These Brooklyn Homeowners Couldn’t Afford to Go Green. Then Help Arrived

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After two decades in her century-old brick rowhouse in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, Marisol Genao was used to some quirks. 

When she turned the lights on in the kitchen, for example, the living room lights would flicker. Before taking a shower, she knew to wait 10 minutes for the water to heat up. And when she wanted to turn on her air conditioner, she’d have to first go to the basement to adjust the breakers.

“I needed a lot of fixing in my house,” said Genao, a pharmacy technician. “My house is old and everything is expensive now.”

But in August, Genao, 48, got a reprieve as part of a program called EnergyFit, which upgraded her electric panel, installed a heat pump water heater and replaced her faulty gas stove with an induction one. They sealed the windows so that her house would stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

Genao was psyched, and talked up the improvements to her colleagues.

“Everybody in my job says, ‘You’re kind of funny. Some people get happy with a new car. You’re happy with a water heater,’” Genao said. “ I said, ‘Guys, you don’t understand! You want to take a shower in these cold winters and you’re waiting for your water to heat up.’”

All the work was free of charge.

EnergyFit, which launched in 2024, is run by the Pratt Center for Community Development, Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation and IMPACCT Brooklyn, and funded by federal and private dollars. The program aims to repair and retrofit 70 two- and three-family homes in a handful of Brooklyn neighborhoods in the span of two years.

Those houses often have issues and their owners may not have the funds to take care of them—let alone take steps towards transitioning away from fossil fuels. EnergyFit staff work as case managers to help homeowners navigate the complicated technical and bureaucratic processes, coordinate with tenants and set them up for further upgrades down the road.

“A lot of these households are in communities that have been disinvested in for a long time, where people are house-rich, cash-poor, and have fallen so far behind on maintenance that to even be able to start moving towards electrification and efficiency, you’ve got to solve these other home maintenance problems,” said Rebekah Morris-Gonzalez, director of climate initiatives at Pratt. 

“The benefits that will accrue are not just around carbon reductions. It is really about health improvements to households and comfort,” she added.

EnergyFit is testing a model to understand what it takes to do this kind of work, focused on small buildings. Morris-Gonzalez said the team will be able to figure out the costs related to retrofitting these types of homes and measure carbon reductions and impacts to utility bills after a year. 

Buildings are New York City’s biggest source of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

But less than 3 percent of existing buildings in the city have been retrofitted to significantly reduce those emissions, according to Andrea Mancino, CEO of Bright Power, which worked with Pratt over a decade ago to do research that ultimately led to EnergyFit. 

New York City laws mandating efficiency measures and carbon reductions apply only to large buildings—about 50,000 of them. But those laws don’t touch smaller buildings, including the approximately 350,000 two- to four-family residences around the five boroughs.

“There’s a whole building stock left out of those major initiatives,” Mancino said. “Most of those smaller buildings—in particular, brownstones—were built before 1930 and a lot haven’t had anything in the way of energy efficiency done since with the exception of maybe replacing a boiler.”

Every Job Is Custom

This year, EnergyFit has completed work in 12 homes, with an average cost of $27,000 per home. Just a fraction of the costs so far have been covered by incentives from the state and utilities. 

EnergyFit’s work begins with an assessment of the property, before spending about three to five days in the home actually making repairs and installing new equipment. The team looks at the electric system, plumbing, lead paint and the level of the home’s energy efficiency. They also scope out for hazards like mold, a leaky roof, asbestos, gas leaks and the presence of carbon monoxide.

Sometimes the team finds a problem in a home that prevents them from being able to move forward with the EnergyFit project, such as if there was prior electrical work that was never registered with the city. Each property requires a bespoke approach, and even if the team can’t do work on a home as part of the EnergyFit program, they refer homeowners to other resources.

“It’d be nice if we could run projects like a machine, crank ’em out one after another, but every property, every homeowner, has their own story,” said Ryan Chavez, director of small homes programs at Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation.

After making the home repairs as needed—which may include installing new carbon monoxide and smoke detectors or fixing a leaky roof—the team does air sealing, adds insulation and installs low-flow water fixtures and LED lights to replace incandescent ones. They also upgrade electrical panels and wiring, and swap out gas stoves for induction in the kitchens of both the homeowner and their tenants.

The stove switch, in particular, improves air quality by eliminating the harmful pollutants that come from gas stoves, which are associated with causing or worsening respiratory illnesses.

If there’s money left, some homeowners can get an electric water heater.

“A lot of people in the program, they’ve been retired or close to retirement age, and so they’re not able to do some of this work on their own,” said Paul Sobers, a project manager at IMPACCT Brooklyn. “It definitely helps them to stay in the neighborhood they’ve been in for decades.”

The work does not fully transition homes to electric from fossil fuels, but it gets them part of the way there. 

 “You see big ambitious policies at city and state level to move toward renewable energy and energy efficiency, but working in communities like Cypress Hills and East New York,” Chavez said, “it’s really important to us to make sure small homeowners, especially lower and middle income, don’t get left behind in this transition.” 

Constance Dawson, 61, noticed her two-family brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant became less drafty and much quieter after EnergyFit completed the work. She would eventually like to upgrade her oil heating system. 

“With the system that we’re seeing now, and the money savings that we’re seeing with Con Ed, we think definitely that might be the way for us to go,” Dawson said. “We have to put in some paperwork and see how much it is going to cost us in terms of changing from oil to gas or electricity.”