National Church Residences community receives almost $3 million for green energy, climate resilience upgrades - McKnight's Senior Living
National Church Residences community receives almost $3 million for green energy, climate resilience upgrades - McKnight's Senior Living
A National Church Residences affordable senior housing community in Indiana will receive $2.7 million in federal grant funding to support clean energy and climate resilience upgrades.
The Village at White River in Anderson, IN, is the only Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly community among the 10 multifamily properties announced to receive some of $73.5 million in new loans and grants as part of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Green and Resilient Retrofit Program. The community will use its $2.7 million in grant funding to upgrade its 44 affordable senior housing units.
“This funding allows for substantial upgrades to the aging structure, as well as providing an opportunity to reduce the utility burden on residents and improve the efficiency of the building as it bears more pressures from the effects of climate change,” Senior Project Leader Stephanie Rhodes told McKnight’s Senior Living. “We are excited to continue to partner with HUD on this innovative solution for supporting the preservation of our aging, subsidized affordable housing stock.”
This is the second GRRP funding award for National Church Residences. Last fall, its Spring Valley Crossing affordable senior housing community in Kalamazoo, MI, received $3.36 million in loans in the first round of funding in the program’s Leading Edge category, which funds retrofit activities to achieve zero energy retrofits and an advanced green certification. HumanGood also had three of its affordable senior housing communities receive $26.48 million in grants in the first round of funding.
Last week’s award announcement was the second set of awards under the Leading Edge category.
The HUD GRRP program supports extensive energy efficiency and climate resilience renovations for low-income residents under the Inflation Reduction Act. The GRRP received more than $800 million in grant and loan subsidy funding, and $4 billion in loan commitments for efficiency and resiliency improvements.
To date, HUD has made more than $368 million in GRRP awards to support renovations at 84 multifamily properties that will improve more than 9,000 homes for very low-income households, older adults and people with disabilities. The investments will reduce carbon emissions, make homes more resilient to extreme weather events, and enable those priorities to more quickly recover from such events.
Through the GRRP, funds are available to help Section 202 and other multifamily housing owners improve energy or water efficiency; enhance indoor air quality or sustainability; and implement the use of zero-emission electricity generation, low-emission building materials and energy storage or building electrification strategies.
Katie Smith Sloan, president and CEO of LeadingAge, previously called the GRRP funding disbursement “a tremendous step forward toward ensuring that low-income older adults are safe and protected as threats from climate change escalate.”
GRRP is the first HUD program that simultaneously invests in energy and water efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions reductions, clean-energy generation and climate resilience strategies in multifamily housing, according to HUD.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”