November 11, 2021

Ithaca’s common council voted unanimously to electrify and decarbonize buildings as part of the Green New Deal the city approved in 2019. The initiative is projected to save 160,000 tons of carbon dioxide by retrofitting about 6,000 homes and buildings. The city is planning to achieve full building decarbonization by 2030 and have the first phase done in the next three years. “We are being very aggressive. I’m very excited but, at the same time, it’s a lot of work ahead,” said Luis Aguirre-Torres, Ithaca’s director of sustainability.

New data revealed that more than 101,000 public school students in New York City lacked permanent housing during the 2020–21 school year. Around 28,000 students learned from shelters, 65,000 children learned while “doubled up” in unstable housing, sharing rooms with family and friends, and another 3,860 children lived in parks, cars, or abandoned buildings. Advocates are calling on the city to hire more shelter employees to help families navigate the school system and to create an emergency network of city agencies to address barriers to education.

Palo Alto’s average monthly rent has increased 50 percent over the past decade, and today, nearly three-quarters of renters are cost burdened. As housing costs continue increasing, the city is considering new initiatives to support renters, such as eviction restrictions, rent caps, and adopting a “fair chance” ordinance that limits landlords’ ability to ask about applicants’ criminal history. “I think that the reality is that in Palo Alto, they use these increases in rent to dislocate people and this is how you end up with people losing their homes all the time,” said commissioner Adriana Eberle.

Virginia Beach’s Housing Choice Voucher Program will accept applications for the first time in nearly a decade. The program closed applications in 2012 after 14,000 applications were submitted. New applicants will be selected from a waiting list determined by local preferences and random lottery. Vouchers and funding are limited, so only a share of applicants will receive immediate assistance. “A lot of our participants are either elderly or disabled, so they really don’t have any options other than to have public assistance in order to live on their own,” said David Grigsby, Virginia Beach’s administrator of rental housing programs.