At the time, however, home solar was something only the affluent could afford. A modest 5-kilowatt system would have topped $30,000 in 2011, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Within a few years, prices had fallen and solar companies were making aggressive sales pitches in her neighborhood. Still, the numbers didn’t work for Jones, who was a full-time student working as an educator in a women’s homeless shelter.

“I couldn’t lay down thousands of dollars for the panels,” she said. “I couldn’t get in the game with a big check.”

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Then one day, at a community event, she ran into representatives from Resonant Energy, a Boston-based solar developer that focuses on projects in low-income areas. Resonant’s staff understood both Jones’ passion for solar and her financial challenges. They introduced her to the Massachusetts Solar Loan, a program that financed residential solar projects, and offered lower-income borrowers fixed, below-market rates and forgiveness of 30 percent of the loan principal.

The solar panels on Jones’ home went up in October 2017 and she hasn’t had to pay an electric bill since the following April. Though her bill was less than $100 – lower than the state average of $126 – the savings have made it easy to afford her monthly solar loan payment of $127.

“When I got my solar panels I just felt like I won the lottery,” she said. “I found it to be very empowering.”

In Massachusetts, the average household spends 3 percent of its income on energy costs, while households with income between 30 percent and 60 percent of the area median — roughly between $32,000 and $64,000 for a family of three — spend 7 percent. For families living below the poverty line, this energy burden jumps to 21 percent.

Solar power could decrease those costs. For renters or homeowners who can’t install solar, community-shared solar — larger developments that sell power to multiple users — can help lower the cost of energy by a few hundred dollars each year. For homeowners who install their own systems, the savings will generally pay off the price in around five or six years. After that, all future savings are pure financial benefit.

These savings could make a meaningful difference to households that routinely have to choose between paying bills and buying medication or fresh food. Nationwide, more than 20 percent of households reported foregoing food or other necessities to pay an energy bill in 2015, the latest year for which data is available from the Energy Information Administration.

So far, however, low-income solar has gotten too little traction for the effects to be realized at any scale, supporters say. These initiatives are undermined by their failure to understand the cultural, historical, and financial realities in the communities they seek to serve, a dynamic Massachusetts is grappling with right now.

The state’s solar targets and policies are widely considered some of the most ambitious in the country. The Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program, or SMART, recently expanded to provide incentives for 3,200 megawatts of solar development, a number that could power more than 300,000 average households. This expansion will more than double the state’s installed solar capacity.

The program pays the owners of solar generation units — anyone from private homeowners with a few panels on their roofs to large-sale solar farms — a set rate per kilowatt-hour of energy produced. The base rate depends on size and location, and increases slightly when the project includes features the state wishes to encourage, such as reclaiming a polluted site or serving low-income customers. The original base rates ranged from 15.6 cents to 35.8 cents, though they have, by design, dropped as more projects have signed up for the incentive.

Though the program includes incentives to encourage developments in low-income neighborhoods, there has been little progress toward this goal since SMART launched in November 2018: Just 4.7 percent of the capacity approved by the program as of late November 2020 has been for low-income projects. According to Ben Underwood, co-founder of Resonant Energy, that’s partially because the incentive doesn’t offer enough money to attract developers, whose main goal is to make a profit: It’s much more lucrative to build solar generation units on open land. At the federal level, a renewable energy tax credit can lower the net cost of a solar installation, but doesn’t make it easier for lower-income consumers to afford the upfront price.

However, the barriers go beyond the purely financial. “A lot of states focus on the monetary barriers,” said Nathan Phelps, regulatory director for clean energy advocacy group Vote Solar. “That doesn’t actually address all of the underlying issues.”

One major stumbling block is the current requirement that low-income solar customers buying energy from community shared systems — the main way renters or homeowners with unsuitable roofs access renewable energy — sign a contract. With a contract on their financial report, it may be more difficult for them to secure a car loan or other needed credit, Phelps said. The decision to go solar therefore becomes another hard choice, rather than an obvious financial boost.

In these communities, there is also often an ingrained distrust of salespeople peddling energy deals. For many years, competitive power suppliers preyed on low-income and minority neighborhoods in the state, promising low electricity prices and hiding expensive loopholes in the fine print. Low-income households often lost hundreds of dollars a year, to the tune of $57 million from 2015 to 2018, reports by state attorney general Maura Healey found. Today, many members of these communities are understandably wary when outsiders show up offering contracts for energy savings.

Environmental justice and clean energy activists are lobbying to change the system, allowing a simplified, no-contract form of payment that will avoid these concerns. So far, the state’s Department of Energy and the Environment, which oversees SMART, has not committed to such a change. Some in the industry, however, say there are hopeful signs that the state will soon start allowing smaller projects to go ahead without contracts.

Looking ahead, environmental justice advocates want more people from low-income and environmental justice communities actively engaged in the conversation next time the rules come up for revision.

“We need to provide benefits to people who live in environmental justice communities, then engage them to help us write the next policy,” Underwood said. “There’s something inherently democratic about solar and it is very important for us in crafting policy to make the most of that potential every step of the way.”

But when he arrived, he noticed dark staining on the home’s mortar and a thick layer of algae growing along the exterior wall — something highly unusual for a home in the Arizona desert.

Concerned, Shaber asked the homeowner if she had a leak. “I mostly do plumbing,” he told her, “and what I’m seeing on the wall is symptomatic of a pretty major water leak.” While at first hesitant to talk about it, the homeowner eventually divulged that there was a problem.

She led Shaber through her home, which was covered in two inches of standing water. A broken bathroom faucet ran constantly into a clogged sink, which overflowed onto the floor. As a result, her possessions were moldy and unusable, and she was months behind on her water bills. The pipes were so backed up that the toilet had long stopped working. Overwhelmed and living alone, the homeowner couldn’t figure out who to call about such an enormous issue, which she feared she couldn’t afford to fix.

What began as a simple home repair illuminated a dire situation for a low-income homeowner.

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According to a 2016 report by the Center for American Progress, 30 million U.S. housing units “have significant physical or health hazards, such as dilapidated structures, poor heating, damaged plumbing, gas leaks, or lead.” By some estimates, poor housing conditions such as these result in health care costs in the billions of dollars.

Such conditions are exactly the kind of overlooked problems that CHRPA’s crew of technicians are trained to solve. In 1982, the Tucson Mennonite church began a small home repair project. Thirty-five years later, that project is now CHRPA, which services upwards of 1,500 low-income households each year across the more than 9,000 miles of Pima County, which has a poverty rate of 18.4 percent.

Many clients are elderly, have disabilities, or are single parents with young children; many live on fixed incomes. After paying for groceries, transportation, medical or dental care, and household goods, there’s little money left for home repair, however critical the problem may be. About 10 percent of homeowners spend more than half their income on housing.

“We prioritize issues of health and safety,” said CHRPA executive director Scott Coverdale. “If we learn of an elderly person who might be medically frail and they don’t have cooling, we go as soon as we have a crew available … Or someone living on $745 a month social security and they pay $350 to the mobile home park, so they literally don’t have the money to fix their cooler or hire a plumber.”

Coverdale and his team of technicians — many of whom are volunteers — conduct emergency repairs ranging from fixing rusted-out pipes and broken water lines to patching up leaky roofs and electrical problems. They also make disability modifications, building wheelchair ramps, widening doorways, and installing shower seats and grab bars. Technicians regularly meet homeowners with disabilities who, previous to modifications, haven’t been able to leave the house or enter the bathroom. Nationally, of households that spend over half their income on rent, between 35 and 40 percent contain someone with a disability.

Technicians often meet people who have been living without cooling for years, some of them in metal-sided trailers in the middle of the desert — a situation particularly dangerous for the medically vulnerable, and one that can lead to hospitalization. CAP reports that “having a working air-conditioner reduces the risk of death from extreme heat by 80 percent,” but “one in five low-income households do not have air conditioners, and many cannot afford the electricity to run them … Low-income households typically spend 14 percent of their total income on energy costs compared with 3.5 percent for other households.”

Coverdale said, “A condition that can be resolved with a $23 cooler pump and an hour of volunteer time ends up costing the community tens of thousands of dollars and the suffering of an individual.” Over the past 10 years, extreme weather events have cost the United States more than $240 billion per year, which includes related health care costs from the burning of fossil fuels.

Before moving to Tucson, Coverdale spent years in Africa and Central America working in advocacy and community development. When he moved to Tucson 18 years ago, he worked construction. While he enjoyed the work, he said “I got a little tired of tearing out a beautiful kitchen and putting in an even more beautiful kitchen.” So he began working with CHRPA. “We’re not just technicians,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is respond to the human need, not just the technical need.”

The organization has forged partnerships with various organizations and agencies across the county. In the case of the homeowner with the standing water in her home, Shaber worked with caseworkers to advocate for a new, safe residence. In other cases, hospitals will refer patients without cooling or water, or the fire department will alert them to a housebound homeowner in need of a wheelchair ramp. CHRPA currently partners with Tucson Water to replace older toilets with newer low-flush toilets to conserve water.

“If someone is isolated or vulnerable, we absolutely want the referral,” said Coverdale. “Even if we have too much work to do already. We want to know about the person in a trailer in the desert with no cooling or no water. It’s really hard to find that person.”

CHRPA receives its funding in a variety of ways, including individual donations and grants from foundations. It also receives material donations — such as work trucks — and funding from utility companies. Unclaimed utility deposits are put into a fund that CHRPA can use for certain home repairs, such as cooler replacements. Tucson Water supplies them with plumbing hardware, including pipes and kitchen faucets. And the organization receives funds from city and county community development block grants and from HUD.

In October, CHRPA volunteer Don L. wrote about responding to a request from a woman named Reglinda, who was suddenly living alone after her husband passed away. During her husband’s long illness, home repairs had not been kept up, and there were several doors that no longer locked or closed. “I don’t feel safe being here alone,” Reglinda told the CHRPA staff. “I love my little house, but I can barely sleep at night because it doesn’t close up anymore.” Volunteers Ted and Don spent two days replacing weather stripping, installing a front door threshold, fixing door jambs, and replacing doors.

“It is one job of hundreds, one house of the myriad homes we visit, one client of the multitude,” wrote Don. “But for Ted and I and Reglinda, there is a transaction of good will that went beyond the $527 of doors and hardware.”

We live in a cabin in Trescott, Maine. Our nearest neighbors are a half-mile down the road in one direction and about two miles in the other, with woods surrounding us. There are two variety stores about 6 miles from us in either direction, and a larger store is 11 miles away.

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Our roof has been leaking for a few years. My husband patches whenever we are able to buy a bundle of shingles and tar, and covers the undone sections with plastic tarps. He has pretty bad arthritis but we can’t afford to hire anyone to help. If we did hire someone, it would use whatever savings we’re trying to scrape together for that elusive new, used vehicle. Meanwhile, we put repairs to our current car on a must-do list since it’s two-and-a-half months past inspection and we know it won’t pass. For example, we had a rusty gas filler pipe, so gas would puddle on the ground. To alleviate that we only put in $5 at a time—smaller puddle. You wouldn’t think that would be a $300 job, but when you add up the estimate for what else needed replacing it was closer to $400.

Both of us are collecting Social Security—I have additional income through part-time work with the Senior Community Service Employment Program. We qualify for food stamps, but an experience 35 years ago has made it a choice of last resort. It was our son’s eighth birthday. We splurged on strawberries and cream for a strawberry shortcake, and on steaks, for his birthday dinner. We may have had to scrimp the rest of the month but at least we would celebrate his birthday. The looks. The cashier and the woman behind me in line watched me handing over the food stamps, and then their eyes went to the steaks and strawberries, and then back to me with an expression I could only describe as scorn.

We built our cabin in 1980-81, and except for five years in Orono while my husband went back to school, we’ve lived there ever since. Yet the Maine State Housing Authority (MSHA) wants more proof that we live there before we can complete an application for heating assistance. We don’t have electricity—we heat with our wood stove—but we’ve had propane delivered here all this time, and bank statements mailed to this address. None of that counts to MSHA, so we don’t apply for heating assistance.

Recently, things became harder for us when we discovered our cell phone account was closed. SafeLink had provided us with a phone that would work in our area. Then, for reasons unexplained, they terminated our service without notice. (Services that help low-income seniors seem to be getting cut, or made more difficult, quite a bit these days.) It’s mean to cut a service that in rural areas can be lifesaving. Our solution was to purchase a simple Tracfone and a card with minutes. The new phone doesn’t keep a charge longer than 2 days and sometimes doesn’t ring when calls come in.

We live in a state of constant anxiety, making a good night’s sleep tough to come by. It’s well-established that prevention is cheaper than crisis care. But if your state refuses to adopt Medicaid expansion—even after the people vote for it—a lot of people are S.O.L. That’s the boat we were in, and the boat some of our friends are still in. We have Medicare but it doesn’t cover hearing, eye care, and oral care. All luxuries. My husband went without glasses for three years after the ones he’d patched with duct tape had a lens fall out and shatter. We found you could get prescription glasses online fairly cheap, but first you had to have a prescription. As far as I know hearing aids aren’t available online cheaper. Luckily, that’s not an issue for us.

So, we make do. We feel grateful for fairly good health (‘cept for the arthritis). We try to save more—although it’s the time of year when a cord of wood at $260 is my two-week paycheck, nearly. We’ve hit a cold spell—forty-six below with the wind chill. The trip to the outhouse becomes less pleasant each morning it goes below zero. And I hope it doesn’t snow too soon, because I haven’t found a pair of winter boots in a thrift store that fits.

And we have to save for that car.

Working for the Philadelphia School District, Ms. Charles was able to manage her utility bills and other living expenses.  Her hardship began in late 2011 when she was diagnosed with cancer and shortly thereafter was laid off.  Out of work, and recovering from surgery, she started to fall behind on her Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW) bills.  As her unemployment compensation ran out, she faced the loss of essential gas heat service.  Her doctor submitted medical certificates to PGW, explaining that the loss of heating would aggravate her condition.  But when her medical certifications ran out three months later, PGW shut off her gas.  She called the Pennsylvania PUC but they turned her away.  Why?  Certain provisions in Chapter 14 of the Public Utility Code limit payment agreements and impose harsh reconnection fees that are simply unrealistic in times of hardship.

A loss of utility service can be disastrous for low-income customers.  There are the immediate health and safety risks, and city agencies may also have no choice but to break a family apart in order to ensure that children are safe.  In the case of Ms. Charles, she learned that a loss of service can also result in eviction.  Her landlord told her she would be evicted if she didn’t pay off her $2800 utility balance to protect the property from a municipal lien—a PGW collection tool enhanced by Chapter 14—and restore service as well.

Ms. Charles reached out to friends and family for help and they came through so she could get her account current.  Shortly after her 65^th birthday, with winter looming, and her income boosted by social security retirement benefits, Ms. Charles’ PGW service was finally restored.   She was luckier than many Philadelphians under similar circumstances, who—with no one to turn to—are cast out of their homes.

When Pennsylvania’s General Assembly added Chapter 14 to the Public Utility Code in 2004, it did so with the recognition that the law was an experiment.  That’s why it included a ten-year sunset provision in the hopes that lawmakers wouldn’t ignore whatever effect the law ended up having on consumers.  Turns out that sunset was a very good idea.  As detailed in our recent report, Out in the Cold, Chapter 14 is a horribly misaligned law which includes as its stated purpose “eliminating opportunities for customers capable of paying to avoid timely payment of utility bills.”  But instead, Chapter 14 has resulted in the loss of essential utility service for low-income customers who are incapable of always paying their bills in full and on time.  It has led to record numbers of utility shut offs and record numbers of customers entering the harsh winter without utility service.

It should come as little surprise that Chapter 14 has had such damaging consequences.  It was originally enacted without public hearings at the urging of utility company lobbyists who claimed widespread payment abuse by customers.  A January 2006 assessment by Joseph Rhodes, Jr., a former PUC Commissioner and member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, found that the lobbyists’ claims had been hollow and it urged repeal.  Advocates called for restoring consumer protections for low-income customers.  Yet despite the clear need for reform, the General Assembly recently reenacted Chapter 14 with minimal changes, ensuring that low-income Pennsylvania utility customers will continue to be placed at risk.

Without access to payment arrangements, and reasonable restoration terms, low-income Pennsylvanians end up making impossible choices between medicine and food as they try to manage their utility bills; or they live without heat while they wait for charitable assistance or help filing for bankruptcy, and the utility service protections that come with it.

To protect the health and safety of all Pennsylvanians—and to ensure that people like Ms. Charles have options when they are facing dire circumstances—utility policy reform must become a central mission of lawmakers.

We stayed.

We moved out of our middle-class house in Bedford, Massachusetts. Thanks to a state law that fast-tracked mixed-income rental development projects, and also a Section 8 federal housing subsidy, we were able to rent an apartment and remain in Bedford, a middle-class town with its good public schools.

I have vivid memories of that difficult time. Checking out at the grocery store, we were the only shoppers in line using food stamps. At school, I was the kid in the cafeteria paying with a voucher for reduced-price lunch. At the welfare office, I remember my mother telling me to “shush” and promising “it would only be a minute.”

“It’s been a lot longer than a minute,” I told her.

“A minute is a figure of speech,” she informed me.

After three years my mother got a job as a travel agent. A couple years later, she was hired as a contracts administrator at Raytheon. By the time I was eleven—six years after we moved into an apartment and turned to the safety net for help—my mother was able to purchase a house for our family. It was a turning point for us, and one that wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of help during the lean years.

My ability to stay in Bedford’s good school system, in particular, changed the course of my life. I went on to attend UCLA and then Yale Law School. I was acutely aware that a lot of nameless public servants had made decisions to expand opportunity and that those decisions had made all the difference for my family and me. So today, I take great pride in leading an institution that at its very core is about expanding opportunities for all Americans. We talk a lot in this town about things like “sequester” and “the debt ceiling” and “target deficit rates”—but to me, public policy basically comes down to this question: is it expanding or contracting opportunity for most Americans?

I believe we have a historic opportunity to address poverty today, because the interests of low-income people and the middle class are converging. Median wages—the wages of middle-income earners—have been stagnant for twelve years. People recognize there is growing inequality in this country and that something is amiss when companies are doing well but people aren’t—when dividends, stock prices, and CEO salaries rise but wages don’t.

And while we have a clear opportunity to make the connection between the interests of people in poverty and the interests of the middle class, we have our work cut out for us. Conservatives have successfully pitted people in the middle against people struggling near the bottom. They are skilled at exploiting economic anger and anxiety, fear and distrust. For example, they have convinced many Americans that many people who turn to the safety net want to be on welfare rather than having a job. This mistaken notion is particularly troubling right now, when the hardest-hit communities face high unemployment rates of 20 to 30 percent. Conservatives say we have to break up the safety net or people won’t pursue jobs. But the truth is those jobs just don’t exist right now. So the real effect of these heartless policies will be more people hungry, more people homeless, and more children with fewer opportunities to succeed—children just like my brother and I.

For my family, as for many American families, the safety net was a bridge that carried us through hard times. That’s why it’s important that I tell my story.

Among some on the center left, there is a political strategy to not talk directly about poverty.  Many will say things like “trying to get people to the middle class.” I think that strategy is a mistake. If we fail to talk openly about poverty, we miss an opportunity to address people’s anxieties and misconceptions about low-income people. We fail to correct the misunderstandings about who poor people are, and we fail to make progress we otherwise could.

That is why at the Center for American Progress we work hard to speak clearly and directly about poverty, and to ensure the conversation isn’t an abstract debate, but one about real people. So we support the Half in Ten campaign to reduce poverty by half over ten years—just as we did from 1964 to 1973—which engages people to tell their stories about what the safety net meant for their lives, just as I tell mine. Our new TalkPoverty.org blog features contributors living in poverty today who write about the struggles they face. Teams as diverse as housing, healthcare, education, budget, and tax policy are working hard to determine the impact of policy decisions on people in poverty or at-risk of falling into poverty. (And let’s remember, there are now 106 million Americans—more than 1 in 3 of us— either living in poverty or on less than $37,000 annually for a family of three, which is a single hardship away from poverty.)

When we take on the assumptions and stereotypes directly—and actually look at the lives of poor people—we see in fact that their lives are full of struggle (including the struggle to navigate a welfare system that seems designed to make it as hard as possible for people to receive benefits).

Recently, I testified at a Senate HELP committee hearing on ways to improve the economic security of working women in America. One of the other witnesses on the panel was Armanda Legros. Ms. Legros was 6 ½ months pregnant when she pulled a stomach muscle at work. The doctor told her no more heavy lifting and gave her a written note for her employer, but the employer refused to comply. So Ms. Legros lost her job and had to go on unemployment insurance and food stamps. She is a perfect example of a person who wants to work but is forced to turn to the safety net. Her story is also a perfect example of the kinds of struggles low-income workers face in the workplace every day. We need to give more low-income people the opportunity to tell their stories at Congressional hearings, so our elected officials see the true face of poverty in America, and I applaud the Senate HELP Committee for providing Ms. Legros a platform.

It’s time for a new focus on the solutions to poverty, both in the November elections, and during the presidential election in 2016. To force the issue to the forefront of the national conversation, advocates in Washington and in communities across the country will need to mobilize and speak out. People will need to raise the issue at town halls just as we did for health care reform. We all need to stand with workers who are fighting for better wages and working conditions and give them opportunities to tell their stories. It’s not a question of whether change will come from the grassroots or Washington—we need to fight for good policy in Washington and raise our voices at the state and local levels.

We’re all in the same boat now, searching for economic stability for our families and an economy that raises wages for everyone. It’s time for us to make that case clearly and unapologetically. There are many times when we miss opportunities in public policy. We can’t miss this one.

A local crisis center referred me to the Blue Valley Community Action Partnership for assistance with food and housing. After listening to my situation, the staff treated me with dignity as they provided my family with nutritious food from the food pantry, clothing, household goods, and new backpacks full of school supplies for my children. My family was enrolled in the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program, which enabled me to find a safe home by providing temporary financial assistance for rent and utilities.

I enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, so I could buy groceries. And Medicaid provided us with vaccinations, medical and dental care, prescriptions, and counseling services, which allowed my kids to enroll in a new school.

The security of having a home, food, and medical care was a tremendous weight off my shoulders, allowing me to focus on finding employment in our small rural community. In August, two months after initially receiving help, I obtained a part-time job at a retail store. A few weeks later, I became a full-time employee as a case coordinator for the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program when it became available at the Blue Valley Community Action Partnership, the same program that originally helped me.

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I have now been employed there for more than three years and gained the job skills needed to advance to my current position as a research and development officer.

It has been a struggle to become financially independent; at times I needed to work two jobs and had to rely on income tax credits to make ends meet, but I am fortunate to no longer need assistance for my family’s basic needs.