Data-based and Decarbonizing Housing Programs for the Lower Income in Latin America

Nicolás Maggio

CEO at Weatherizers Without Borders and SPURS Fellow at MIT

December 1, 2023

This article presents a series of questions about housing, decarbonization, and data-based public policies in Latin America, inviting readers to look for possible answers in their own countries and contexts. 

The first question to consider when thinking of improving a country or region’s housing situation is what the problem looks like. This will tell us what needs to be done, and in which proportions. In a given context, the housing problem (or housing deficit) can be divided into qualitative needs, which are existing homes that need improvements, and quantitative needs, which are new homes that need to be built. In Latin America, the housing deficit is 94% qualitative and only 6% quantitative, which translates into over 43 million non-performing homes to be improved. If governments were to design and implement data-based housing public policies, these policies would follow those percentages in terms of resources invested, workforce, administrative bureaucracy, and other aspects. However, in Latin America public resources are invested in housing in a very different way: on average, national governments in the region invest 90% of their housing resources into building new homes, and only 10% is invested in the 94% of homes that need improvement. 

While much could be written on this data point alone, this piece focuses on how feasible it would be to implement home improvement public policies that would allow for over 43 million homes to be retrofitted. Considering whether other countries or regions have experienced the same challenge, and if there is any previous experience where solutions have been implemented, is the next step.

Luckily, the answer is a clear “yes”: as a first example, the United States has been implementing one of the largest lower-income housing improvement programs in the world since 1976. The Weatherization Assistance Program, run by the Department of Energy has now been implemented in all fifty states. France has had a housing improvement agency called l’Anah for over seventy years, and has improved 1.5+ million homes since 2022 through the France Rénov program. These two examples of government-funded national public policies addressing the qualitative housing deficit challenge both have an additional component that is important to note: they focus on making existing homes more sustainable, which means making homes more energy efficient, healthier, safer, and more comfortable for inhabitants. 

So data clearly shows it is feasible to address the qualitative housing deficit. Now, do the results make it a good public investment? Again, the answer is clearly “yes”. First, the largest portion of people affected by the qualitative housing deficit are lower-income populations. From the perspective of universal access to human rights, including the right to housing, they must not be left behind. Second, the two programs in the U. S. and France provide evidence of how improving the performance of existing homes makes them healthier (thereby saving healthcare costs both for families and the state) and safer (with the same cost savings for both). These programs also demonstrate how sustainable home improvement creates and supports green jobs and local economies (again, with both public and private benefits), and how homes become more energy efficient. This last result benefits families fighting energy poverty as well as governments reducing consumption of subsidized energies and also has huge implications for climate change mitigation. 

So that leads us to the final question to consider: is there potential for Latin American governments to increase their commitment to fighting climate change and addressing climate emergencies through their housing public policies? The answer is again a clear “yes”, and we know “the greenest building is…one that is already built." In Latin America, a broad estimation shows that one-third of energy consumption is from buildings, the largest part of which are residential buildings (many lower-income housing that need to be improved). The previously mentioned weatherization/sustainable home improvement programs produce energy savings of up to 40% per home, which means that each of those homes reduces the emission of thousands of tons of carbon over their remaining lifespan. So imagine the huge positive health, safety, economic, and climate impacts of 43+ million homes being decarbonized, and try to answer together our last question: how do we make it happen?