Retrofits for Resilience: From Policy to Implementation
For Climate Week 2026, the Urban Future Lab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering presents Retrofits for Resilience: From Policy to Implementation in partnership with NYU Corporate Engagement and the Center for the Sustainable Built Environment at NYU Schack.
Featured Speakers:
Bomee Jung, Cadence OneFive (ACRE Member)
Jane Bartman, Bloomberg Associates
Laura Mondragón, Montgomery County Green Bank
Will DiMaggio, Building Efficiency and Decarbonization at NYC Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice
Moderator: Suhail Y Tayeb, NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate
Retrofits are often framed primarily as a climate mitigation tool, a way to cut emissions from the buildings we already have. At the neighborhood level, they often can also serve an equally urgent purpose: strengthening residential climate resilience against flooding, extreme heat, and degraded air quality, often for the communities that can least afford to wait for these improvements.
However, as extreme weather increases in frequency and severity, cities are grappling with issues like high upfront costs, labor shortages, disruption to tenants, deferred maintenance, and aging infrastructure that limit the speed and scale of retrofit programs. The good news is that emerging technologies, financing approaches, and public-private partnerships are creating new pathways to accelerate retrofit implementation.
Using New York City as a jumping off point, we’ll examine the following questions:
How can innovative technologies help address affordability, capacity, and workforce constraints for residential retrofits? And how can cities adopt, de-risk, and scale these solutions?
What is the potential for retrofit programs to also support climate resilience and improved quality of life, in addition to energy efficiency and emissions reductions?
What new approaches are needed, from measuring ROI to assessing risk, to support resilience planning in retrofit programs? And what role can innovation play in these changes?