This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
This signup form requires necessary cookies.
Allow marketing cookies to load the newsletter signup form.
Next Upcoming
By Canary Media
Canary Media
A few years ago, a gas leak from Sherry Frazier’s furnace forced her and her daughter out of Frazier’s Baltimore home.
“Oh, it was awful,” said Frazier, a retired educator who worked with students with disabilities in Baltimore public schools. “We had bad headaches and were kind of dizzy, wobbly on our feet.” Had they stayed any longer, she fears they would’ve ended up in the hospital.
But now, her home will never pose that danger again.
Frazier’s house has become an all-electric haven with solar panels pumping out power, thanks to an extensive retrofit coordinated by Baltimore-based Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI), a public health nonprofit that directly serves Baltimore and Providence, Rhode Island, and advises about 50 cities and 12 states.
“I feel a lot safer in the home [and] my utility bill for heat and air conditioning is much lower,” Frazier said.
Frazier’s abode is among the thousands that GHHI has worked on in its efforts to ensure healthier living conditions for those who can’t repair, weatherize, or decarbonize their homes themselves. Fossil-fueled water heaters, furnaces, clothes dryers, and stoves emit toxic pollutants that pose health risks, including asthma, cancer, heart attacks, and carbon monoxide poisoning — the symptoms of which Frazier and her daughter experienced.
In addition to replacing these noxious appliances, GHHI first tackles any necessary underlying home repairs. The U.S. housing stock is the oldest it’s ever been — with a median age of 44 years — and older homes are most likely to harbor health and safety hazards, such as rotten roofs, mold, lead, and asbestos.
GHHI deals with all those problems. And in low-income homes that qualify for its services, the nonprofit covers the entire cost, tapping funding from local and federal sources, such as Maryland’s EmPOWER program and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Housing, as well as private funding from philanthropic organizations and healthcare and utility companies.
GHHI was founded in Baltimore with the original goal of halting lead poisoning in children. But the organization learned “very quickly” that it needed “to think holistically about housing,” Ruth Ann Norton, GHHI’s president and CEO, said in a July webinar.
“We want to address the same things that we … originally saw in lead [pipes and paint], in carbon-emitting appliances and homes,” Norton added. “That is, the impairment that it causes for neurological development, for reproductive development, and for long-term health.”
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
This signup form requires necessary cookies.
Allow marketing cookies to load the newsletter signup form.
Frazier was referred to GHHI when she turned to a different nonprofit for aid to get a new fridge.
“I just had no idea of the many blessings that I was about to receive,” Frazier said.
During an assessment in November 2022, GHHI discovered Frazier’s home had a leaky roof, poor insulation, and other hazards besides those emitted by her gas appliances. By the end of March 2023, the nonprofit had orchestrated a raft of improvements: Workers replaced the roof; installed carpet tread and handrails on the stairs as well as a shower seat; caulked air gaps; added fiberglass insulation to the attic; and swapped out every gas appliance with an electric one, upgrading the electrical panel to accommodate the switch. Among the electric devices new to Frazier — the heat pump system, induction stove, electric-resistance dryer, and heat-pump water heater — GHHI also put in a new fridge.
In July 2025, GHHI added the pièce de clean energy résistance: a rooftop solar array. Altogether, the retrofit totaled about $73,200, at no cost to Frazier.
“I felt like it was a godsend,” she said. “I inquired about a refrigerator, and I wind up getting more done to my home than I ever dreamed.”
Since the overhaul, Frazier’s bills have gone down by hundreds of dollars annually, GHHI found. When she was still using gas in the year before the retrofit, they averaged about $230 per month. Electrification saved her $9 per month. And going solar has brought her bills down to around $170 per month as of May.
The road to lower energy bills had a big bump, though. In the biting winter of 2024–2025, the second year Frazier had the heat pump, her costs were spiking up to about $600 and $700 in December and January, which puzzled the GHHI team.
But after checking out the appliance, GHHI quickly diagnosed the problem.
It turned out that Frazier had been putting a cover over the heat pump to protect it from snow, just as she had done with her old air-conditioning unit. That was preventing the heat pump from drawing in enough air to harvest heat, which was triggering much less energy-efficient electric-resistance backup heating.
Now, Frazier leaves the heat pump unencumbered year-round. “You’re never too old to learn new things,” she said.
Frazier has been raving about GHHI’s retrofit program to friends and family, as well as patiently explaining the health reasons behind it.
“I was really surprised that when I shared information with my friends who are seniors like myself, they were not aware of the dangers of gas,” Frazier said. “I make it my business to spread the word.”
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
This signup form requires necessary cookies.
Allow marketing cookies to load the newsletter signup form.
Food and farms
Data centers
Clean energy manufacturing
Politics
U.S. regions
This video requires marketing cookies.
Update your cookie preferences to watch the video.
