As climate change increasingly burdens Milwaukee’s aging housing stock, the city’s Environmental Collaboration Office, or ECO, is working to connect homeowners with energy-saving resources and build new net-zero housing.
But recently, the department has faced budget cuts from the Trump administration, which cancelled a Biden-era EPA grant this March.
Erick Shambarger is the director of Environmental Sustainability for the City of Milwaukee. He joins WUWM's Digital Producer Graham Thomas for an update on ECO's efforts to make housing more energy efficient and affordable.
Moving forward with energy efficient home improvements, "despite the headwinds"
Shambarger says many Milwaukee residents are paying too much on their energy bills, especially if they live in homes built before the 1970s. To address issues with old boilers or poor insulation, Milwaukee's Me2 Energy Efficiency program connects homeowners with financing resources and contractors to conduct HVAC, insulation and heat pump installation projects. The program falls under one of the "10 Big Ideas" from Milwaukee's 2023 Climate and Equity Plan.
"We want to help you take that money that you're spending on energy and reinvest it in home improvements," he says.
Shambarger's team hopes to expand these services to provide more comprehensive home assessments.
"One thing that you often see in Milwaukee's homes is we might go in there and the person wants energy efficiency, but then we do an inspection and you find roof leaks or other other things like that — maybe they need electrical upgrades," he says.
Shambarger says that the loss in grant funding means ECO will likely have to scale back this holistic approach, however. It also limits ECO's outreach efforts. The department had partnered with the Sherman Park Community Organization and Clean Wisconsin to hire "resilience ambassadors" to promote the program through the ECO Neighborhoods Initiative.
"When the Trump administration cancelled that grant — which incidentally, I don't think they have the authority to do because that funding was authorized by Congress — we had to terminate the extra resilience ambassadors that we have, so we have less outreach."
Despite this, Shambarger says ECO is utilizing leftover American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds and a recent Housing and Urban Development grant to continue their energy-efficient housing work. He says they're also working to expand the Milwaukee Health Department's lead abatement efforts to include energy efficiency assessments.
"We're finding ways to move forward despite the headwinds," Shambarger says.
Building new net-zero energy housing
In addition to energy efficient home upgrades, the Climate and Equity Plan also prioritizes the construction of new net-zero energy housing to address Milwaukee's housing shortage.
"It's important for the city to have strategies to both repair and sustain our existing homes — many of which are historic — but recognize that over the years we've had to demolish homes that got to a certain condition level where they couldn't be safe," Shambarger says. "And so now we've got thousands of vacant lots in the city that need to be redeveloped."
That means both educating developers about net-zero building practices and investing in off-site, "modular" housing construction, Shambarger says. He also says new construction methods, such as off-site construction, will allow the city to build new housing more quickly and bring down costs.
"We think there's some efficiency opportunities to leverage off-site construction — meaning building whole wall panels at a factory environment and then just assembling those more quickly on-site," he says.
As climate migration to the Midwest surges, Shambarger says the demand for new housing will likely increase.
"I simply don't think we as a country are building enough new housing units fast enough," he says. "And so, to the extent that people are migrating here, it just adds that much more incentive to have a strategy to build new housing faster."
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