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The state has made itself into a model of relief policy for manufactured homeowners.
There’s a brook that runs along the Mountain Home Park in Brattleboro, Vermont, providing the sort of pleasant babbling sound people play at night to help them fall asleep. On a typical morning, the water moves quickly and is shallow enough that you can see the rocks under the surface.
But when a storm comes through, long-time resident Angela Johnson warns, this steady stream can turn treacherous.
“We watch it every day when it’s raining — it doesn’t matter if it’s a heavy storm, the brook rises quite quickly,” Johnson told me. “It has and it will continue to break out of its space and cause flooding.”
That’s what happened four years ago, when an ice jam caused the brook to burst, flooding into the houses in the low-lying surrounding area. Or during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, which destroyed 29 homes in the greater Tri-Park Housing Cooperative, of which Mountain Home is a member. The rushing water lifted some structures right off their foundations, damaged roadways, and left a trail of debris, photos, and furniture among the wreckage in its wake.
Manufactured homes (which the state of Vermont uses interchangeably with mobile homes, though that term that refers only to models made before 1976) were disproportionately impacted during Irene, making up 7% of the state’s housing stock but 15% of housing damaged during the storm. Across the U.S., one of seven manufactured homes is in a neighborhood with high flood risk, according to a Headwaters Economics analysis, a figure that is only expected to rise due to climate change.
Vermont has recognized this risk, making changes at the state, local, and community levels that have earned it national recognition as a model for mitigating flood risk in these particularly vulnerable neighborhoods. To better understand what some of these strategies looked like, I went to Vermont earlier this year and met with residents, officials, and researchers who shared their experiences working or living — or both — in manufactured home parks.
Or rather, I tried to. On my first attempt to visit, I made it about 45 minutes into my four-hour drive before I had to turn around due to flooding, an irony that was certainly not lost on me. When I finally made it up to Tri-Park the next day, there was still water pooled in front of homes and alongside the road, hinting at the areas that might be particularly vulnerable to the next storm.
Mountain Home Brook.Colleen Hagerty
Weeks later, Vermont was in the headlines for flooding once again. An unnamed storm drenched the state in July, causing “catastrophic” impacts and earning quick comparisons to Tropical Storm Irene. More than 2,900 homes were damaged across the state, hundreds of them significantly, including dozens of manufactured homes. “Flooding had outsized impact on 4 Vermont mobile home communities,” announced the headline from one local news organization, which placed the loss at more than 60 manufactured homes.
So, did any of the changes implemented after Irene make a difference? It’s a tricky question, said Kelly Hamshaw, a researcher with the University of Vermont. She’s been visiting and interviewing residents in manufactured housing communities since 2011 and is currently working to identify needs in areas impacted by this summer’s storm.
For starters, the flooding footprints of the two storms were different, meaning those hardest-hit by one were not necessarily as impacted by the other. The flooded areas are still in the early stages of recovery, so it’s difficult to step back and make clear comparisons. Other less visible interventions, though, have certainly paid off, she told me.
Take accessing aid — researchers say the specific needs of manufactured homeowners are often overlooked in laws dealing with flood damage. Typically, owners of manufactured homes buy the structure they live in but not the land beneath it, which they rent from a distinct owner or corporation. Since most government assistance is aimed at either single-family homeowners or renters, Headwaters Economics research found that manufactured homeowners are “more likely to face barriers in accessing federal and state assistance, more likely to experience long-term recovery problems, and more likely to be permanently displaced.”
In the aftermath of Irene, for instance, most damaged manufactured homes had to be condemned to receive a full payout from the Federal Emergency Management Agency; those payouts often amounted to less than the value of the homes and left their owners without anywhere to live. Other types of homes did not require condemnation for their owners to receive that full payout.
This was a discrepancy the state recognized more readily this time, though it still has required additional interventions to address. In response to this summer’s storm, Vermont has rolled out new programs specifically aimed at damaged manufactured home removal and funding for those who received insufficient payouts from FEMA. A state legislative task force is also working to better understand the economics and issues related to manufactured housing in hopes of addressing policy gaps.
Because it’s not just a challenge accessing aid. Other types of homeowners also have more options when they’re ready to start moving on.
Stephanie Smith, hazard mitigation officer for Vermont Emergency Management, said buyouts were a key tool when it came to single-family homes after Irene. In those cases, the typical model was to pay 75% of the value of a property, an amount that was often significantly higher than the maximum FEMA payout, and gave the homeowner funds towards purchasing a new property. But this approach wasn’t feasible for manufactured homeowners, Smith told me. While many single-family homes appreciate in value over time, Smith said the value of a manufactured home often diminishes over time due to age and wear. And unlike single-family homes, in which the entire property goes into the valuation, manufactured home owners typically own just the structure they live in, paying rent on the actual land beneath it to a landlord.
So, based on just the value of that building, the payout these homeowners would receive would not be “anywhere near enough” to cover purchasing a new structure and paying lot rent, according to Smith.
Aging infrastructure is an issue in Tri-Park, from older homes to public offerings like the bridges and sewage systems, all of which can make the community more vulnerable to flooding. To address these compounding challenges, Tri-Park, where Johnson lives, developed a multimillion-dollar master plan with the input of government officials, residents, board members, and developers. It calls for funding infrastructure upgrades, including fixing up sewers and bridges over the brook, and proposes a new approach to buyouts. Instead of paying the 25 residents living in floodplains a percentage for their homes, Tri-Park will offer them new, eco-friendly manufactured homes located at a higher elevation within the same community.
The plan has multiple public and private supporters, including Smith’s department, which is providing the park with $2 million to purchase those new homes through the state’s Flood Resilient Communities Fund. At this point, both the plans and the funds to make this idea a reality are largely in place.
What’s still missing: Fewer than half of the minimum 25 households necessary to move forward have agreed to move. Residents have been hearing about the plan as a hypothetical for years while the board worked with partners and looked for capital. But board members and residents alike acknowledge there is a lot of skepticism around the plan’s promises. One challenge is that the new lots are expected to be smaller, and residents might not be able to have the same sort of layouts or amenities they currently enjoy.
To address these concerns, the Tri-Park board — which is open for residents to join — has hosted resident meetings and is offering a chance to tour models of the new types of homes they will be building. Which brings up another resiliency strategy more than a dozen parks have adopted since Irene: becoming resident-owned. Vermont law requires landowners of manufactured home parks to give notice to all lessees if they intend to sell the property, giving residents first dibs on purchasing the land. To do so, homeowners often opt to work with a nonprofit or establish a resident-owned cooperative, in which the residents become shareholders. Tri-Park is the largest of the 67 nonprofit or resident-owned manufactured home parks in the state, giving its residents an opportunity to have a voice in these larger park decisions.
Help from Cooperative Development Institute and Resident-Owned Communities has been a key part of this movement, local officials said. Julia Curry, who works for CDI in Vermont, says the biggest benefit in switching to a resident-owned model is security, as things like lot rent cannot be changed without resident input.
“Now the residents themselves — the members of the co-op — are setting their annual budgets,” Curry explained.
Aside from ensuring prices remain reasonable, that can also allow for prioritizing and accounting for risks like flooding. Last Christmas, a winter storm sent Sandy Jarvis’s Christmas into chaos. A mixture of high winds, rain, and snow over Northwestern Vermont caused the St. George Community Cooperative, where Jarvis has lived for nearly a decade, to lose power. Like Mountain Home, even an average storm causes large puddles to form in the low-lying neighborhood. But the Christmas flood sprang from another source — frozen pipes that cracked and leaked, draining the community’s well system.
For Jarvis, this was a warning sign. Since then, she’s been working to establish an emergency plan in the community and budget for a generator that could keep the water supply running during power outages. When the heavy rains came through this summer, she said, they were mostly spared, though they did lose power again and dealt with some flooding.
“Most mobile home communities in the state are old, and there's a lot of aging infrastructure,” Jarvis told me. Reflecting on their luck compared to other communities in the state, she later added, “We came out of it fairly well.”
Bill Dunton, another resident of the St. George development, has lived there nearly 25 years, through the transition to a cooperative; he’s witnessed flooding and the aftermath. Making changes can be difficult, he acknowledges, particularly in a neighborhood that has “118 families — and 118 different attitudes.” Still, Dunton believes the co-op model is ultimately supportive for residents, as it eliminates the fear of losing their homes or getting priced out with no notice, something Hamshaw from the University of Vermont said is not unusual in the state’s “bonkers” housing market, even after disasters.
Concerns over lot rent, which manufactured housing residents can still be charged after being displaced, and accessing aid are among the issues Hamshaw has heard since the summer storm. With the ground now frosting over at night as winter weather settles in, Hamshaw worries about the residents still in the thick of post-disaster bureaucracy. She’s currently interviewing displaced residents, many of whom are couch surfing or living in campers as they await aid. Even once they receive funds, she stressed that the housing market is significantly different now than it was after Irene, with everything from rent to repairs costing more, let alone new housing units.
That’s why Dunton, sitting inside his warm home as a light drizzle fell outside, said he hopes the state can come to see communities like St. George the way he does: as one of the last vestiges of actually affordable housing. And that, he believes, is well worth investing in for the long haul.
Support for this story was provided by The Neal Peirce Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting journalism on ways to make cities and their larger regions work better for all people.
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.