People of color and low-income residents bear the brunt of extreme weather. To fight it, America’s fastest-growing city is investing in cleaner air and affordable housing.

• Austin is experiencing increasingly extreme weather as a result of the climate crisis.
• Poorer communities that are located in flood zones and further from resources suffer the most.
• The city has committed millions of dollars over the next 20 years to address the issue.
• This story is part of “Advancing Cities,” a series highlighting urban centers across the US that are committed to improving life for their residents.

In one Austin neighborhood in February 2021, mothers held their infants to keep them warm in freezing temperatures amid an ice storm that froze the electrical grid and left many with no heat or electricity for days, The Guardian reported at the time.  

Just a few miles away, families living in the city’s center, a wealthier enclave where key infrastructure is located, were either able to stay home or retreat to a heated shelter nearby, per The Guardian’s report. The downtown area where they lived was better equipped to deal with a blackout. 

This tale of two cities is possibly the starkest recent representation of how the disparate impact of extreme weather brought on by the climate crisis manifests in the Texas capital. But it’s far from the only example. 

“These are the kinds of disparities that we see on a normal basis all the time,” Natasha Harper-Madison, a city council member, told The Guardian at the time.

Austin’s poorer communities and communities of color are more likely to live in flood zones, be displaced by climate-related catastrophes, breathe more polluted air, and spend a bigger portion of their paychecks on air-conditioning and heat. Indeed, these residents have borne the brunt of Austin’s extreme weather events, from heat waves to cold snaps, over the past 10 years.

To help abate this, local public officials, nonprofits, and private companies are working to make buildings less reliant on fossil fuels, create more affordable housing in the city’s center, reduce carbon emissions, and alleviate food insecurity.

These initiatives are part of a wide-ranging climate-equity plan passed by the city council and funded through partnerships with local government and the private sector in an effort to prepare the city for increasingly volatile weather events. As of May, 62% of its projects are either underway or completed, and nearly all the rest are about to start soon. 

Certain communities are affected the most by extreme heat, flooding, and freezes

More often than not, extreme heat and flooding wreak the most havoc on marginalized communities in Austin. 

On top of its many over-100-degree days, the city is located in flood alley, a stretch of central Texas that sees more flash floods than anywhere else in the country. 

In areas of East Austin, residents who live along floodplains have been bombarded by disastrous flooding over the past 10 years, Carmen Llanes, the executive director of GAVA, a community coalition that represents ZIP codes in East Austin, told Insider. 

Then there’s the extreme heat: Swaths of this area are paved and lacking in green space, which makes them even hotter than the rest of the city, Llanes said.  

While no one area is homogenous, ZIP codes in these regions tend to be home to more Austinites of color and lower-income households than the western parts of the city. These environmental factors have even led to shorter average life spans for Austinites living just miles apart, the Austin American-Statesman reported in 2019. 

Reducing carbon emissions and building affordable housing 

Under the climate-equity plan, millions from the city’s coffers will be spent building more resilient infrastructure in these communities. That, in turn, will allow all parts of the city to prepare for more hot days and flash floods ahead as the climate crisis worsens.

One of the most important efforts in the plan is building affordable housing and retrofitting existing homes to be energy efficient — two strategies that are already underway, according to progress data on the city’s website. The efforts have seen some early success, said Cassidy Ellis, a consultant specializing in environmental justice who sat on the advisory board for the plan while it was being formed. 

The city spent $1.6 million to assist residents in weatherizing their homes and an additional $1 million to help them implement more energy-efficient technology. This has allowed 178 low-income and elderly residents to replace their natural-gas appliances with electric ones — saving these residents a total of $364,000 so far, the city’s data shows. 

“People at lower income levels spend a greater proportion of their income on their utilities,” Ellis said. “The greatest way to reduce utility spending is energy efficiency.” 

Then there’s building affordable housing, she said.

With a goal to build 135,000 new housing units — nearly half within the affordable range — by 2027, the Austin Housing Finance Corporation has already funded “several thousand” of that total, according to the tracker. 

At a time when many residents from marginalized backgrounds are getting priced out of their homes, current residents of gentrifying neighborhoods will be the first to receive these loans to ensure they get to remain there. 

“People that have a relationship with their neighbors do better in climate events,” Ellis said. “Being displaced because of affordability issues wears on that community fabric, so it’s important to ensure that people can stay where they live.” 

Only time will tell if the plan makes a difference 

Not everyone is sold on the city’s ability to get these things done in a way that meaningfully creates equity in climate resilience. 

“I am pretty disenchanted with plans in the city of Austin,” Llanes said. “The reality is that plans tend to be repositories in the city of Austin for complaints and suggestions and then we sit on them.” 

There is hope, though, that efforts like this will help not only Austin but the entire country in years to come. From hurricanes in Florida to wildfires in California, local governments are tasked with protecting their most vulnerable citizens from the effects of the climate crisis. 

“A lot of the efforts and the conversations around climate, equity, resilience, justice start locally,” Ellis said. “Cities have been leading these conversations for a long time.”