Racial inequality in housing, a major reason for the growing wealth gap between white people and Black people has deep roots in the United States. Through discriminatory federal, state, and local policies entrenched for over a century, Black people have systematically been denied equal access to homeownership or high-quality rental housing, both private and government-subsidized. Tragically, this pattern of racial exclusion and segregation in housing—as well as in lending and real estate—continues to the present day despite the passage of equal housing laws such as the federal Fair Housing Act.
The current lack of affordable housing in the U.S. is just the latest manifestation of this ongoing crisis, and it bites across all low to medium socioeconomic levels. Especially hard hit are the 10.8 million extremely low-income families lacking 7 million affordable homes in all states and major cities. The majority of these families are Black with 70% of them paying 50% or more of their income on rent. Today in America there is no place where a full-time worker earning minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom apartment.
As a partial response to remedy these racial injustices in housing, President Biden signed Executive Order 14008 in 2021 that established the creation of the Justice40 Initiative which mandates that 40% of the “overall benefits” of “certain federal investments…flow to disadvantaged communities.” The seven designated areas of J40 are:
- Climate change
- Clean energy and energy efficiency
- Clean transit
- Affordable and sustainable housing
- Training and workforce development
- Remediation and reduction of legacy pollution
- Development of critical clean water infrastructure
In this article, we focus on the Justice40 Initiative and affordable housing.
What is the Justice40 Initiative?
The Justice40 Initiative (J40) proposed by the Biden Administration is intended as the underlying framework of the federal government offering a lens by which all policy and funds must address the climate crisis. J40 is meant to institutionalize justice in American society by ensuring that 40% of certain federal funds benefit disadvantaged communities.
At the heart of J40 is environmental justice. As Vice President Kamala Harris said in 2021 while announcing the formation of the White House Environmental Justice Council which works to advise on J40 Initiatives: “The President and I are committed to addressing environmental justice and environmental injustice in everything we do. Because we know we cannot achieve health justice, economic justice, racial justice or educational justice without environmental justice.”
Currently, over 500 new and existing federal programs administered by 16 federal agencies fall under J40. Most will use funds from the $891 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, formally called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).
What are “disadvantaged communities” in the Justice40 Initiative?
In the Justice40 Initiative (J40), disadvantaged communities are those that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution while underinvested in housing, transportation, water and wastewater
infrastructure, and health care. A community qualifies as “disadvantaged” if the census tract is above the threshold for one or more environmental or climate indicators and the tract is above the threshold for the socioeconomic indicators.
To identify these communities, experts developed the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). The tool takes into account the following factors:
- Low income, high and/or persistent poverty
- High unemployment and underemployment
- Racial and ethnic residential segregation, particularly where the segregation stems from discrimination by government entities
- Linguistic isolation
- High housing cost burden and substandard housing
- Distressed neighborhoods
- High transportation cost burden and/or low transportation access
- Disproportionate environmental stressor burden and high cumulative impacts
- Limited water and sanitation access and affordability
- Disproportionate impacts from climate change
- High energy cost burden and low energy access
- Jobs lost through the energy transition
- Access to healthcare
Critics have pointed out that the Biden Administration did not directly include race as a criterion for guiding J40 funding decisions.
HUD grants and loans for Section 8 housing
The Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, a Justice40 Initiative, has awarded almost $1 billion to upgrade buildings for energy efficiency and renovate for climate resilience. The improvements will lower home energy costs as well for disadvantaged families. So far, this program has installed home insulation, energy-efficient windows, electric heat pumps, and, in some cases, rooftop solar in roughly 2,000 multifamily, Section 8 homes occupied by low-income Americans in 39 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
HHS Federal Real Property Assistance Program
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced 13 of its programs for inclusion in the Justice40 Initiative (J40) in June 2022. One of them is the Federal Real Property Assistance Program. Under this program, certain federal surplus real property may be transferred to eligible organizations for homeless assistance purposes only at a discount or for free. Approved uses include homeless shelters, transitional housing, and permanent housing with and without supportive services. Interested parties must apply for this program.
Republican response to the Justice40 Initiative
The future of the remaining Justice40 funds depends on the results of the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate all or most of the remaining funds of the IRA climate law calling it a “waste” of money. At the same time, many House Republicans want to retain certain IRA-related tax credits that benefit their states’ economies.
Sixteen Republican governors, although they would like to be recipients of federal funds for infrastructure improvements in their states as secured by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), requested in a 2022 letter that the Biden Administration eliminate Justice40 benchmarks. They wrote: “Excessive consideration of equity, union memberships, or climate as lenses to view suitable projects would be counterproductive. Your administration should not attempt to push a social agenda…”
The current state of the Justice40 Initiative
The nonprofit Resources for the Future has assembled the most comprehensive report on the implementation of the Justice40 Initiative (J40) to date. However, it does not include a balance sheet of the total amount of federal funding allocated or approved to date for J40 probably because that information is not yet readily available.
They state in their Report: “Although we obtained FY2023 budget numbers for many programs on the covered programs list, obtaining that information for all programs was beyond our scope. Therefore, although it would be useful to view the status of Justice40 spending in addition to the number of programs, that analysis is left to future research.”
The future of the Justice40 Initiative
As indicated above, the Justice40 Initiative is destined to end in a second Trump Administration.
Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, will likely retain the J40 Initiative. As a district attorney in California, Harris launched one of the country’s first environmental justice units, stating “crimes against the environment are crimes against communities, people who are often poor and disenfranchised.”
As a U.S. senator, Harris, along with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, introduced the Climate Equity Act of 2020 aimed at low-income communities burdened by pollution and climate change disasters. Later as vice president, she worked to include $15 billion in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for lead pipe replacement in marginalized communities.
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