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Possibile unpopular opinion: Almost all the housing stock in the NE USA should be replaced, because it is old and usually built to a pretty poor standard.
I see guys saying that "we should use heat pumps!", and we probably should...after we have houses that don't waste 75% of the heat that we use to heat them.
When we moved into our house in Princeton, we were shocked at how much energy was required to heat and cool it, and we observed that many of the walls had, like, open cracks where they met the windows, that you could actually see through.
We could do some things to try to improve the house but really the best thing to do would be to knock the whole thing down and start again.
And it's not like our house is unusually bad! We had guys in to do an energy audit, and they said that our house was performing better than any other home they had tested in Princeton! I was aghast when I heard that...
...but not particularly surprised. We looked at lots of houses before we moved in, and they were almost all mid-century crackerboxes, well past their use-by date. Some of them I thought I could knock the whole thing down with one good kick.
All across New Jersey we've got town after town full of crappy old energy-inefficient homes, leaking heat all over the place. Replace them! They are obsolete!
But you can't even replace them because you've got environmentalists talking about "embedded energy" and NIMBYs declaring that the old ranches and split-levels "contribute to the character of the neighborhood" or are even historically significant 
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Many Americans also haven't spent much time in Germany or Scandinavia, where homes are built to a vastly superior standard. They don't even realize that many of the houses that we're living in are worn-out crackerboxes that weren't even very good when they were first built.
The burden of poorly-built old homes probably falls most on low-income renters too. Landlords often have little incentive to pursue energy efficiency, and energy costs in the NE USA are very high.
One last thing: I see people say "oh you can just retrofit it!" Well, you can. But it's hard to make a make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If you think you can retrofit Scandinavian-grade home performance onto one of these old homes...I think you're kidding yourself.
