In Pittsburgh, Climate Justice and Affordability Are the Same Fight

A coalition in Pennsylvania demonstrated the power of cross-sector organizing by bringing together residents of a senior public housing property to advocate for and help shape immediate retrofit plans for their own building, while also planning ahead for the future.

In late 2024, residents of a senior public housing property in Blawnox, a small Allegheny River community a few miles from downtown Pittsburgh, were living with a failing HVAC system, a deteriorating hot water tank, and air pollution drifting into their building from a nearby coal transport operation.

A few months later, a storm knocked out power to the building entirely. Maintenance staff fired up an aging diesel generator, but it took hours to get the lights back on—and then exhaust fumes began filling the lobby, drifting into residents’ apartments. Staff tried redirecting the fumes with fans. It didn’t work well.

For a building of more than 80 senior citizens, some already managing cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, breathing diesel exhaust in their own living rooms was a health emergency on top of failing housing conditions.

That combination of deferred maintenance, environmental burden, and acute risk from the very backup system meant to protect residents became the pilot case for a decarbonization campaign. The campaign has since moved more than $4 million in public money, created a template for co-governance between a grassroots coalition and a county executive, and challenged the argument that climate action and affordability are competing goals.

The coalition behind it, the Allegheny Decarbonization Coalition, was anchored by Pittsburgh United and made up of 64 partners from 45 organizations, including IUPAT DC57, IBEW Local 5, the Black Equity Coalition, the Keystone Energy Efficiency Alliance, Pittsburgh Gateways, and the Master Builders Association.

Initially, the coalition’s plan was to secure a large federal award through the Inflation Reduction Act’s programs. When federal climate priorities shifted abruptly in early 2025, that path closed. The coalition pivoted to Allegheny County’s own budget instead, securing a $1 million allocation (the first time the county ever directed funds to its housing authority specifically for decarbonization), plus more than $3 million from the Allegheny County Housing Authority’s own budget for energy-efficiency upgrades.

That pivot is the real story, and it’s a story about power and long-term relationships, not just alignment. A coalition without an existing base, without trained tenant leadership, and without a working relationship with county government could not have absorbed the collapse of its federal strategy and converted it into a local win within months. Pittsburgh United could, because it had spent over a decade building exactly those capacities.

Residents were organized, trained, and given a formal role in shaping the retrofit plans for their own building, on the premise that when the coalition wins, residents also win.

For funders, the lesson isn’t just that climate and affordability goals happen to fit together. It’s that putting them together on purpose is organizing work, takes years to build the power and relationships to do, and philanthropy’s habit of funding “climate justice” and “economic justice” as separate portfolios can make that work hard to see, let alone fund.

How the Power Got Built

Pittsburgh United’s approach starts from an explicit power analysis: naming who holds power in the region—large employers, landlords, political campaign donors—and building coalitions large and disciplined enough to move them. The Allegheny Decarbonization Coalition’s diversity, intentionally including labor unions, tenant organizations, environmental groups, and workforce-development nonprofits from the beginning of the campaign, is often described as a strength. But power is demonstrated in what a coalition can push decisionmakers to do that they would not necessarily have done otherwise.

The fact that the pivot in this decarbonization campaign succeeded on a compressed timeline, after a federal strategy failed, demonstrates that the coalition had already built durable leverage instead of scrambling in response to the crisis. Power and relationships built in advance is a transferable lesson for other coalitions and their funders.

The campaign didn’t stop pushing once the county’s $1 million was secured.

A core feature of the coalition’s organizing strategy is that tenant councils were centered and there was direct engagement with residents of public housing in the county. Residents were trained and given a formal role in shaping the retrofit plans for their own building on the premise that when the coalition wins, residents also win—in lower utility bills, better indoor air quality, and functioning heat and hot water.

What turned Blawnox from a maintenance problem into a campaign was organizing. The Blawnox Apartments Tenant Council, led by resident and Council President Joan Mills, had already been meeting, documenting living conditions, and building relationships with Pittsburgh United organizers before the outage, which is part of why the coalition was able to move so quickly. Mills didn’t just describe her building’s problems to organizers; she became a public leader of the campaign. Along with immediate repair, Mills asked for additions such as rooftop solar and battery storage so that the next storm wouldn’t force seniors to choose between reliable power and clean air.

That’s a different posture than “residents were consulted.” Mills and the tenant council were leading the coalition’s public argument, not just supplying anecdotes for it. And the campaign didn’t stop pushing once the county’s $1 million was secured. Mills went on to press state Sen. Lindsay Williams and state Rep. Mandy Steele for another $1 million in the 2026 state budget, treating the county allocation as a floor to build on rather than a finish line.

That’s what tenant power looks like in practice: not a single moment of input early in the process, but an ongoing, named, public role in setting the agenda for what “done” means. This is partially what makes the coalition’s relationship with the county a genuine co-governance arrangement rather than a channel for resident input. Co-governance is at its best when both “sides” understand the constraints of the other and are in a relationship that is about moving an overall strategy together, rather than treating the relationship as adversarial.

What’s Secured, What’s Underway, and What’s Still Ahead

Secured funding: the $1 million Allegheny County budget allocation and more than $3 million from the Allegheny County Housing Authority’s own budget for energy-efficiency upgrades, investments projected to save the housing authority roughly $22,000 a year in lighting and electricity costs at Blawnox alone.

Work underway: The Blawnox retrofit itself, and a new pre-apprenticeship program launched with Pittsburgh Gateways to build pathways into union decarbonization jobs.

Anticipated, not yet achieved: At its December 2025 convening, coalition partners discussed expanding the housing-decarbonization model to other public housing authorities in the region, challenging data center developers on community benefits, and advancing the proposed Pennsylvania Energy Savings and Jobs Buildings Fund (a state-level financing mechanism), along with securing a second $1 million from the state budget that tenant leaders and coalition staff have publicly called for.

Tensions That Could Make or Break This Model

A coalition this broad is not friction-free, and the tension is likely where the most transferable knowledge sits. Labor unions, tenant organizations, environmental groups, workforce-development nonprofits, county government, and potentially private developers do not share a single timeline, risk tolerance, or definition of success.

A union may prioritize wage floors and job quality over speed; an environmental group may push for faster or broader decarbonization than a housing authority’s capital cycle allows; tenants may prioritize immediate relief from a broken HVAC system over a longer, more comprehensive retrofit; and a county government operating under real budget constraints may be unable to move as fast as any of its coalition partners want.

There is also structural tension: The co-governance relationship described here depends heavily on a specific county executive’s openness to it. That is a strength when the relationship is good, and a vulnerability when it depends on one official rather than an institutionalized process. Any argument for replicability elsewhere needs to include what happens to this model under a less receptive administration.

The usual framing of climate action and affordability at odds with each other treats that tension as a natural feature of the policy landscape.

The Heinz Endowments have provided Pittsburgh United with sustained general operating support for more than a decade, funding that helped the organization build the staff capacity, tenant leadership infrastructure, and deep relationships with both county government and a broad array of coalition partners. These relationships made a fast pivot from a failed federal strategy to a local budget win possible. Catalytic, shorter-term grants from national funders including BuildUS, Invest in Our Future, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Jobs With Justice, and People’s Action helped accelerate specific pieces of the campaign, such as the December 2025 convening and the pre-apprenticeship program launch.

It’s worth distinguishing what each kind of funding actually did. Long-term, flexible local support built durability: the staff time, trust, relationships, and institutional memory that let the coalition absorb a strategic shock and still deliver. Time-limited national funding added acceleration and connective tissue to other regions doing similar work, but it did not build the underlying organizing capacity that had to already exist for the catalytic money to be useful.

That distinction matters for replication, and so do this model’s limits. This case rests on a funder willing to commit a decade-plus of largely unrestricted support to a single anchor organization, a coalition that had already done the work of building tenant leadership and a cross-sector base before this campaign began, and a county executive disposed toward collaborative governance. Those conditions are not universal, and a funder or coalition elsewhere without one or more of them should not expect the same sequence to play out the same way.

An Open Question for Funders

The usual framing of climate action and affordability at odds with each other treats that tension as a natural feature of the policy landscape. The Allegheny Decarbonization Coalition’s experience suggests it’s more accurate to treat it as a condition that persists in the absence of organized power. The tension dissolves, at least locally and partially, when that power exists.

This reframes the funding question for philanthropy. It’s not simply “should we fund coalitions that connect climate and economic justice work?” It’s whether conventional grantmaking organized around issue silos, annual cycles, and program-specific metrics is structured to recognize and sustain the slower, cross-cutting organizing infrastructure this kind of alignment actually requires—or whether it will keep funding the pieces separately and missing their connections.

Pittsburgh offers one data point on what happens when the infrastructure gets built. It does not yet answer how many of the conditions behind it—including a decade of committed local funding, an already-organized tenant base, and a receptive county government—must be present elsewhere for the model to be replicated. That is the harder and more useful question for funders watching from outside western Pennsylvania.