New and existing financing tools must play a crucial role in addressing barriers to achieving energy efficiency and emissions reductions across US housing. Yet, current market challenges have inhibited the adoption of low-carbon technologies across both the single-family and multifamily sectors, making progress to achieve aggressive national decarbonization goals nearly impossible. To identify and address these existing market pain points, RMI and Wells Fargo convened key industry experts, including leading developers, lenders, policy influencers, technical experts, mortgage financing actors, and housing finance agencies, to engage in interactive workshops addressing existing market challenges impeding the advancement of low-carbon affordable multifamily housing. To help inform the workshop discussions, participants engaged in a pre-event survey and ranked the following market challenges for consideration and workshop discussion:

Multifamily Workshop Participant Survey Findings:

Single-Family Workshop Participant Survey Findings:

After identifying key challenge areas, participants collaborated on potential solutions that could be explored by industry leaders. From providing guidance on how to improve existing climate-related data reporting and benchmarking systems to deploying grants to technical assistance programs, strategies that surfaced throughout the workshops highlight opportunities to drive substantial progress in enacting low-cost, sustainable, and resilient solutions across both the single-family and multifamily market. These two reports comprehensively outline such recommendations and explore opportunities for lenders and philanthropies to leverage new and existing financing tools and market solutions to dissolve existing obstacles preventing a climate-aligned US housing stock.

Disclaimer: Statements and opinions in this publication and related materials are suggestions offered by workshop participants and do not represent the opinions of Wells Fargo or RMI. This document is presented for informational purposes only and is not intended to recommend any particular investment or inform investment decisions.