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Council for Energy Friendly Affordable Housing

The Council for Energy Friendly Affordable Housing (CEFAH) is a working group of some of the most active owners, managers and consultants of affordable housing. The Council has retained legal and technical expertise to identify policy changes that could be made by Congress, HUD, the GSEs 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 CEFAH is pursuing include:

• Adjusting HUD policies governing the use of replacement reserves and residual receipts;
• Establishing a supplemental loan program for energy retrofit financing;
• Adapting the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program to better enable funds to be used to retrofit HUD-Assisted and LIHTC properties;
• Modernizing methodologies used to calculate utility allowances for multifamily affordable rental properties to incentivize developers to finance deep energy retrofits;
• Educating housing officials on which energy efficiency improvements make sense to support.

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