The early application deadline is June 29th.

Test your knowledge

Last week I quizzed you on the most expensive hurricane in U.S. history. Recent storms have been consistently expensive: we've had at least one storm with costs exceeding $1 billion for the past nine years. This is dwarfed by the most impactful storms, however, and the most expensive was Katrina.

Katrina made landfall in 2005, and costs were $125 billion. If you put that in 2025 dollars, it exceeds $200 billion. As we start to see the federal government pull out of the disaster recovery business, it's worth reflecting on how the states can afford something like this. In the southeast, it may be a hurricane; out west, it may be wildfires or earthquakes. How do we build resilience for when disaster strikes?

For this week, we're turning our attention to Pell Grants. These are currently a subject of debate as part of the big tax bill working its way through Congress, and they provide financial aid to roughly 30% of undergraduate students.

Pell Grants were named after a U.S. Senator who championed education access. What state did Senator Claiborne Pell represent?

Email me your guess, and I'll send one lucky winner a couple of One Work stickers!

It's trip time again, and I am excited to stroll through Golden Gate Park for the first time in 20 years. I need to walk off a Ghirardelli visit somehow, right?