Housing Crisis, Energy Crisis: How Soaring Power Bills Keep People in Poverty and What Can Be Done

Many Athens residents struggle to afford the expensive costs of their houses, but building and renovating homes to be energy efficient could be the solution.

With a poverty rate around 30%, many Athenians are already struggling to pay rent. Add on expensive energy bills and you can imagine why the cost of living is getting so expensive.

Unless you own your own home, not much can be done to combat big power bills. But government and nonprofit organizations are hard at work trying to help low-income Athenians manage their energy costs.

Margaret Songster works for the Athens Office of Sustainability. She and her team are working with the community to address the low quality of housing.

“People who are kind of underneath the poverty line, can’t afford to have a lot of rent and what that means is that they’re also investing in low housing quality stock.” Songster says. “So that means that they come out with energy bills that are exceptionally high and they can’t afford.”

According to a 2019 Atlanta Journal Constitution article, the cost of utility bills in Georgia are more expensive compared to other states. Making homes energy efficient is a solution that can lower the price of utility bills, but the initial investments can be costly.

In Athens, where nearly 50% of residents rent their homes, that solution faces a major hurdle. Property owners lack the incentive to make their units more efficient.

“There’s a capital investment cost whether it’s building new housing, more sustainable practice, repairing older housing, or changing our energy mix,” says Andrew Saunders the director of central services for Athens.

Despite the cost Songster and Saunders, both agree that investing in more energy efficient housing will benefit the community in the long term.

“I argue that it’s more expensive for this community to not take action than it is to actually provide some level of intervention,” says Saunders.

The community can’t wait for private owners to fix up their properties, so Local nonprofits like the Athens Land Trust are working to build and renovate homes with energy efficiency in mind.

“A lot of it is just the size of what you’re doing and how tight you’re building the structure, how you site the house, the size of the house, the systems that you put and how they’re calculated to fit the size of the house so you’re being efficient,” says Athens Land Trust Executive Director Heather Benham.

Homes built by the land trust save residents hundreds of dollars a month on utility bills.

“That’s what an efficient house does for you. Your bills go down from $200 a month to something that’s more manageable,” says Benham.

The energy burden in Athens is fixable, but it’s an issue that also requires housing to be affordable, which is an issue that the city has struggled to tackle in meaningful ways. Until then, renters are left tightening their faucets and micromanaging the thermostat.