UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation

Los Angeles launched the nation’s largest Feed-in Tariff (FiT) In Basin Solar program in 2013, helping to catalyze an emerging market for multifamily housing, commercial, warehouse, and industrial rooftop solar. Part of the promise of a properly designed and well-implemented FiT is that it will drive economic growth, enhance environmental sustainability, and create social equity in the workforce by creating career-ladder jobs through rooftop solar installations.

This report assesses the FiT program’s early impacts on the local solar market and on local employment. Researchers find that 40 percent of proposed solar projects are in solar equity “hot spots,” meaning in neighborhoods with high solar rooftop potential and indicators of high socioeconomic and environmental distress.

This is the third report in a three-part series commissioned by the Los Angeles Business Council and involving LCI research. The first, Making a Market: Multifamily Rooftop Solar and Social Equity, looks at areas of opportunity within the multifamily market. A follow-up report, Empowering LA’s Solar Workforce: New Policies that Deliver Investments and Jobs, focuses on the commercial and industrial markets as well as the solar workforce.