Our Homes and Our Climate, with Carlos Martín

Notable quotes

• Race and ethnicity influence perception of climate risk and action: “Households of color, for example, are nearly twice as likely to perceive hazard risks, making race and ethnicity the greatest predictor of risk perception in our study … But what I found was most important is that, even though some of these households are likely to exhibit higher risk perception, we found that there was no difference in the extent to which these groups considered the risks while they were making their home-purchase or home-acquisition choices … They’re all groups who are underserved, already vulnerable, and have fewer choices. They have fewer resources to translate their perceptions into material housing decisions.” (16:34)
• Preemptive approach to housing adaptation: “I think the low-hanging fruit is doing that kind of post-disaster, post-event [response] more thoughtfully, that centers the housing and the households more. I think where we’re still lacking is the pre-disaster event—what I would describe as really being the core of climate adaptation—which is good planning, good regional thinking about where our housing should be, how to properly consider historical housing contexts in different communities, and making that transition towards a reduced exposure rate.” (20:05)
• Overcoming challenges to create effective housing policy: “So much of what I think is the barrier to any real changes—money, leadership, and clarity of goals—housing policy has a lot of silos. Finding out where that money, leadership, and clarity of goals comes from is going to be a real challenge.” (25:00)

Top of the Stack

• Housing Resilience in Greater New Orleans: Perceptions of and Home Adaptations to Climate Hazards in Post-Katrina Louisiana by Carlos Martín, Claudia D. Solari, Anne N. Junod, and Rebecca Marx
• “Exploring Climate Change in US Housing Policy” by Carlos Martín
• Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States: Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions by Stephen W. Pacala, Danielle Deane-Ryan, Alexandra Fazeli, Julia H. Haggerty, Chris T. Hendrickson, Roxanne Johnson, Timothy C. Lieuwen, Vivian E. Loftness, Carlos E. Martín, Michael A. Méndez, Clark A. Miller, Jonathan A. Patz, Keith Paustian, William Pizer, Ed Rightor, Patricia Romero-Lankao, Devashree Saha, Kelly Sims Gallagher, Susan F. Tierney, and William Walker
• Pathways to Prosperity: Building Climate Resilience by Allison Plyer, Alysha Rashid, Elaine Ortiz, Taylor Savell, and John Kilcoyne
• The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Priviledge, and Environmental Protection by Dorceta E. Taylor

The Full Transcript

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Margaret Walls. My guest today is Carlos Martín. Carlos is project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, and, I might add, he's one of our newest university fellows here at Resources for the Future (RFF), which I'm super happy about. Before joining Harvard, Carlos spent two years at the Brookings Institution as a David M. Rubenstein Fellow. Prior to that, he was a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

We're going to talk to Carlos about some of the work he did there. He's had a really interesting research career, working on a variety of topics and issues, but the thread through all of them is housing. These days, much of Carlos's housing work is centered one way or another around climate change. He works on housing adaptation to climate change, disaster mitigation, recovery, and housing decarbonization. We're going to chat with Carlos about all of these things on the show today. Stay with us.

Hello, Carlos, welcome to Resources Radio. It's so nice to have you coming on the show today.

Carlos Martín: Thanks so much for inviting me, Margaret. I've been listening to Resources Radio for years, so it's a real treat to be on this side of the radio.

Margaret Walls: Nice. If you've been listening, I have to ask you our starting question, which is really to learn a little bit about you and how you came to work on housing issues and the things that you work on today. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Carlos Martín: Sure. Usually, I get tickled when I hear about the stories from other interviews that have played out in Resources Radio with people describing how they have lovely memories of national parks that they visited in their youth. My perspective is a little different.

I'm the son of Mexican immigrants. My folks were rural farmers in Mexico, but I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a kid, I'd go back to the farms and the nearby town where my parents came from every summer. I learned, at a very early age, that the environment is hard work, and it's something to be respected.

And fortunately, I think all of us that work in the environment and climate spaces have all come to the same places despite our various backgrounds. But that always played a very big role in my thinking about how important it is that the environment is something that requires a lot of attention—but in a very different way than just sort of the appreciation and the aesthetic love of it.

I should note that there was one other significant path on my journey here. That's seeing our relationship as humans to the natural environment through our homes. On the farms that my parents grew up in, the homes literally were the shelter from the storm.

Then, in an immigrant family, I also witnessed how the American dream manifested in their homeownership, and how it can easily become a nightmare for so many, because of historical housing discrimination. I went into my training as an architect and civil and environmental engineer specifically because of that interest in exploring how our homes mediate this relationship between who we are socially and economically and the environmental context in which we live. That's ultimately how I got here.

Margaret Walls: That's great. We're going to explore that a little bit more. I want to start with you, Carlos, first with the big picture and ask you if this isn't too big of a question: Why are housing issues so important when we're trying to meet the climate challenge? Both sides of the climate challenge—lowering emissions to address the problem and building resilience to the impacts. Can you give the big picture?

Carlos Martín: It ultimately is the centrality of our housing and how we define our communities, and how we draw that line between our human and natural environments. If you think about it, every study that we talk about when we're looking at different demographic groups, for example, talks about where people's homes are located. That's the data that we use—residential location.

The different strands that we're talking about that you mentioned (lowering emissions, the decarbonization aspects, as well as the building resilience) have played out in the same way with regard to the housing (the physical housing units and how the households occupy those units). Fully decarbonizing homes is an imperative and one we've been working on since the 1970s oil crisis, when the president put solar panels on the White House back in the late '70s.

We're still pretty far off, considering the range of political debates over things like gas stoves. But, more importantly, it's the persistence of existing housing, equipment, appliances, and construction—that's the decarbonizing side of it.

On the climate adaptation side of it, I'm going to talk a little bit in silos, and I apologize for that, because the whole purpose of my work is how do we de-silo these things, and housing is a perfect silo. But let me switch to that second silo, and that's how housing is ground zero for climate adaptation. When we talk about climate exposures, we're usually talking about places and properties in communities—physical things.

Nationally, when we propose adaptation solutions, they either focus on mitigating individual homes, like flood elevations and fireproofing, or building infrastructure that protects those residential communities. When we speak about risk levers, we also talk about home hazard insurance. There are so many ways in which housing is the vehicle for either our climate emissions-reduction goals or our climate-adaptation goals.

That relationship between our environmental conditions and our housing goes back some time. The environmental justice movement, the green building movement, the healthy housing movement—they've all been waving these banners for decades.

I think climate adds to this conversation about housing. But, ultimately, for both mitigation and adaptation, we must address the housing markets and housing policy in order to successfully deal with those concerns.

Margaret Walls: Well put. I want to start with one of the silos, Carlos, and that's the resilience side of things. I want to specifically tell folks about a large study that you led when you were at the Urban Institute that looked at resilience outcomes in the greater New Orleans area post-Katrina. That report just came out last month, and it's really great, and we'll put a link to that on our website.

I want to ask you, first, just to describe what you did in that study and what you found. I promise I read more than the executive summary, but I was really taken by the first lines in the executive summaries. So, I just wanted to read those first. You've already started talking about this.

What you wrote is, “Housing is a first line of defense, particularly for households that are vulnerable to environmental shocks and not equipped to recover from them. The home is the primary physical barrier, financial asset, and neighborhood stabilizer. Housing resilience, homes' and households' capacity to withstand, adapt, and thrive in the face of acute and chronic hazards is untenable where quality, fair, and affordable housing is in jeopardy.”

I just want to ask you first to elaborate a little bit on this. I mean, you already have a little bit. But I love that beginning.

Carlos Martín: That line was intentional on many counts—not just to start off the whole conversation. It's a 400-page study, so we’re trying to synthesize the importance of housing in this context. But it was also meant sort of as a call, particularly to remind those of us, especially those of us in the climate and environment spaces, about the fundamental issue of housing and the crisis that housing finds itself in today.

That's as much at stake when we are making environmental policy. Basically, that line is a wake-up call for the community to learn more about housing and as a broader socioeconomic context. I always like to remind people that the crisis of housing is that crisis that we're going to see in climate change.

Most low- and moderate-income households and, historically, most households of color, haven't had housing options—both where they can live and the kind of housing in which they can live. This affects not just exposures to things like climate changes effects, but also basic functions in their lives and financial and health effects. In this country, housing is a historical marker of the haves and the have-nots.

So, housing policy is very complicated—as complicated as environmental policy. At some point, the two have to meet. That was the impetus for doing this whole study. I do want to just sort of elaborate on the idea that, when we're talking from the climate-environmental policy spaces, we're pushing the concept of some places being “bad” because of their high exposures, and that these places should not exist.

That's exactly what the Army Corps said after Hurricane Katrina about the Lower Ninth Ward and what was visibly mapped in what's the now-famous green-dot map of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. That's sort of a disregard, and it's a lack of consciousness about the many residents that live in these places, because they're the only places that they were allowed to live, and they're the only homes that they were allowed to purchase. So, our housing crisis is going to be intertwined with our climate crisis.

Margaret Walls: That's really interesting. I just want to make a comment. I think I've told you this before, Carlos, but I talked to people in Eastern Kentucky after those really devastating floods in 2022, which completely destroyed many homes and killed 45 people, and I heard this quote: "We already had a housing crisis; the floods just made the problem worse."

I think this is what you're talking about. Is this related? What do you think they meant when they said “we had a housing crisis” in that region?

Carlos Martín: This is the current national housing-affordability crisis and housing-access crisis. If you look at places like Lexington, Kentucky, and the Huntington-Ashland area of the Kentucky–Ohio–West Virginia nexus, their share of renter households with cost burdens are right up there with the worst of the country. My colleagues here at the Joint Center for Housing Studies just released our biennial renters' report, for example, which noted that half of all US renters are cost burdened. This is an all-time high.

22 million renter households spend more than 30 percent of their income on their rent and related housing costs. Then, on top of that, that leads to evictions rising, as the country is seeing higher accounts of homelessness, etc. There's a housing crisis that's afoot, and that housing crisis is going to play out in our climate and environmental policy.

Margaret Walls: That's super interesting. Let's turn back to the New Orleans study, then, and just let me just ask you—what were some of the major findings? I know there's a lot, but what are some of the highlights of what you found in that work?

Carlos Martín: I should note that the study was funded by the Gulf Research Program at the National Academies, and it was the first cohort of the Thriving Communities Program. This is going back to 2017. So, this report and this study have gone through much evolution during the pandemic time, just in terms of data collection and the ability and robustness of what we were able to do.

The purpose was to look at the climate crisis from the perspective of actual households and the physical homes in places in which they live in the post-Katrina-New Orleans era. It's especially important for us to talk about housing there, given that so much attention has been paid to the broader infrastructure in Southeast Louisiana in the post-Katrina era.

The study included a massive survey in the field to gather information from post-Katrina home buyers. It also included about 200 interviews with federal, state, and local actors from multiple different sectors. I’ll quickly go through the six areas that we studied. Then, we could talk about some highlights from some of those studies.

One was looking at whether that regional infrastructure actually did lend itself to protections for different residential communities of different demographic backgrounds.

The second was the community engagement that was involved with all of the planning that happened in the post-Katrina era, and whether residents actually felt that they were actively participants—that their input was solicited and integrated into this planning.

Third was risk perceptions in relationships to people's personal property and their community vulnerabilities, whether they perceive an increased risk from climate change from various climate change effects.

Fourth was about risk information. It was about how much information they received about their property before purchasing, and as a consequence of purchasing, the process of disclosures, etc.

Fifth was the one that's getting a lot of attention, which is the property insurance coverage, pricing, and treatment. There, we really wanted to look at what the disparities were by location—location being within a flood zone versus not a flood zone—and income, race, and ethnicity, just to see if there were divergences there. It's really important just to highlight this, the fifth of the topics that we're talking about, because there are virtually no nonproprietary surveys on home insurance.

I want to give a shout-out to my fellow and your RFF University Fellow Dr. Carolyn Kousky, who was an advisor on the insurance portions of that instrument in the analysis that we did there. Because there are so few surveys of homeowners that aren't maintained by the insurance industry, we made the instruments and data available publicly. You could find those on the Urban Institute websites. They have been shared with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the US Census Bureau, and the Federal Insurance Office, as they are developing insurance-related questions to their major survey instruments. Sorry for pausing there for a second and talking about that.

The sixth part of the study was actual, physical, home-mitigation improvements—the rate and quality of the kinds of home-mitigation improvements that people were doing as part of the purchase of their home or after purchasing.

Margaret Walls: I want to ask you specifically, because it caught my eye, about risk information and disclosures—maybe I'll go ahead and do that. Then, I’ll give some other major highlights—maybe on the insurance piece. But this caught my eye.

You uncovered some interesting findings about where people get their information about flood risks and how that varies across people of different income levels. Tell us what you found there, Carlos.

Carlos Martín: We found notable differences in information sources by income and house price. If you think about it, if you've gone through a home-buying process, there is a wide range of information sources of people talking to you and telling you information about the various homes that you may be purchasing and the one that you ultimately end up purchasing.

But we did find that higher-income households and households that bought homes of higher value used the formal information sources. That included the inspection reports, disclosure statements, real estate agent information and property records to some or significantly higher rates than their lower-income counterparts. This is important to note, because the state of Louisiana has always been viewed as the gold standard of disclosure requirements, requiring sellers to disclose tons of details, particularly around flood-risk experiences of a property, flood insurance requirements, and any past repairs that have happened to a home because of a flood. All of that is required to be disclosed.

But we found that many lower-income households did not use these information sources at all at the time of home purchase. In fact, about 39 percent of lower-income households did not reference those compared to 23 percent of higher-income ones. Information is really important. I think we're at a point in the climate discussion and climate-exposure discussion in this country where we're saying, “More information is better.”

The reality is that more information … Only some people can act on it, and only some people can understand it. So, it's incredibly important to look at sort of how this information is provided and whether people can act on it.

That's actually a good segue, maybe, to one of the other key areas of findings that we had around perception of risk. I could talk about that a little bit.

Households of color, people with lower incomes, and people with lower educational attainment were all significantly more likely to exhibit heightened perceptions of future hazard risks to their homes than their white, non-Hispanic, higher-income, higher-educated counterparts. Households of color, for example, are nearly twice as likely to perceive hazard risks, making race and ethnicity the greatest predictor of risk perception in our study.

That jibes with most other studies, noting that people who have experienced some disparity in the past are likely to exhibit heightened perceptions of future risks, including environmental and climate risks. But what I found was most important is that, even though some of these households are likely to exhibit higher risk perception, we found that there was no difference in the extent to which these groups considered the risks while they were making their home-purchase or home-acquisition choices.

This discrepancy suggests that disparities in risk-mitigation action among households of color and people with lower incomes, people with lower educational attainment—they’re all groups who are underserved and already vulnerable and who have fewer choices. They have fewer resources to translate their perceptions into material housing decisions. So, it's a positive.

I think that there is a group of highly vulnerable people that perceive their risks and understand that they may be more at risk. The negative is that we don't have the institutional resources to make sure that they can act on those risks appropriately.

Margaret Walls: That's an interesting finding. I mean, that might lead into a big question I have for you, Carlos. From what you learned in that big study that you did and other work you've done around resilience and housing—and especially equity and justice. Let me ask you what you think are some of the low-hanging-fruit policy solutions—maybe three things, or whatever you want to say, something that could really make a difference. Also, maybe relatedly: Are there policy bottlenecks or shortcomings that you see to building resilience in communities, especially in underserved and underresourced communities?

Carlos Martín: Much of our climate adaptation and resilience policy is, essentially, still disaster policy in this country. To the extent that we're seeing reforms in the federal disaster policy framework, and that includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s very recent changes to the Individuals and Households Program that were announced last week, which are actually very positive.

I'd encourage the listeners to see this internal executive program rule change that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is considering that helps renters, especially people who don't own property—but also to help people access any additional assistance and resources more quickly than they have in the past. So, there are these positive things that censor the households and censor the reality that they may not have a house to live in immediately after an event.

They're going to need more resources to either rebuild or think more thoughtfully about where they're going to live. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development, if you want to talk about the continuum of disaster policy that we have right now in the country, has also made great strides toward improving their disaster-recovery community-development block grants.

I also like that private insurance and actors are stepping up somewhat. Putting on my hat as the director of the Remodeling Futures Program, we know that disaster repairs are an increasing portion of homeowner improvement spending nationally. I don't know if that's a good thing. Obviously, that means that there are a lot more disasters.

But, certainly, people are willing to spend in the retrofit. I think the low-hanging fruit is doing that kind of post-disaster, post-event more thoughtfully, that centers the housing and the households more. I think where we're still lacking is the pre-disaster event—what I would describe as really being the core of climate adaptation. This is good planning, good regional thinking about where our housing should be, how to properly consider historical housing contexts in different communities, and making that transition toward a reduced exposure rate.

Margaret Walls: Those are great points. I want to flip now to the other side of the climate change coin and talk about decarbonization, if that's okay. First, can you just give our listeners a sense of how important buildings—residential buildings in particular—are in terms of emissions and contributions to the climate change problem? Is that a fair question to ask you, Carlos?

Carlos Martín: Very much. It's a huge contributor to, particularly, carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. When you include source energy, buildings account for about 40 percent of all US carbon dioxide emissions, and housing is a little more than half of that. That rate of emissions that we have just from our housing, for example, is the equivalent of Brazil's or Germany's carbon dioxide emissions.

I mean, we're talking about a major source of contributions. And the reality is, especially given the amount of R&D that has occurred since the 1970s for improving residential energy, much of it is supported by the US Department of Energy. And we have seen significant changes in improvements in energy efficiency and the take-up of residential renewable energy, etc.

But there's still large gaps. And the gaps are particularly strongest for the low- and moderate-income households. And this is, again, because they can't afford to make the improvements. In fact, we know from our modeling research on repair and improvement, that lower-income households and houses of color are more likely not to invest in repairs and improvements because they can't afford it.

And when they do, they spend less than the higher-income households. So, there's a real challenge in how we make this transition work for all housing and for all households.

Margaret Walls: That brings me to my next question, which is: There's this push to electrify everything, as they say. And when it comes to housing, that means heating, cooking, water, etc., should run on electric, not natural gas and other fuels. And so, there's kind of a movement in that direction.

I want to ask you about this, and what you think about it, and the challenges we face. Also, you were on a National Academies of Sciences committee that just came out with a report not too long ago called Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States. This is a massive study, I might add. And I assume you probably played a major role in the research on the built-environment component. So, what are some of the findings from the committee about this sort of electrification goal that we're trying to reach?

Carlos Martín: You're right; I coauthored that chapter on the built environment with Vivian Loftness. Essentially our buildings are typically underestimated. We looked at the policy angle as much as the reality of the current state of housing. And because it was the built environment, we looked at the commercial buildings, as well.

Just from a policy angle, buildings are typically underestimated, I would say, in energy policy—are our third rail in a lot of ways. And that's mainly because so much in building and housing happens at the local level. So, without massive investment like we're seeing in the Inflation Reduction Act, etc., so much is dictated by the local decisionmaking processes.

Another reason I think is the power of the buildings lobby. So, much of our residential-energy policy levers are for new applying standards and new building codes. And these are all focused on new housing. But most of our residential climate and energy R&D is focused on that.

We're not dealing with the reality that 99.2 percent of homes that will exist next year have already been built. They're existing. I always joke, we are now at the oldest median age for our homes in this country. We're over 40 years old. So, we're entering midlife, and we're entering a midlife crisis with our housing.

There is still substandard housing in this country. But we're also expecting a lot more of our housing in terms of energy performance as well as climate resilience, that homes built in the '70s and '80s, even homes built during the last huge boom in 2006, 2007, just are not equipped to do. So, there's a major transformation that has to happen.

But we have to be able to think about—going back to your comment about low-hanging fruit. So much of what I think is the barrier to any real changes—money, leadership, and clarity of goals—housing policy has a lot of silos. And so, finding out where that money, that leadership and clarity of goals, comes from is going to be a real challenge.

I know in the Resources Radio podcast, a colleague of mine spoke about that—the same study, the Decarbonization report, the committee’s report. Dr. Julie Haggerty talked about the importance of state and local leadership. And I'm going to reiterate that. But I would also like to add the importance of local civil-sector groups that have been not just great activists, but in many cases have been incredibly helpful service providers.

I'm talking about groups like Elevate in Chicago that are actually doing low- and moderate-income-household decarbonization—in some cases full electrification as well as energy-efficiency improvements. Because those are the opportunities where you actually have groups that are trusted entities that are working with the local households, and they understand their housing very well.

So, the Decarbonization report that the National Academies committee released really has very similar recommendations. One, that we can do more with our housing. The challenges are the necessary increases in resources, particularly for low-income households and property owners across all income levels.

We talk a lot in the report about the Weatherization Assistance Program as being a highly underutilized, but still very highly siloed, program. So, there are a lot of opportunities for reforming that, for thinking about expanding it to make sure that all of the households that I mentioned—that can't afford any kind of improvement, even with rebate programs and tax credits that came out of the IRA—that they have access to that kind of beneficial outcome from decarbonization.

Margaret Walls: Right, the Weatherization Assistance Program (which is run by the states and was DOE funded) got quite a bit of money, I think, in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. And then I want to ask you, you mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act. There's a lot of incentives laid out in the IRA for electrification, rooftop solar, renewables, community solar, and so forth, and a lot targeted to low-income households and communities.

So, what do you think about what's in there? Are there hurdles to accomplishing the goals that are in the IRA? How are you feeling about that big piece of legislation when it comes to housing and decarbonization?

Carlos Martín: Like most folks in this space, I was ecstatic with the IRA's allotment of both tax credits and rebates. And combined with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act weatherization funds—I mean, there are these points of understanding, that extremely low-income households need a broader amount of assistance, that low- to moderate-income households just can't afford the up-front costs, whereas upper-income households can afford to pay for an event, and they just need an additional financial incentive, which manifests in the tax credits that were expanded. So, it was a nice mix. And we certainly see, even though it's a very positive step forward, it's not going to change every house in this country. There are a limited amount of resources in the rebate programs and weatherization assistance.

So, it's not enough money to transform every low- to moderate-income household over the next decade, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. I think the challenge is in the implementation. And this is, I'm sure, true. Everybody who's listening right now is going to note that the implementation is the number-one challenge. We noted this in the National Academies Decarbonization report.

And I should say, full disclosure, I'm completing this study for the US Department of Energy that attempts to measure the quantitative gaps between what the range of energy retrofit needs and the resources provided. There's a big gap; that's no surprise. But there are also some interesting qualitative findings about how to serve these communities.

A lot of the energy, local utility-efficiency programs, as well as public programs at the state and local level refer to these communities as “hard to serve.” And again, a lot of the questions come down to, Who is the conduit of information? Is the conduit trustworthy? And will the quality of work vary, depending on whether the household is low to moderate income or higher income?

So, there's some real physical marketing outreach campaigns and physical intervention. I think that's going to vary for low- to moderate-income households and other disadvantaged communities. So, I would certainly say that there are still some hurdles to overcome.

Margaret Walls: Right, yeah, I've heard a lot of stories about that, too.

So, Carlos, we're out of time here. As you know, we close the podcast with a feature we call Top of the Stack. So, I have to ask you now to recommend to us a book, or an article, or a podcast, or anything that's caught your attention lately that our listeners might be interested in. What's on the top of your stack?

Carlos Martín: Like I said, I've listened to Resources Radio for years. This is always my favorite part. I mean, the content is always great, but I always enjoy hearing what people are reading. So, I have to deliberate about this one significantly. So, I'm going to give you two.

I'm going to do a shout-out to a colleague, Dr. Allison Plyer at the Data Center in New Orleans, who was a partner in the New Orleans work in terms of providing data and providing information about data sources in the New Orleans area. But she and a team that she works with through Pathways to Prosperity just released a Building Climate Resilience report. Lots of housing included in it. I'd recommend that people look for that. I think it's available at p2pclimate.org. And it just came out this week. So, that's the first—just to continue to add to the conversation about climate and housing.

The second one is—we've talked a little bit about my circuitous route through the world of environment and climate and housing and the research space. And certainly I've been a big advocate of breaking down those silos and hopping through boundaries. But at my heart, I'm still an environmentalist and a houser. But many people like me in this space know that, when you hop through a lot of boundaries and bust a lot of silos, it's exhausting. And it's particularly more complicated when you're a person of color—a scholar of color—in these spaces. This includes a lot of the predominantly white spaces—like, the DC think-tank world has been in my background. So, to get some inspiration, I've actually been rereading Dorceta Taylor's book, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement. So, I'd put that as another a tie-in for what I'm reading right now at the top of my stack.

Margaret Walls: That's great. I know Allison Plyer, too, so I'm going to look forward to looking at that. Thank you so much, Carlos. I love those recommendations.

And it's been a super big pleasure having you on Resources Radio and learning more about housing and climate change. So, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Carlos Martín: Always a pleasure, Margaret. Thank you for having me.

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