Author Gets Insulated
I live in a low-income building in one of the wealthiest parts of Manhattan. Westbeth consists of 383 rent-stabilized apartments in a rehabbed nineteenth-century warehouse with tall, leaky windows right on the Hudson River. Heating costs us a fortune.
That’s one reason I noticed that the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), or “the stimulus” as it was more often called, included $5 billion for weatherization.
Insulating old buildings seemed like a perfect recession twofer. It yields immediate energy savings and creates jobs that use the very skills that were idled when home construction crashed.
Since 1976 the U.S. Department of Energy has run the Weatherization Assistance Program, which channels relatively small amounts of money through state governments to nonprofit community groups to subsidize the weatherization of low-income homes and apartments.
Much of the $800 billion stimulus was to be distributed in the form of tax cuts to private businesses and grants to state and local governments. But the increased weatherization money would go to those community groups to pay workers to produce a public good. It wouldn’t put millions of the unemployed directly on the government payroll the way the Works Progress Administration (WPA) did during the Great Depression. But it was as close to the WPA as anyone dared go this time around. So aside from a personal interest in replacing my leaky windows, I had a professional interest.
I imagined myself interviewing a formerly unemployed young man from the Bronx—no, make that a young woman—her electric screwdriver poised in midair while joyful neighbors wave their lowered utility bills.
In order to locate such direct stimulus beneficiaries, I set up an appointment at an established weatherization group in my area. But I found this message on my answering machine: “We had a meeting today at two o’clock, but … I was told by my funding source that I needed to request, um, that you needed to request in writing, um, the organization that you’re working for and pretty much what you’re interested in because I have to submit the request through DHCR’s [Division of Housing and Community Renewal’s] media office.”
When I phoned back, she promised to send my written request for an interview off to Albany tout de suite. We’d reschedule just as soon as she got the approval. “It’s nothing personal.”
After a few frustrating weeks I gave up on appointments and dropped in at some outer-borough community groups where sweet, sincere people either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me how they were going to spend their weatherization money when it came through.
I began to suspect that something ugly like a jurisdictional struggle was holding up the works. Then I happened to attend a lecture on alternative energy. I recognized one of the speakers as a staff member at a community group I’d tried to visit. After her talk I privately mentioned my interest in weatherization, and she implored me not to tie her environmental activism to her community group. But why shouldn’t a weatherization worker champion alternative energy?
That’s when I realized that I might be feeling the Van Jones effect. The man President Obama appointed as his “green-jobs czar” had recently been outed on Fox Television as a 1960s black radical—which indeed he had been. Fox ran pictures of him sporting a huge Afro and saying things he would surely put differently these days. Within a week the president accepted his resignation.
Fear of tarnishing the weatherization program with environmentalism or radicalism was one worry. Corruption or the appearance thereof was another. Over its two-year duration the stimulus bill would provide small groups with enough money to insulate about a million homes a year, or seven times what they’d been doing until then. That’s far more than these groups were used to spending. To avoid scandals, real or cooked up, they adopted elaborate paperwork to account for every penny. I wonder if the WPA got off to a slow start like this. I still wanted to write about people finding work, but I put weatherization on the back burner.
Then, one day about a year and a half later, I saw a Hispanic man in his twenties, a white woman in her thirties, and a black man in his forties eating bag lunches behind my building. Next I spotted them on the roof measuring the emergency doors, then in the basement near the laundry room. Finally, the trio knocked at my own apartment and asked permission to install new bulbs, faucet sprays, and weather stripping.
While I’d been writing downbeat recession stories, my building management had slogged through a weatherization application. To be eligible, over 66 percent of the tenants had to have incomes not more than 150 percent above the official poverty income. (So that’s why they’d collected our Social Security numbers.) Once we’d been declared poor enough, we were given an energy audit to determine what upgrades we could use.
Now my personal insulation team, José Santos, Tracy Leonardo, and Cleavon Bell, were at the door. Tracy, the clipboard woman wearing boots, tool belt, and ponytail, explained their mission. I let them in, and they dispersed with choreographed speed toward the bathroom and the kitchen. By the end of the afternoon almost every apartment door on my floor had one of those silver strips to hold in the heat.
I caught Tracy without her clipboard one lunch hour, and she joined me for a cup of tea. An organization that prepares women for nontraditional employment helped her to find her way to the weatherization group. “I was the first girl they ever hired as a field worker,” she said.
Before that she’d worked as a plumber (nonunion, noncertified), a bartender, an emergency medical technician, and at an animal hospital. Along the way she’d earned a BA in criminal justice. “I thought I wanted to be a cop till I dated one for a while.” She’d also gotten a law degree that she’s never used.
“Does your family feel disappointed that you have a law degree and you’re doing construction work?” I asked.
“They wanted me to get a degree; I got a degree. My dad is a carpenter. His career was computer technician at IBM. But he redid our entire house. He can do it all, and he taught it to me. I love it. Besides, I make more at this than I would as a lawyer.”
For the moment that was probably true. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 required contractors receiving federal funds to pay local “prevailing wages.” This is generally interpreted as union wages. After a bit of a tussle, that requirement was attached to the ARRA or stimulus bill.
Because of the variety of work they did, my three insulators were classified as carpenters. That meant that Tracy had earned $70,000 during the year that she’d worked exclusively on stimulus contracts. “I paid like $15,000 in taxes,” she told me proudly.
But the two-year stimulus program was just about over. Because of the slow start her group was granted an extension to finish our job. But in another few weeks she’d be back to earning $40,000 a year. That was fine with her, she said. It was still the work she loved.
Though Tracy was clocked out for lunch, she took a call from Cleavon with a question about washers. “Yes, I’m the informal supervisor,” she acknowledged when she got off the phone. “Except not in the sense that I would ever rat the fellas out for anything. But I tell them what to do, where to go next.” This was not because of her education, she said, but because she’d been taken on staff a little before them.
Her really important contribution to the team, Tracy thought, was helping them get into the individual apartments. This was tricky in any part of the city. “But frankly,” she said, “gaining access in your building is harder than anywhere else I’ve worked.” That’s all she would say. Despite my coaxing, her professionalism prevented her from telling me stories about my eccentric neighbors.
She did wonder, however, whether the heating team would have as much trouble when they came to put regulators on our radiators. “They’re going to be installing in each apartment,” she said. “But it’ll be a bit of a waste because of the windows.”
That’s when the bad news sank in. A building like ours has to pay at least one-fourth of its weatherization costs. Replacing hundreds of irregular-sized windows over a century old was beyond our means. It would be so expensive that it probably wouldn’t meet the government’s standards for cost effectiveness even if we could pay our share. So after the job was finished, I’d still have to stuff towels into the cracks around my elegant, wood-framed windows when it rains. Tracy deplored the energy waste even as she admired the vintage woodwork.
She thanked me for the tea, noticed my odd-sized hanging lamp on her way out, and promised to send up special flood bulbs that would fit. In her capacity as informal supervisor, she also promised to send “the fellas” up to talk to me next day at lunch.
José Santos is a slight twenty-four-year-old born in the Dominican Republic and raised since school age in New York City. Weatherization work introduced him to many new neighborhoods, and he didn’t mind sounding provincial. “I went out to your supermarket the first day to buy sandwiches for us. It cost $30. We bring our lunch now.” José’s partner Cleavon Bell is a sturdy forty-five-year-old who seems far more sophisticated and confident. But they both felt awkward being interviewed.
“Is the ARRA money the best pay you’ve ever earned?” I asked the two.
“Is that the Recovery Act?” Cleavon asked.
“Yeah,” José answered him.
“Then yes,” Cleavon said, laughing, “because I recovered. We started to be like real citizens. We got a taste of what it was to pay bills, to have money in your pocket.”
“Yeah, it feels good,” José agreed.
When I asked if they saved any of the temporary windfall, they both answered by describing how they were now helping their families. José talked about paying his mother’s rent. Cleavon spoke about his children’s Catholic school tuition and his sister in college. “Everybody is eating now,” Cleavon said. “My wife says, ‘You know, you’re the number one son right now.’ I’ll have to break the news to them when ARRA stops,” he ended wistfully.
Though they hadn’t really answered my question, I surmise that for good or for bad just about all of their ARRA earnings flow directly from their pockets into the consumer economy. Indeed one of the advantages they cited of ARRA jobs was that they paid weekly instead of biweekly.
“Before this job,” said José, “I used to be a porter near Avenue B. I had nine buildings, and it paid me minimum wage. Like seven twenty-five an hour. They took me on like full-time, but they didn’t tell me that it was temporary. After a couple of months they started giving me days off and more days off. I’m asking them, ‘Is it my work?’ But actually, it was because they only needed a weekend porter. Some weeks it was a $50 check. That wasn’t enough, because I got …”
“We got families, responsibilities,” Cleavon said, finishing José’s thought.
“So I had to quit.”
After that José was hired on a house renovation. That also paid minimum wage, but the boss was nice and taught him some carpentry skills. But the renovation was soon finished. Then a friend of the family’s showed José a flyer about the community group that offered GED and job training, and he registered.
Cleavon, by contrast, had had a longtime, steady job with a private sanitation company. “I decided to give it up after twenty years. It was outside in the weather, and it was having its effect on my body. I decided to take a different turn of direction, go to school, take a trade. This is why I choose to learn this trade of ‘going green.’ ”
“Going green slash carpentry,” José said, carefully stating their current occupational designation.
José and Cleavon both earned GEDs and were both among the few accepted into the community group’s internship program at $8 an hour. They were among an even more select group taken onto the weatherization staff.
“We learned a lot,” Cleavon said.
“We learned too much,” José interjected.
“They pay us for using our brains,” Cleavon continued. “We do a lot of physical work, but we also got to always figure out how to do things easier. ‘Work smarter, not harder.’ ”
“I suppose you have to use your brains to get into some of these apartments,” I said, fishing.
“And your charisma and personality,” Cleavon responded with a dapper smile.
“You must have to keep lists of the appointments you make and the way different tenants responded when you knocked on their doors.” I was still hoping for gossip about my neighbors. But the fellas didn’t bite either.
“Yes, paperwork is very essential,” Cleavon explained. “If you don’t have the paperwork correct …”
“Then it’s like you haven’t even done the job,” José said, completing what must have been a maxim of their training. “Remember the first week,” José said to Cleavon. “Everyone said, ‘Not yet. Let them do the physical work, but don’t let them touch the paperwork.’
But Tracy, she showed us and let us actually do the paperwork from the first. Tracy, she taught us the ropes.”
“This crew, we’re like family,” Cleavon said.
“We are family,” José said, making it stronger. “We see each other every day; we help each other. Staff is family.”
When the community group hired people directly, it sent us a multicultural team that looked like the squad room on a NYC cop show. But it also subcontracted work to profit-making companies. These minority-owned businesses tended to be monocultural, though serially diverse. We had a team of Russian electricians who installed fixtures. They generally answered tenant queries by saying, “You ask super.” The Russians were replaced by a team of Mesoamericans who spoke less English but managed to communicate benevolence.
I had the most contact with the West Indian heating crew because I have a work space above the heat return lines and the building was getting brand-new oil burners. We would soon have hot water instead of steam circulating in our pipes.
One day one of the heating men asked if I knew how to locate the person who rented a room that was always locked. Their clipboard guy, a trim, confidence-inspiring man who was informative but not chatty, explained that they’d been trying to trace a pipe into our wing. The building was once several separate structures. Unfortunately, there are no complete plans documenting all the jerry-rigging that had been going on since the nineteenth century. The pipe they were after exited one building section from the first floor but was then directed sharply upward inside a three-foot-six-inch brick wall and may have entered our area through that always-locked studio on the second floor. That turned out to be the case. The place was full of mysteries like that.
I would sometimes see the heating men in animated conversation at the end of a hallway. They were now working for me, and we employers are always suspicious that workers are discussing personal matters on our time. But whenever I managed to overhear anything, they seemed to be talking about pipes and elbows.
Except for a core of salaried men, contractors generally hire people as the work comes in. The clipboard man told me that since they’d started our job, his company had hired two recent community college grads plus a master plumber—now laid off. They’d also brought back some regulars.
A mature man who worked off and on installing heat sensors told me that back in the islands he’d been a factory engineer and also taught at a college. He hoped to find that kind of work in New York, but till the recession is over, he said, “This is my survival job.”
A young American black man I’d not seen before emerged from the basement one day with sweat-soaked work clothes. I felt guilty pestering the tired fellow as he sank down onto the step and took a drink from his thermos. But he seemed happy to talk about his job. He said he’d been with the company for three years. He’d been off during the prior three weeks, but they needed him now to rip out these big old oil boilers.
“Yes,” he confirmed, “it’s always off and on like that, but it’s a really good job.” I asked what he does in between. “I hate doing nothing, so I volunteer at churches and stuff … No, I’m not married. I’m concentrating on work first.” He had no special training for the job. “I’m a laborer, but learning lots of things as I work along.”
It was good to know that he wasn’t making $7.50 an hour the way José had when he picked up construction work. Laborers had to get the union laborers’ wage on jobs covered by the Davis-Bacon Act.
“We have to keep track and make sure to change wage scales when our people work on government jobs like weatherization,” the clipboard man explained.
“Then I shouldn’t be taking up your expensive stimulus time with these questions,” I apologized.
“I’m on salary,” he said with a slightly sardonic nod. “I wish I was hourly.” Then he checked something off on his clipboard, excused himself, and headed to the basement. That’s the last I saw of him. I went away for two weeks, and when I returned, our weatherization was complete. I miss having those purposeful well-paid workmen around.
Did the weatherization stimulus work? It obviously created jobs for both experienced and new construction workers. And since these men (Tracy was the only woman I encountered) tended to spend their pay, the money had the multiplier effect planners hope for from a stimulus.
We won’t be able to tally the energy savings either nationally or even in my one building for about a year. Everyone is keeping before-and-after records, for, as Cleavon and José learned, “if you don’t have the paperwork correct … then it’s like you haven’t even done the job.”
At this point I can only report anecdotally that before we were weatherized, apartments facing the river were chilly, while I had to keep my windows open to let the heat escape. Since that’s no longer true, it’s reasonably safe to say that our weatherization must have produced some energy savings. Assuming it was run efficiently, it was indeed a twofer. It both created jobs and lowered our utility bills. We’re also releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. So if you’re concerned with global warming, you might call it a three-fer.
There are still millions of drafty houses in America, and we needed a much larger jobs program to have a Keynesian effect on recession unemployment. For these reasons I ought to favor extending the weatherization initiative. And I would, except for one serious drawback. We paid for it with borrowed money.
“Don’t Borrow, Take!”
When you borrow money, you have to pay it back with interest. When the government borrows, the money flows from all taxpayers to some investors. It’s true that Treasury securities were earning relatively low interest at the time, but a billion here, a billion there, it adds up.
In my populist fantasy, bringing insulation to urban tenants was akin to electrifying rural households through the New Deal. There’s one big difference, though. The Roosevelt administration didn’t fund its projects by leaving rich people with all their wealth and handing them more.
Between 1929 and 1939 taxes on capital gains rose from 12.5 percent to 30 percent; taxes on the top bracket of earned income rose from 25 percent to 79 percent. Not only did a U.S. Congress impose these redistributive taxes, but even more amazingly, rich people actually paid them. Like it or not, they chipped in to fund the New Deal.
But between 1976 and 2008 the capital gains tax went down from 39.9 percent to 15.4 percent. Then, in 2010, two years into the recession, it went down a further four-tenths of a percent. Instead of asking people who arguably caused the mess to chip in for the cleanup, we’re paying them interest on the cleaning bills. Those cleaning bills include the $800 billion financial bailout. So we paid banks interest for the money we borrowed to give to them.
Yes, I’d like to see more stimuli like weatherization. But if we pay for them by borrowing, then the rich get richer. Piles of investment capital grow at a time when there are still few productive ways to invest. But that led to the last bubble and will inflate the next one that much sooner. That’s why I offer the practical advice: “Don’t borrow, take!”
Unfortunately, those were not the options on the floor. The U.S. Congress wasn’t choosing between debt-funded stimuli (borrowing) and tax-funded stimuli (taking). At the height of the crisis its debate had been between insufficient stimuli and no stimuli at all. We’d had our insufficient stimulus bill. Now, with twenty-four million officially unemployed or underemployed, Congress had decided to try no stimulus at all.
(Actually, there was a third option I hadn’t noticed. As the special weatherization stimulus program expired, the government cut back the regular Weatherization Assistance Program that had existed since the Carter administration. So you might say we’ve opted for a counter-stimulus.)