2021 Quick Start Grant Recipients

Revalue

Overview

Revalue will remediate home health hazards or code violations in low-income West Oakland households through electrification and will provide training to contractors and apprentices to improve the diversity of the local HVAC workforce.

Market Barrier

Low-income households often are not served by existing home retrofit programs for a variety of reasons, and these same households often have home health hazards or code violations.   In addition, many programs have difficulty reaching target communities due to the lack of cultural relevance and community familiarity because existing building electrification contractors do not reflect the communities they intend to serve.

Proposed Solution

Half of the program funds will be used to provide direct installations of heat pumps for water heating and space heating and cooling, focusing on properties identified by the Revalue.io GIS data platform that can identify target properties based on existing code complaints, age, operating expenses, and other variables. The remaining project funds will support existing local diverse contractor training programs in collaboration with the Cypress Mandela Training Center; these apprentices and contractors will then have a guaranteed project pipeline from program installations.

Theory of Change

This project aims to accelerate the electrification of homes in underserved communities by building local contractor understanding and capacity, increasing owner and tenant understanding and acceptance of electrification, streamlining and combining various funding resources to finance projects, and developing a project pipeline for contractors to create local, sustainable careers.

Housing:

Multi-family deed restricted affordable housing

Technology:

HPWH

Central HPWH Boilers; Split, Packaged

Ductless Muni-split HVAC

Location:

West Oakland, CA