Illinois city passes law to slash emissions from big buildings
On March 10, the Chicago suburb joined 14 other state and local governments across the U.S. that have enacted policies to decarbonize existing buildings, which often account for the bulk of a city's carbon emissions. Evanston's Healthy Buildings Ordinance marks the first such law — known as a building performance standard — to pass in the U.S. this year and the second to be adopted in the Midwest after St. Louis.
More could be on the way soon. Evanston is part of a wave of small cities that have recently passed building performance standards, including Newton, Massachusetts, in December. Another city outside Boston and two in California are also working on adopting standards this year, according to the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit that helps state and local governments implement building efficiency policies.
Under the Trump administration, local leadership is 'the only front on which the climate action battle will be fought,' said Jonathan Nieuwsma, an Evanston city council member and key sponsor of the law.
For cities that want to continue climate progress, regulating large, existing buildings is one of the best avenues available, said Cara Pratt, Evanston's sustainability and resilience manager. Besides targeting local emissions sources, performance standards spur more proactive maintenance to ensure cities are 'providing the healthiest indoor air environment possible for the folks who live and work in these buildings.'
The city of Evanston, home to around 75,000 residents, committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 under a 2018 climate action plan. Buildings are key to reaching that target: The city's 500 largest structures alone account for roughly half of total emissions, and the sector overall accounts for about 80%. While the city has adopted building codes to rein in emissions from new construction, existing buildings aren't subject to equivalent rules to make sure routine upgrades of systems like heating and cooling happen in line with Evanston's climate goals.
The new law fills in that gap by requiring the city's biggest commercial, multifamily, and government buildings to reduce their energy-use intensity, achieve zero on-site fossil fuel combustion, and procure 100% renewable electricity by 2050. But the ordinance itself does little aside from setting up long-term goals. Instead, it creates two groups charged with developing the detailed rules needed to actually implement the law.
One is a technical committee that will develop interim targets covering five-year intervals between 2030 and 2050, along with other regulations like compliance pathways and penalties. The other will serve as a community accountability board to ensure the policy's design and implementation incorporates equity concerns, including by minimizing costs to low-income residents and tenants and providing support to less-resourced buildings such as schools or affordable housing.
Like other building performance standards across the country, Evanston's policy will set limits on emissions or energy efficiency without mandating how property owners should reach those targets. Buildings can typically choose from a menu of compliance options, from weatherization and efficiency upgrades to installing heat pumps and other electric alternatives.
Nieuwsma describes Evanston's law as 'an enabling ordinance' that 'sets up a process for those very important details to be developed with robust stakeholder input.' Once both committees agree on regulations, they will need to be approved by the City Council. Nieuwsma and other officials expect the city to adopt rules sometime next year.
Evanston's policy is unusual in baking in a high level of formal input from property owners. Three out of six seats on the technical committee will be nominated directly by local building owners associations, an amendment made after several City Council deliberations. (The rest of the members of both committees will be nominated by the mayor.)
The setup is designed to address property owners' cost concerns and could help Evanston avoid industry pushback that has stymied similar laws in places like Colorado, which currently faces a lawsuit brought by apartment and hotel trade associations against its policy.
Building performance standards are still relatively novel. The first one in the U.S. was introduced in Washington, D.C., in 2018, followed by New York City's Local Law 97 in 2019. Four states — Colorado, Maryland, Oregon, and Washington — and 11 local governments, including Evanston, have now adopted the policy. More than 30 other jurisdictions have committed to introducing the standards as part of a national coalition that was led by the White House under the Biden administration and is now spearheaded by the Institute for Market Transformation.
Last year, the Biden administration doled out hundreds of millions of federal dollars under the Inflation Reduction Act to cities and states pursuing building performance standards. Evanston was one of them and received a $10.4 million conditional award from the Department of Energy in early January.
But since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has attempted to freeze and claw back climate funding to nonprofits and local governments. Pratt said the federal government has not told the city that it will withdraw its grant, but Evanston has also not received word on whether the funding will be finalized.
The city had intended to use the grant to hire additional staff and support energy audits for resource-constrained buildings like public schools, Pratt said. Yet regardless of whether the city receives the money, the work to reduce emissions from large buildings will continue, she said, adding that Evanston committed to adopting a building performance standard a few years ago without the promise of federal funding. 'To me, it was always a huge positive addition. But it's not necessary to do the work.'
Jessica Miller from the Institute for Market Transformation, who served on a committee that helped the city develop its ordinance, pointed out that the country's first building performance standards were passed during the first Trump administration. 'There are many jurisdictions that have passed these types of policies without federal support,' she said.
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