Book Description

In response to the predicted potential loss of nearly a million affordable rental homes in the United States, the MacArthur Foundation in 2000 launched a large philanthropic initiative called Window of Opportunity (WOO) to preserve privately owned affordable rental housing. By 2011, the foundation had learned from its WOO recipients and affiliates that improvements in energy efficiency (EE) could enable residential building energy costs to be lowered, improving cash flow and, by extension, the viability of multifamily affordable rental housing. As a consequence, the foundation decided to invest in energy efficiency. From 2012 to 2015, the MacArthur Foundation awarded 39 grants and loans totaling $27.5 million to promote the energy efficiency of multifamily affordable rental housing. Awardees for these grants and loans spanned the real estate, energy, and environmental sectors. This evaluation confirms that there have been marked increases nationally since 2010 in investments in the energy efficiency of multifamily rental housing, including in the subset that is affordable. Interviews, grantee accomplishments, and two case studies indicate that, of the seven desired outcomes the foundation outlined for Window of Opportunity-Energy Efficiency (WOO-EE), the initiative's greatest contributions were to help improve cross-sector collaboration and to increase awareness of EE as a preservation tool for affordable multifamily rental housing. WOO-EE activities had a smaller positive influence on three more of the outcomes, had no appreciable influence on one of them, and had an unknown influence on another.