Housing Justice and Climate Adaptation

As cities around the world are taking bolder action to mitigate and adapt to climate change, a growing body of literature has emerged highlighting the potential for maladaptation when climate governance fails to account for existing social, economic and environmental inequities.  In Los Angeles, against the backdrop of an ever worsening housing crisis, recent efforts to develop building decarbonization policies has surfaced concerns about the potential impacts of these policies for low-income tenants and homeowners. In collaboration with colleagues in the UCLA Department of Sociology, I am mapping the ecosystem of actors involved in building decarbonization policymaking in Los Angeles to reveal how these simultaneous crises (climate and housing) are being understood and managed in relation to one another. 

Questions

• How are issues of housing justice being impacted by ongoing policy decisions made in response to climate change threats? 

• What possibilities exist for rethinking unjust housing policy and property rights regimes in the context of climate change adaptation? 

• How are community members participating in designing, implementing, and monitoring adaptation projects? 

Publications

French, E. (2022). Report on equitable building decarbonization: Equity focused policy recommendations for the City of Los Angeles. Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, City of Los Angeles.