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Council for Energy Friendly Affordable Housing

Council for Energy Friendly Affordable Housing (CEFAH) is a working group of some of the most active owners and managers of affordable housing. The Council will retain legal and technical expertise to identify policy changes that could be made by Congress, HUD and state agencies to help encourage and finance energy conservation improvements. Approximately $5 billion – nearly 15% of HUD’s budget -- is spent annually on energy costs in assisted housing. Reducing this amount would free up a considerable sum of money for more productive uses. NH&RA launched CEFAH as a means to achieve policy changes to affordable housing programs that will facilitate owners’ abilities to retrofit and upgrade properties to achieve a higher degree of energy efficiency and utility cost savings. 

Our goal is to identify areas where significant savings could be found and work with policymakers to obtain regulatory and legislative changes that make such improvements feasible and permissible. A few examples of actions that could be taken are adjusting HUD policies governing the use of replacement reserves and residual receipts, establishing a supplemental loan program for energy retrofit financing, and educating housing officials on which energy efficiency improvements make sense to support.

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