May 13, 2025 | Adelyn Mui
A new initiative is taking aim at a key barrier facing low-income homeowners: weatherization deferrals. Weatherization is the process of making the home more energy-efficient, which can lower energy bills and improve overall home comfort. The project, titled “Reducing Deferrals by Integrating Healthy Homes with Weatherization,” is looking to enhance energy efficiency upgrades by also addressing the environmental health hazards that often disqualify homes from weatherization programs.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission, the three-year effort plans to integrate healthy home evaluations into the traditional Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) audits. Using DOE funds, the program provides weatherization services to about 32,000 homes every year. These audits typically assess a home’s insulation, air leaking, heating and energy use, but many eligible households are turned away due to conditions like leaky roofs, pest infestations, or mold—problems that impact the health of residents.
“One of the focuses really is to be able to take credit for the health benefits,” said Paul Francisco, the director of Champaign County Regional Planning Commission’s Indoor Climate Research and Training team and the principal investigator of the project. “If we can take credit for the health benefits, now it makes it much more plausible to say, ‘Hey, let’s not defer this home’—let’s do this home, and the cost effectiveness is going to be great because of all of these non-energy impacts we’re going to be doing.”
Francisco said there’s been a lot of interest in trying to quantify those benefits in a way that allows the federal program to take credit for those benefits, since the weatherization program allows a certain amount of money for each state. Sheena Martenies, an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, works on that quantifying aspect of the project.
“We have tons of evidence from the epidemiological literature that says these indoor environmental conditions are are harmful to health, and that improving these indoor conditions improves health, but sometimes you have to you have to a dollar value on it in order for it to be in the same vein as other pieces of evidence that these decision makers are considering,” Martenies said.
The project is currently working in seven homes all over Illinois, with more in the process of being recruited. Franscisco’s team does a pre- and post-assessment of each home, identifying issues such as leaking roofs and old windows, as well as conducting a number of assessments on indoor environmental quality measures, like air pollutants.
“My lab takes information from Paul’s evaluations and we translate it into health benefits: for example, fewer individuals who are being hospitalized for asthma exacerbations,” Martenies said. “After we quantify the number of benefits of these programs, we can actually attach a dollar value to those health benefits so that we can perform a more comprehensive cost benefit analysis, of ‘Do we see a better cost-benefit ratio?’”
Martenies said her calculations provide numbers for avoided health impacts, or the health outcomes that would have occurred had we not remediated these homes. Those final results are then reported to their funders, like the Department of Energy, as well as peer-reviewed papers, conferences and other avenues of dissemination.
Currently, an average home gets about $250 to $300 in energy savings, according to Francisco. He said success with this project would make it possible for these households to get those benefits.
If the project is successful in integrating health benefits into the calculations for return on investment, the team said they would like to apply the same methods to other settings where kids spend a lot of time, like schools, to help support health-positive infrastructure projects. They hope that for policies, that energy programs would include health benefits in their decisions of what measures to implement, and be able to take credit for those health benefits.
Both Francisco and Martenies said it’s incredibly important for individuals to have access to healthy homes.
“Our homes are incredibly important places, emotionally and socially, but also from an environmental health perspective,” Martenies said. “I firmly believe that everyone deserves to live in a healthy home and a healthy environment, and I don’t think that your income level should dictate the quality of your housing.”
Francisco said a lack of healthy homes impacts everyone—not just those who don’t have one.
“There’s an economic cost to all of us. There’s a moral cost to all of us. There is a societal cost to all of us. There is a productivity cost to all of us,” Francisco said. “This is why we should care—because when thousands and millions of families are struggling with this every day, we’re lying to ourselves if we think we’re not paying a price for that.”
