What Stops Millions of Americans From Going Green: Their Landlords - Slashdot
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What Stops Millions of Americans From Going Green: Their Landlords
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What Stops Millions of Americans From Going Green: Their Landlords (msn.com) 99
Posted by EditorDavid
on Sunday June 04, 2023 @07:34AM from the not-easy-being-green dept.The Washington Post looks at "Americans who want to lower their carbon footprints — but are stymied by their landlords."
Homes and apartments burn oil and gas, suck up electricity, and account for about one-fifth of the United States' total greenhouse gas emissions. But current attempts to green America's homes, including billions of dollars in tax credits for energy efficient appliances and retrofits, seem aimed at the affluent owners of detached, single-family homes — in short, Mad-Men-style suburbias. In reality, about one-third of the country's households live in rented apartments or houses... And they generally do not have the spare cash — or the permission from their landlords — to make environmental upgrades. Part of the issue is what's known in economics as the "split-incentive problem," or the "landlord-tenant problem." Roughly 75% of tenants in the United States pay their own utility bills; that means they have a strong incentive to try to conserve electricity, water, or gas to save cash. But their landlords, who have to pay for installing and replacing those appliances and heating systems, don't. They benefit from renting out their properties as quickly and cheaply as possible...
Renters, therefore, are often stuck with leaky housing, inefficient appliances and ancient heating systems. According to one study from 2018, renters use almost 3 percent more energy than homeowners thanks to the split incentive problem... President Biden's signature climate bill includes an estimated $37 billion in tax credits to help households switch to efficient heat pumps, water heaters, or to seal up and insulate their homes. Those credits are applicable to individual homeowners or renters — but not landlords. According to IRS guidance, "the credits are never available for a home that you don't use as a residence." And few renters are going to want to spend thousands of dollars on a heat pump that they'll have to leave behind when they move...
If the landlord problem isn't solved, millions of less wealthy Americans could be left out of the green transition — and will be stuck with higher energy bills. For example, even in the same income bracket, homeowners are almost three times more likely than renters to own electric vehicles — largely because renters lack home charging. There are programs, including some in America's giant climate bill, that could change this... Still, those programs haven't launched yet and aren't expected until at least late this year. And even though renters make up one-third of American households, they're still getting less investment; the tax credits for homeowners are uncapped. The federal government could end up spending well over $50 billion on homeowners, and about $8 billion on renters.
Most renters remain at the mercy of their apartment managers and landlords.
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To go green, the government must encourage home ownership!
Enter the banks to finance it all... oh wait.
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Income is taxed.
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If a renter is paying more for utilities, and the apartment comes furnished with inefficient appliances and structural components, the landlord and the tenant should find a mutually beneficial arrangement to pay for upgrades. Why not spend the cash or finance the upgrades, for an increase in rent whereby the savings are shared by both parties? If there are savings, then it should be incumbent on both parties to search for those savings and split the winnings.
Yes, yes. I know. Landlords are evil and tenant
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Kill all the landlords, problem solved.
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If you can’t afford to build a property, then either it won’t get built or someone else will pay and own it.
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Collectively owned and managed by those that live there. Such as a housing cooperative, real estate LLC, city-owned housing, etc. It turns out some radicals want to do away with the rentier class like we've done away with serfdom. Other, rear-looking people, want to bring both back.
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My parents own a co-op apartment unit and it is problematic. The price is much lower, about 1/2 to 2/3 market for a traditional unit but this isn’t some form of altruism or because it’s trashy (it’s quite nice). It’s because you cannot obtain financing for anything socialist and because it’s cash only deals it artificially suppresses not only the price, but creates a massive barrier to entry. We need sweeping reforms to force banks and the government to accept collective ownership agreements on the same terms as collective shareholder agreements. Only then will cooperative residences and businesses be on the same financial footing and thus be competitive to authoritarian capitalist control.
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Corporations can be non-profits. Set rent equal to out-of-pocket expenses (mortgage interest, property taxes, etc.) but require residents to buy equity shares equal to the monthly build-up of property equity.
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Raising capital in order to purchase a place to live, instead of simply saving for it, is how the system works today. But it's a bad system, and housing shouldn't be something that takes you 30 years to pay off.
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Banks certainly don’t want to own property. They will auction them off.
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Yes, they want all the money and none of the work - that bag is held by the average person.
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Who will own the tickets?
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Rent income from land ownership is a problem even for capitalists. Some of the less honest ones like the Rothbardians cover it up with the tarp of homesteading and quickly look away, ignoring the injustice of first come first serve AND the fact that all land has been stolen, undermining it as ever functioning as a principled approach regardless. The honest ones are some flavor of Georgist.
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But we're not talking about your strawman; we're talking about maintaining residential or commercial property and renting it to users who don't want to assume all the costs/liabilities of owning it themselves.
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Don't have to do something that drastic (Although quite a few landlords could go that way). Tax them on the lack of green credentials for the building an tax them if they are empty make it unaffordable to have building that are not green or are left empty so that it artificially creates scarcity. and yes it is done in other parts of the world
one example that looks likes it is being ramped soon
https://www.ato.gov.au/General... [ato.gov.au].
One that just doubled for a similar reason Singapore doubled taxes for foreign
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Not going to happen.
First of all, the landlords will rather have the houses sit empty than to lower the rents. If you lower the rent, your bank will downgrade the value of the building on the balance sheet, and you have to cough up the difference. Sitting on an empty building and paying back the loan one month at a time is less of a problem.
But secondly, like everything else, real estate is moving into the subscription model. Nobody will sell anything anymore, because you will always make more money by rent
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What some places are starting to do is adding a tax on empty places. A bunch of empty apartments are bad for a city and a tax on a vacant property seems to be a good way to combat this problem. Keep raising the tax until the landlords start renting the place out.
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It is a good idea, yes. But in practice I expect that the easy part is to add a small tax to create voter support, but to add a big tax to create results will be shot down by landlords via their political influence...
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This doesn't, or isn't, working.
San Francisco instituted this in the past three years; only something like 200 landlords paid anything, and they just kept their businesses shuttered. The problem is twofold: There's no enforcement (on anything in San Francisco, but that's another issue) and it turns out many of these places literally cannot find tenants, for a whole host of reasons.
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Absent enforcement, laws are meaningless.
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Why not offer free, independent home efficiency assessments (assessors only make recommendations & do not do the actual work, i.e. no perverse incentives) & subsidies for energy efficiency upgrades that tenants can apply for (not landlords), & tax landlords on any inefficiencies revealed so there's an incentive to fix them promptly. Also, make the assessments publicly available so that prospective tenants can see beforehand how in/efficient homes are. You'd also need some decent tenant protectio
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Or they follow the style of NYC Bronx landlords of the late 1970s and level the places into vacant lots.
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It is disturbing how casually you entertain the thought of another black death.
Absolutely not.
Kindly take any Malthusian daydreams elsewhere.
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Sounds like a covid conspiracy.
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Here we go! The US is currently in the process of consolidating the country's real estate into the hands of just a few big companies. They muddy the waters of actual ownership through a million of smaller holding companies, but the trend is clear. There is not many people left who can actually afford to buy a home, and the number is going down as time goes by. And the smaller landlord companies get bought out by the bigger ones as time goes by. So home ownership is dead in the US.
But what being proposed in TFA is just a free government giveaway to these companies. This will bring about a green transition just as much as any of the multiple presidents' broadband bills have brought about quality internet, or Biden's chip money will bring about a renaissance of american chipmaking, how Trumps corona funds brought about the saving of small businesses, or any other has brought about any other supposed improvement. As any other such "measure" before, this one's also just that: free money for those who can afford the ticket to go and get some. They will take the money, buy hookers and coke, and make excuses as to why nothing changed. And they will be let off the hook because they paid the campaign bill of both parties.
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So what you're saying is that we need BOTH a vacancy tax (10% annually of the appraised value of the property) AND a tax on multiple properties (call it another 10% annually of the appraised value of the property). Finally, eliminate the depreciation deduction on real estate and the carried interest deductions so the taxpayers stop subsidizing high property costs and a lack of housing.
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Adding to your comment...
All of those taxes would reduce the incentive for property owners to rent, leaving them the only option but to keep their lands free & clear of any development at all.
In many localities you can have vacant lots in residential and urban areas so long as you keep the weed growth in check and remove the trash that naturally accumulates.
And in most localities the property taxes breakdown to separate evaluations (1) the unimproved land (a vacant lot); (2) any improvements and structu
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by codebase7 ( 9682010 ) on Sunday June 04, 2023 @08:03AM (#63574961)
Roughly 75% of tenants in the United States pay their own utility bills; that means they have a strong incentive to try to conserve electricity, water, or gas to save cash. But their landlords, who have to pay for installing and replacing those appliances and heating systems, don't. They benefit from renting out their properties as quickly and cheaply as possible...
One way to fix that would be to create some sort of equity system for renters. I.e. A percentage of your rent payments goes towards an "equity" account that the renter can withdraw from. Or use with loans as collateral. Just like a regular homeowner's property appreciates in value. Improvements to the landlord's property, (such as the kind from TFS), could be used as tax credits deposited into the renter's "equity" account. Obviously, portions of that equity would be withdrawn from by the landlord if they can prove in court that the renter caused damage to the property.
With such a renter "equity" system in place, there's a market incentive for the renter to maintain the property, and to make improvements to it. While also creating an incentive for the landlord to allow the improvements. It's free to the landlord, and the improvements mean that the property will have higher property values and attract more affluent tenants.-
Sure, some people can be deceived into renting a property that has higher than average cost utilities, but the reality is most people will see that and rent elsewhere because the rental market prices are already inflated in most areas and thus they will choose lower cost alternatives. It only becomes slightly harder to rent them, the base rental cost remains fixed - if it were common for a discount on inefficient properties this article would have no basis in reality. Further, most of the cases where this
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by indytx ( 825419 ) on Sunday June 04, 2023 @09:23AM (#63575049)
One way to fix that would be to create some sort of equity system for renters. I.e. A percentage of your rent payments goes towards an "equity" account that the renter can withdraw from.
The article says that renters use 3% more energy than people who own their homes. Okay. Three. Percent. How much more do you think renters can afford to pay on top of their rent for this? They already shop for cost, size, and location. That's pretty much the extent of most renters' criteria. A single window without installation is hundreds of dollars. A new central AC can easily be $10,000. There is no economic argument for these people to pay dramatically more money on top of their rent to reduce that 3% number. They would be throwing good money after bad.
There's also the issue of the ROI on this. In my city (a small city with a university), a large percentage of the renters are students or new/temporary university employees. None of these people intend to be in the same rental housing more than a year or two. It makes no sense for them to pay more to upgrade their rental unit.
Maintenance on a rental unit is not like making an upgrade decision from an episode of This Old House. Smaller landlords are not going to spend $10,000 more for a Cadillac HVAC system in a rental unit. Or windows. Or sprayed-in foam insulation in a attic. Not for 3%.
The only way to do this is for cities to change their building codes to require higher efficiency in new rental construction, but I would argue that this is already happening. New housing is dramatically more expensive than existing housing for reasons analogous to why new cars now cost so much. It's just more expensive to make things to comply with safety and efficiency requirements that existing stock did not have to when they were constructed, and retrofitting something is expensive.
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Three percent difference is not zero when you're living on the margin, but it doesn't convince me the difference is significant or -- for that matter -- a real difference because there are so many other variables in housing. (It also comes from 2018 data, and the world has changed quite a bit since then.)
The whole story seems riddled with shaky assumptions and dubious claims. Landlords come in a wide variety, from corporate investors to owners of duplexes who live in one apartment and rent the other. Some
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Do you work for the IRS? That's probably the most complicated solution I've ever heard. Here's a simpler idea: Ban rentals with a low energy rating. Landlords who have been profiting for years will not let land sit empty if a simple solution of adding solar panels, insulation, etc can put it back on the market.
This has an added benefit of reducing utility costs for renters.
As a landlord myself let me categorically say FUCK NO. I do not want random renters making "improvements". If improvements are required
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That is possibly the worse idea that I've heard. What happens to the people that currently live there? Talk about cities having a homeles problem now. Then let's say the landlords do this, how do they recoop the cost for this? By raising the price of rent. We already live in a time when rent is at a all time high. Many renters simply can't afford any increases.
A far better plan is to set up a set of incentives and tax deductions to accomplish this. To take advantage of these incentives the landl
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The problem described but not highlighted is that we have an interest and incentive mismatch: To avoid getting stuck with higher energy bills, it would make sense to improve your house. Except it's not your house, someone else owns it and improving it is tantamount to giving them free money—if you're even allowed to do any such thing since the house is not yours. The other way also doesn't work, because would cost the landlord money but the savings end up with the tenant.
The question then becomes: Ho
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In some countries, rental properties are assessed for their energy efficiency and are required to declare it to potential tenants.
This in theory incentivises the landlord to make improvements, otherwise their property becomes less desirable or cheaper to rent. -
You make some interesting points. I haven't upgraded my aging a/c system because I don't see it paying for itself in any amount of time I find appealing. It raises a lot of questions.
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This story is straight up leftist propaganda.
I’ve noticed the trend to blame the problems with housing on the landlord who rents only a unit or two because they inherited a family home or couldn’t sell because it was underwater instead of the multinational corporation buying units in the 3+ digit range. Articles pushing the narrative to the person making 50k that the person making 120k is the cause of wealth inequality rather than the person holding ten thousand lifetimes of wealth slipped into otherwise left leaning articles is all the rage right now and detracts from the real problem.
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They are free riders on the system created by those persons and by their sheer numbers they are an equally big problem. There are a lot more mom and pop landlords than there are mogul real estate owners.
This is not sustainable :
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]-
The banks and conglomerates are the winners of the system they rigged for themselves. Convincing people like you the person who is manipulating and benefiting massively from the system is some guy with a single rental unit is successfully dividing and conquering the population. It’s extra funny because that house cost 2-3x the purchase price with the excess going to banks so even if the little person wins they still only get a small slice of the profit pie and yet you see them as an enemy.
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The landlords are the soldiers in the banks' army. They are the little guy fighting the war against the littler guy. Do you feel "Just following orders" or "The pay was good" are valid excuses?
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And to be clear here, I'm not advocating for liquidating the kulaks, but it is important to acknowledge that the footsoldiers do have some culpability in the acts they carry out.
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Right. Because the person who bought in 2006 and was asked to empty all bank accounts, sell all worldly possessions, and take out a personal loan for 10k to bring it all to close along with the title and hand it all over to the bank so they can make payments on literally nothing while having negative 10m to their name all because they can’t easily get a job in that market and want to move deserves indentured servitude. They are functionally the same as billionaires paying off scotus to bend the syst
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If you're going to get involved in the victimhood olympics, at least pick a good runner. In your original post it was the guy who "inherited a family home", now morphed into a guy who's 10 million in debt for reasons you haven't fully explained but sound like bad personal financial decisions as far as I can make out. In any case, it doesn't resemble any of the landlords I've rented from, nor the in-laws I had who carried a family business in real estate through the crash.
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That was my first thought reading this article as well. I actually believe their numbers (renters use 3% more energy), not having investigated it at all myself. I agree that it should be addressed. But I also see that it's insignificant in the face of the total problem and its root causes.
The media strategy from the elites seems to involve lots of divide & conquer, misdirection, and missing the forest for the trees. Like, you turn on the news today, and at least half of it is about racism or transexuals
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Oh, do tell. What's the *real* problem? The size of the landlord, or the “split-incentive problem”/“landlord-tenant problem” that's explained in the article and applies regardless of the size?
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Slashdot mostly IS leftist propaganda and climate cult BS. Most of the commenters are straight-up commies that were brainwashed by their Marxist college professors.
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Is that possible? Happens with condo unit owners.
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The solution to these kind of problems is exceedingly simple: require landlords meet a certain level efficiency and reduce emissions. The hard part of course is the political end of the problem because politics is inured in money from the rich.
The real solve here requires people to care enough to overhaul a broken political system. It is only when things become exceedingly dire that we will see change that comes far too late to make a meaningful impact.
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There is a segment of the rental market for which such upgrades are not economically feasible. These buildings will become food for bulldozers. And guess which part of the rental market they serve?
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Or require landlords to pay for heat and electricity unless they meet certain efficiency standards. Don't separate the person deciding on efficiency improvements from the person paying the energy bills.
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Here in West Australia we've just gone through two years of utterly brutal summers (This past one wasnt QUITE so bad, though still gnarly, the previous one had a month+ of 40c days), and the house I'm in like a giant heat trap. Actually hotter at night because heat cant escape , but very hard to keep it out. All of us in the 4 joined houses have been pleading with the landlord to put in ducted air conditioning because its a straight up inferno in summer, but nope. So I have to rely on a combination of one o
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Look into a split air conditioner (or two.. or three..)
They don't require ductwork, all they need is a power connection, a condensate drain hose and two smallish pipes between the indoor and the outdoor units. They even make units that have multiple indoor heads (for several rooms) and just one outdoor unit.
They're very energy efficient.
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Tax credits are specifically intended to screw the little guy. They require them to have the cash up front to do (whatever), then as much as a year or more later, (may) pay back some or all of it. Presuming congress, the executive, or some court hasn't interfered with the program in the interim.
The people who actually need the help can't afford to put their funds out of circulation for long periods of time; they live paycheck to paycheck. Which the politicians know perfectly well.
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You'd have a million times better effect mandating good (or any) insulation in the buildings, especially the attics. It costs, and had little priority, given the cheapskates use undersized air conditions, and old school slapping a premium on electricity. Win win win for landlords!
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Most city apartment buildings don't have attics.
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Neighbors got heat pump. Still have to use electricity based heating whenever it comes close to 0ÂC.
Others have solar which brings 22 kw on good days but that's just barely enough to drive one heater.
Other than that, putting solar on the roof of an apartment house is a major risk if it is located in the worst part of the town and peope vandalize the roof regularly.
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Vandalize the roof?
Seriously?
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Jup. I know a house that is a little shorter than the two adjacent houses and has a flat roof so the neighbours throw their garbage on the roof. One time the police had to come because they were throwing an unauthorized party. Not good for placing solar cells unattended.
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So, let's make sure we demonize the shit out of that group, because after all Greed sure as hell doesn't want anyone looking at what accounts for the other 4/5ths. Hell, they don't even want you smart enough to know mathematical fractions.
When corporations run their systems until absolute failure, in order to maximize profit, perhaps we should stop questioning why a landlord often does the same.
And good fucking luck convincing society that a leaky faucet or shitty A/C unit in a home is the real waste and e
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Yes, RENTERS (who are generally doing so because they can't afford a home) *of course* they have the spare cash for boutique "green" capital improvements to a property they don't own.
Yes of course the only thing holding these people back is legislation.
That's as stupid an idea as assuming everyone should buy a $60k electric car.
Does logic even faintly enter the discussion any more?
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No matter what first world you may be broadcasting from, there is no doubt you are well aware of the current leadership "running" America. And given America still votes for their elected leaders, there is no doubt as to exactly how that happened.
Smart people already know society would be FAR better off putting Dumb and Dumber in check instead of voting for them to lead. But, here we are. Still listening to Corruption tell citizens which ideas should be accepted, and which ones should be "racist".
It's alm
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When you can't afford a place to live in. These guys have no shame at all
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Of course it's the landlord his/her fault.... They are the ones needing to pay for all the upgrading, while they cannot easily up the rent to get their investment back. It's not the landlord that benefits from the upgrades. I'll bet a lot of people will tell the landlord not to go ahead if the rent is upped because of it.
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Give me a break. I've been working on appliances for 40 years. It takes a lot of power to make them work, no matter their age or design...they are doing a lot of "work" for us. Throwing out functional appliances to improve efficiency (by usually a tiny amount) does the earth nor your checkbook any favors.* It costs to make/ship/install that new device and it costs to discard or recycle (yeah, lol) the old one.
Also, the newer designs are often riddled with modern technology, tech that fails more frequently due to the added complexity. This is an inside joke where I work as we've started selling/repairing such devices.
Per the article, if people are that broke, then I think keeping a roof over one's head is more important than having the most efficient appliances anyway.
*A young coworker bought his first house and immediately replaced the washer/dryer for thousands of dollars for reasons of assumed efficiency. I asked him how long it will take to save thousands on his gas and electric bill (assuming no repairs are needed in the meantime!).-
A friend of mine is an appliance repair technician. He tells me to try to hold onto my old Kenmore washer and dryer as long as possible since there are no new models available for any price that will work as well and as reliably as those.
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I worked in this field for 15 years and the author and all the other l illiberal, woke, virtue signaling morons are making it harder to go green. Rich people consume more energy and they also have the flexibility to change their habits. We could easily cut a non-trivial amount of green house gas emissions from electricity production and save money if we let rich people pay the spot price for electricity. When the wind blows and the sun is out the spot price drops to nearly zero, on winter evenings the spot price in Ontario, Ohio and Pennsylvania regularly goes negative. I've done pilots of 100,000 plus people that have shown that with minimal help rich people will change their consumption habits to match renewable energy production. Poorer people can't though and it shouldn't matter because the poorest 15% of people living without AC in a multi dwelling unit consume so little power we should be ignoring them and concentrating on the richer 85%. However, since it saves rich people money, whining losers like the author of this article, will insist that any program be offered to 95% of people served by a utility. Unfortunately there are some hard technical problems getting to 95% and the one f$@king time in Texas where we proved we could get to 95% required subsidizing low income households but when we did that we got sued because we were not supposed to have a list of low income households.
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They have been copy/pasta covenants for decades and they always say "no solar". Then there is the huge lot of sociopaths that love to use HOAs to bully their neighbors around (who will subsequently respond by pretending that it protects property values and cars on cinder blocks... studies have actually shown that homes in HOA neighborhoods have 10% depressed values as compared to non-HOA homes and if you live in a nicer home you're 1) very unlikely to put some junk in your yard, and 2) already live with some local government entity [a municipality or county government] that has health & safety regulations).
Bottom line: HOAs are only valuable for shared property. That can mean multi-family homes to do maintainance on things like shared roofs or neighborhoods with common areas. The "standards" and other BS are simply for the mentally deranged to hide their behavior behind so that they don't get criminal charges against them for their behavior.
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The people who run HOAs are either people with nothing else in their lives so they have nothing but spare time and their ego to invest. No matter how it starts, it ends up with power-tripping assholes pretending they're being reasonable as they screw everyone around them.
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I like my covenenti with marinera sauce
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Move. You have freedom of movement in this country (for now). Buy your own place and then you can choose to do what you want with it (for now).
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Better to say you're not specifically restricted by law from moving but that's far from being free to do so.
Freedom to do something is always dependent upon feasibility.
Lack culture of direct Governmental restrictions are essentially saying we're not going to send our goons after you if you do so that's not at all the same as being free to do so.
Indirect restriction is much harder to pin down and much more effective at restriction over the long term.
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A government incentive program is in place to encourage the replacement of existing systems. Landlords are not eligible as per the summary. So why would they invest in upgrading a working system? If the tenant doesn't want to leave money behind why should the landlord? You could also say that what's stopping them is also energy efficient companies wanting a profit.
It's a poorly devised incentive program that was intended to get votes rather than address the problem.
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The US currently allegedly has an acute housing shortage. What does that mean? It means that (a) it is not sufficiently cost-effective for people to spend capital to build housing at the rate and of the type deemed necessary to avoid shortage, and (b) the government does not want for its own reasons to spend money to do the same, because, er, it is not cost-effective.
If you remove landlords from the equation, i.e. private capital, the situation will be much much worse.
The problem right now is that renters
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The blue recycling bins are right next to the trash bins, but most tenants ignore them (only one in the past two decades has consistently used them).
Now we have green bags for compost too (tenants never have used).The blurb does miss that insulation, updated windows and energy saving new appliances are marketing that do cause tenants to choose to rent "here" instead of elsewhere, many do ask about such.
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I would love to ditch my expensive electric clothes dryer, and dry my clothes using a combination of solar and wind power, using a clothes line in my back yard. But the HOA doesn't allow such things, because 'it will lower the tone of the neighborhood and reduce property values'.
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The neighborhood be damned.
Sacrifice the neighborhood for the good of the people who live within it.
Rather than sacrifice the lives of the people who live there for the maintainment of the neighborhood.
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I understand that's your only option to regain ownership is to move.
Unless you can get your neighbors riled up enough about operating as as vassals to an HOA Lord and forced to pay for the insult.
Didn't we fight a revolutionary war to not live that way?
Whatever it takes to dissolve an HOA is worth doing if at all possible.
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Got a basement? Clotheslines used to be very common in basements near the washer and dryer. They even make indoor clotheslines that roll themselves back up when you're not using them.
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renters use almost 3 percent more energy than homeowners
There is no way in hell renters use even close to as much energy as homeowners. On average homeowners have a lot more square footage per person, and don't have anybody above or below them (which increases heating/cooling cost), have larger refrigerators, their own washer/dryer, and on and on...
I'm not saying the 3% is bogus, I'm saying that model must have a lot of "corrections" for the above factors (and more) try to factor out the impact of the s
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My power company offers community solar. That is where you lease a block of panels are in a large solar farm, and get credited whatever they produce against the kWh on your residential meter. This works for tenants, and home-owners whose house faces the wrong way or is shaded by trees. It is also a month-to-month lease, and there is no setup fee.
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So, I'm betting the same people advocating for this also scream about affordable housing. If you make property owners make expensive upgrades, they can only afford to if they raise rent. They need to recoup their expenses. Forcing more expenses on rental owners will only drive out the small landlords and concentrate rentals more and more with large corporations that have the deep pockets and large property profile to split the costs across. We're already seeing that in locales that are enacting rent con
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What is NYC going to do when the cost of housing increases by an order of magnitude?
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