“We have to walk and chew gum at the same time”:

Despite its repu­ta­tion for luxury skyscrapers and ever-rising rents, New York City also has a strong legacy of offering afford­able housing. With various models from the New York City Housing Authority to Mitchell-Lama co-ops, and new afford­able housing devel­op­ments, gener­a­tions of New Yorkers have worked to ensure that people of all income levels can make a home in the city. And now, afford­able housing is undoubt­edly a part of the clean energy tran­si­tion of the city’s buildings. 

No one knows this better than Sadie McKeown. As pres­i­dent of the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC), a nonprofit lender dedi­cated to creating afford­able multi­family housing, McKeown has been a cham­pion not only of afford­ability, but envi­ron­mental sustain­ability and decar­boniza­tion, since before it was trendy. 

“To me, there was just a really natural inte­gra­tion of the two concepts,” McKeown said. ​“Affordable housing is an industry that’s always been at the head of the class as it relates to sustain­able buildings.”

In her more than 30 years at CPC, McKeown has been a part of driving over $2.5 billion of invest­ment in energy-effi­cient, afford­able and work­force multi­family housing. As of 2025, CPC has financed approx­i­mately 16,000 energy-effi­cient and high-perfor­mance homes. 

In a wide-ranging conver­sa­tion with Skylight editor Camille Squires, McKeown lays out her philos­ophy that afford­ability and sustain­ability not only can, but must, go hand in hand. The work involves actors at every level, from the federal govern­ment all the way down to indi­vid­uals. And despite any changing polit­ical winds, McKeown says, the energy tran­si­tion is still possible.

“I am incred­ibly opti­mistic,” she said. ​“There’s so much promise, and I believe that the pendulum will swing back.”

This inter­view has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

 

Camille Squires: Tell me a bit about your back­ground at CPC and afford­able housing devel­op­ment. How did you get into this work and what led you to your current role in leadership?

Sadie McKeown: I started at The Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) as an intern back in 1991. But I grew up in a small white suburb in New Jersey and ended up going to Fordham in the Bronx for under­grad in 1982. 

Part of what I learned outside the class­room at Fordham was what part of the rest of the world looked like. It’s an exciting and vibrant place, and it was completely different from where I grew up but I also saw a lot of poverty and a lot of need. I started volun­teering in a home­less shelter in a church in the base­ment. I’d sleep overnight in the church, go home, go to work, and I felt like I was doing some­thing. But at the same time, I was a busi­nessperson, so I went back to school [after Fordham]. 

I went to Cornell, and I got my degree in human service admin­is­tra­tion and [in] my first summer, I interned at HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], where I did a study on orga­ni­za­tions that were doing commu­nity devel­op­ment, partic­u­larly in response to the [1977 federal] Community Reinvestment Act. I had a whole list of orga­ni­za­tions that were lenders or invest­ment compa­nies, and CPC was on that list. The next summer, I was going to get a PhD, and then I thought, ​“I’m not an acad­emic, either. I’m a doer.” So my second summer, I got an intern­ship at CPC, [then] I got a job at CPC right out of grad­uate school. I started as a loan officer, [where] I really learned the busi­ness and under­stood the needs in neigh­bor­hoods from a capital perspective. 

I love the work because working at CPC has always been, for me, very much like a private sector job but with a focus and a mission that you wouldn’t get if you went to work at a bank.

CS: In terms of the clean energy tran­si­tion as it relates to afford­able housing, I imagine some may think that ​“clean energy changes” and ​“afford­ability” are an oxymoronic combi­na­tion, given how expen­sive these updates can get. But is that your expe­ri­ence? Is it possible for people who aren’t already deeply resourced to access energy effi­ciency and clean energy upgrades in their homes?

SM: Affordable housing is an industry that’s always been at the head of the class as it relates to sustain­able build­ings. In 2008, there was the great reces­sion. Energy costs were really high and [the reces­sion] was putting huge pres­sure on affordability. 

At that moment, sustain­ability was becoming a thing, and I have always cared about the envi­ron­ment, So to me, it was just really a natural inte­gra­tion of the two concepts. We have to walk and chew gum at the same time: We have to be able to address afford­ability in housing and address sustain­ability, decar­boniza­tion all at the same time. 

One of the big chal­lenges is: ​“How do we pay for this?” To me, if we had started with focusing on getting first mort­gage lenders to address this problem [of envi­ron­mental sustain­ability], we would have made a lot more progress. 

If there’s asbestos, if there’s lead paint, or there’s an under­ground storage tank, it’s the first mort­gage lender that says to the owner [during the Phase One site assess­ment,] ​“You have to reme­diate those things or I won’t close your loan.” I always thought of carbon as a pollu­tant that needed to be reme­di­ated at the time of the first mort­gage. So, if the lenders had said, ​“And you need a plan for decar­boniza­tion” — whether that was tran­si­tioning to all-elec­tric heating and cooling, or just making build­ings much more energy effi­cient — we would have been much further along in the tran­si­tion with respect to inno­va­tion around energy, with respect to prices coming down. 

[Back then, there was a] cultural divide that really created an uphill battle for anybody inter­ested in building decar­boniza­tion writ large. We had a lot of energy geeks that were very focused on building perfor­mance and energy effi­ciency who didn’t neces­sarily mix with the finan­cial jocks.

There are a lot of people that would dismiss that [cultural aspect], but I’ve been trying to do this for almost 20 years now, and I can promise you, they don’t talk about energy effi­ciency at the [Mortgage Bankers Association,] and they don’t talk about finance at the National Association for Energy Efficiency and they really should just integrate. 

CS: If those two worlds had been more inte­grated decades ago, where would that have left us today?

SM: When the oppor­tu­nity came from [President] Biden’s admin­is­tra­tion putting billions of dollars on the table for decar­boniza­tion and tran­si­tioning to clean energy, CPC ran at that oppor­tu­nity and — along with Calvert Impact and Self-Help Credit Union under the umbrella of Climate United — we won $7 billion to help really try to start this tran­si­tion. (Editor’s note: The Climate United coali­tion was awarded money from the National Clean Investment Fund, one of three programs under the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), a Biden admin­is­tra­tion policy.)

[A portion of] our $2.4 billion dollars was going to be used so that we could educate the first mort­gage markets, create the tools neces­sary for them to under­write the data­bases, resource centers where they could go and figure out which energy consul­tant could help them with a decar­boniza­tion plan. 

We were doing the work, but the money was frozen. But if we were [able to continue] the work, AI would [now] be fueling all of that work. So that we would be building all these incred­ibly effi­cient tools built on data, and we would really be accel­er­ating. But instead, we’re in a place where we are idling. CPC is still trying to do the work. We’re raising capital, really trying to continue to do decar­boniza­tion in build­ings and focus on high perfor­mance and resilience and health outcomes. 

CS: Where do the private and nonprofit sectors come in? Are there (many) lenders out there like CPC who are looking to help people shoulder the cost of the energy transition?

SM: CPC gets all of its money from the private sector, and then we lend it out in the neigh­bor­hoods. So [it is] this sort of Robin Hood concept of: Where are the resources, and how do we bring them to the people that need them? We occupy two worlds; the world of finance and the world of social service. There aren’t that many of us that are trying to sit in between both worlds, and that was the team that I built to do the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) work. 

So I’ve always been very comfort­able in both worlds and, for me, it’s about people. The problem that I see is that poli­tics stopped being about all people, and it’s just become about my people. There is no such thing as my people and your people. For me, there’s only our people. And the more we focus on just [one group of] people, the less we’re ever going to be able to solve big problems. 

I’ve been working a lot recently in inno­va­tion, and I went to an inno­va­tion confer­ence, and what was fasci­nating about that confer­ence was, I was now out of my echo chamber; I was in a room with the nation’s biggest home builders. All of the inno­va­tion is happening with this constituency of single-family home builders, large compa­nies like Zillow and Home​.com, because that’s where capi­talism is focused. That’s where inno­va­tion is running, because that’s where they’re going to be able to make money, so they can pay all of those venture capital people that funded them, right? So you realize, they’re really smart — they’re focusing on the prob­lems up here [at the top of the market], but those are similar to the prob­lems we have down here in afford­able housing. So how do I get those inno­va­tors to come down here and plug into our world? And so some of that’s around afford­ability and the way we build housing, but some of that is also around sustain­ability and energy and resilience. 

CS: As someone trying to bridge both worlds, could you walk me through how you think about financing an afford­able housing project? How does sustain­ability work into the process, and what does a successful financing project look like from your perspective?

SM: A metric we’ve used at CPC is: educate, advo­cate, inno­vate, and invest. So, from my perspec­tive, a successful outcome is that we are educating our borrowers about different options rela­tive to the perfor­mance of their building, design, and stan­dards. We are advo­cating for better outcomes [and] for them to tran­si­tion and use different systems. We are inno­vating in that we are creating prod­ucts and tools to support that tran­si­tion, and then we’re investing and we’re closing those loans. And then all of the invest­ment work that you do, you take the data from that and you use it to further educate, advo­cate, inno­vate, and invest. That’s success.

CS: Are there good rules of thumb for your borrowers to make their build­ings as effi­cient as possible? Is it some­thing as straight­for­ward as only supporting build­ings where there are heat pumps, or is it maybe a little more bespoke or nuanced than that? 

SM: It is a little bit more nuanced. The reality is that, today, it is so hard to develop housing — that the majority of what we do is subsi­dized with either [NYC Housing Preservation and Development] or [NYS Department of Homes and Community Renewal]. So our advo­cacy is less impor­tant because [effi­ciency is] a require­ment [for those devel­op­ments.] Affordability is our primary goal [while] our other goals are sustain­ability, and then closing the racial wealth gap. So, if we are doing a deal with a BIPOC devel­oper that is thinly capi­tal­ized, and we want him to do high perfor­mance [but] the numbers just don’t work, we might subor­di­nate some of our prior­i­ties around building perfor­mance so that he can get his first deal done. We’re subor­di­nating it because we have other prior­i­ties as well. 

Still, we’ve educated that devel­oper. We’ve given them the tools to look at the next deal. And part of what we were building with GGRF was a whole slew of contrac­tors that did this work, so that you weren’t beholden to the one contractor who knew how to do this. We were trying to create more of an infra­struc­ture for people to be able to do [sustain­able devel­op­ment] because, frankly, now it’s getting so much worse — it’s really hard to find contrac­tors because it’s so much easier for a plumber or an elec­tri­cian to build a data center.

CS: Are there ways that people can approach this on an indi­vidual level in a way that isn’t over­whelming in terms of cost and experience? 

SM: You’re never going to get every­body, but the majority [will get] in agree­ment enough to get us to a tipping point where the market just says, ​“All-elec­tric systems are so much more efficient.” 

I think we’re learning, and the reason that we’re learning is because we’re doing the work. The only way to evolve and figure out what energy tran­si­tion actu­ally means is to do the work. We were given the priv­i­lege of a $250 million grant from New York State [through the Climate Friendly Homes Fund] to put in 6,600 apart­ments, and we’re learning. It’s a labo­ra­tory for how to tran­si­tion. I’m constantly meeting with my team and asking, ​“What did we learn? What are we going to do differ­ently? How are we going to talk differ­ently about this?” And you need to remember that you’re not just [installing] heat pumps; you’re tran­si­tioning the economy to clean energy. What does that mean? How can we do it more effi­ciently? How can we do it [with] less cost? So it’s really just being inten­tional and not rinsing and repeating.

CS: On the lender side of things, when you’re talking about private sector capital coming in, are you having to convince people that this is a work­able model or are you working with people who are already more aligned with afford­ability and sustain­ability in housing development?

SM: The majority of people that we’re working with [were] already aligned, and that was [growing] signif­i­cantly under the Biden admin­is­tra­tion. And, unfor­tu­nately, this has become polit­ical. So now, anybody that was consid­ering [elec­tric heating and cooling] is like, ​“No, I’m just doing a gas system.”

But there are still the true believers, and we do know that the pendulum will come back, and so we continue to do the work because when the pendulum swings back, we want to be ready. 

CS: What is your outlook for the future of sustain­able real estate and the clean energy tran­si­tion espe­cially as it applies to afford­able housing? 

SM: I am incred­ibly opti­mistic because tech­nology is evolving so quickly, and there’s so much promise, and I believe that the pendulum will swing back. I don’t think [the U.S.] can remain the lone wolf in the world, pretending that coal is an accept­able form of energy. So, we’re idling at the moment. That’s okay. It’s also giving us time to think and rede­fine things like tran­si­tion […] and to be thoughtful about the impacts that this is having on resi­dents, on tenants, on owners, on agen­cies, and on poli­cy­makers. We should be thoughtful about what we need to do differ­ently when we are given the oppor­tu­nity and the priv­i­lege to do this work again.