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Landlords have to start reporting energy and water use to the city
By adamg on Wed, 05/08/2013 - 2:44pm
By a 9-4 vote, the City Council today approved an ordinance that requires owners of commercial buildings larger than 35,000 square feet and residential buildings with more than 35 units to file annual reports with the city on their resource consumption - along with their annual emissions of greenhouse gases.
The goal of the new law is to help curb greenhouse emissions and just make Boston a more resource-efficient kind of place.
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Comments
This just screwed over
This just screwed over homeowners in larger condo complexes by adding another cost to living in the city.
no, it didn't
READ.
"owners of commercial buildings larger than 35,000 square feet"
Condos aren't commercial buildings. They're residential.
Also, is this going to include oil usage? How about steam? Are there penalties for misreporting? Otherwise it's stupidly useless.
-The really big buildings downtown use central steam services
-Huge numbers of buildings in Boston still use oil
-If there are no punsihments, landlords will simply "miss" counting some deliveries or skip a fuel source or misplace a decimal.
I do wish Boston would start punishing landlords who waste energy, or banning certain heating system control systems. It makes me want to cry when I see people in the dead of winter with their windows open because their idiot landlords won't upgrade to something besides a TIMER CIRCUIT that simply switches on the boiler at a certain time of day and then switches it off at another.
To quote anon, "READ"
Applies to "residential buildings with more than 35 units"
35 units?
You're going to see a lot more 34 unit condo projects coming on the market soon.
Soon to follow-
-higher rents.
And
A new tax stream! They are already forcing multi-family owners to pay for forced city inspections.
bwahahahahahaahahaha
Raise your hand if your Boston apartment has EVER been inspected by the city.
*crickets chirping*
Right. Didn't think so. The city passed that law, landlords ignored it, and the city hasn't cared because Menino didn't want to piss off the thousands of leeches making money off the rest of us.
"leeches "
so people shouldn't be aloud to conduct business, capitalism i bad and everybody could afford a home only if leeches didn't own property! Liberal Art Major? Thought So........
Liberal Arts Majors
At least they can spell and proofread.
You might have benefited from their services had you cared to pay attention in high school English class.
It's called trying to type
On my blackberry! Take a lap, my post contributed an opinion yours was simply a rant/ attack.
This is too easy
Not to mention that an English teacher can help you with proper punctuation and sentence structure, even when typing on a blackberry.
Also, how is attacking "liberal art majors" a contributory opinion and not an attack?
Rents
Are already high.
A tiny new expense isn't going to do much to drive up prices in a city that has major development issues at the beset of Developers and wealthy NIMBYs.
BAS vendors will like this
Building Automation systems prices will go up too
The city wants more
The city wants more affordable housing and yet passes a law which will vastly increase the cost of living in the large prewar multifamily buildings which provide a large portion of the city's relatively affordable housing on a cost per square foot basis.
The city council only seems to care about government employees, the uber rich for a tax base, and the very poor which it can keep under its thumb with subsidized goodies. The middle class gets exiled to the suburbs.
???
Explain how this "vastly increases the cost of living" anywhere.
They just have to REPORT ENERGY AND WATER USE. Simple.
ZOMG! that increases costs by ... NOTHING!
And, once the landlords become aware of the utility usage, it might mean FIXING STUFF and thus USING LESS and SPENDING LESS???
How is that driving costs up?
Let me guess - you bought the corporate bullshit when companies were required to report chemical use to the Commonwealth that it would increase costs ... and never looked at the actual data. Actual data that beancounters then used to ferret out wasteful use, expensive disposal, and unnecessary storage ... and reduce costs.
It does make it more expensive
Because for a huge swath of people, heat and water/hot water are included in their rent. The majority of landlords will raise rents to cover the cost of improvements in conservation and then not bring the rent back down once the improvement starts paying for itself in energy conservation.
landlords are not required to
landlords are not required to make any changes to their buildings. they just need to have an energy audit every 5 years.
Really?
Everywhere I've rented I've always paid separately for utilities.
Regardless, you are making some assertions here, but I don't see what, other than gut reactions to things changing and change=bad thing always, there is to support them.
Rents are raising anyway - it would be very hard to sort that out from the cost of capital improvements and maintaining systems. They may not lower rates to reflect savings, true ... but why should they if they make the improvements?
As usual, Boston is not exactly being innovative here ... find some examples from other places where such mandates are in place and we can discuss this from factual references, not presuppositions.
There is no requirement to
There is no requirement to upgrade, but most landlords will probably want to after confronting the real costs of energy, which will in turn lower the energy costs and probably be cost neutral in the end.
Rent + Utilities
I have only ever rented and I've lived in 2 apartments in Boston. In both places, I paid for gas and electricity but not heat or hot water. Actually, that was the norm at almost every apartment I rented. I totally can see landlords passing along costs to renters for heat and hot water costs now. I am certainly an environmentalist, but this worries me as a renter.
not everything is like where you live, snowflake
Thousands of double and triple deckers have per-unit heating and hot water.
Large buildings and really old smaller buildings which are owned by one owner, are the buildings with unified heating + hot water systems.
Most landlords go to individual heat/hot water systems if they possibly can, because otherwise they're at the mercy of the tenants. Tenants also hate unified heating+hot water because they don't get to control the temperature, and if the LL fucks up on the oil delivery or paying the gas bill, the tenants are screwed.
Us Big Boy tenants would rather pay those bills ourselves and know that we're getting heat the next day.
That sucks
you must have got some cold showers. Landlords tend to only include it those utilities they haven't separated out the systems for. A house sharing hot water can be a nightmare of a inconvenience.
Only behind not having a dishwasher (IMHO)
For some apartment buildings,
For some apartment buildings, this is simple; I've lived in buildings where electricity, gas, etc. were included and all usage went through one meter. But I've also lived in buildings with 60 or 70 meters and no clear way to actually get this data.
If the utility companies are willing to share this data, then maybe there is not a big burden, but are they allowed to? And if they can, why can't the city request the information directly from the utilities?
If the utility companies cannot, for some legal reason, share this information with the landlord; then will the landlord write to all their tenants asking for this information?
I would venture to say that
I would venture to say that this will not end here.
It costs money to pay some
It costs money to pay some energy audit company to author a report.
LOL what?
Nothing you said can be applied to who is effected by this law. Outside of downtown, it's not going to effect many people at all.
Good job city council!!
This ordinance is sorely needed.
Sarcasm off.
======================
Why do we tolerate their crap? They work for us, right? Right? Yeah, right.
And
these are the people running for Mayor.
Another infringement on private property
There is no reason for the government to be monitoring the use of electricity, water, cable, internet, gps, phone or texting etc. etc.
To say otherwise is to agree that only government/corporate facism that uses/gets its power from controlling every aspect of your life is the only way for us to live in peace and security.
I reject this.
And we
Reject you. Whats your point?
Quit your job here in the commonwealth and go live in the woods in NH. Least you can be free and die.
Wow. What circle did that
Wow. What circle did that come from?
Or you
could move to N. Korea....
No "we" don't reject him/her.
If you don't understand his/her point then that's your problem because his/her point is rather clear. And I agree with his/her point.
Who is "we?"
Do you have a mouse in your pocket?
Speak for yourself only please.
Another infringement on private property
There is no reason for the government to be monitoring the use of electricity, water, cable, internet, gps, phone or texting, medical insurance, etc. etc.
To say otherwise is to argue that we have to have government/corporate facist/totalianarian control that uses/gets its power from controlling every aspect of our lives in order for us to live in peace and security.
I reject this. We do not need to have the government telling us what to do every minute of the day. We know what to do.
Prediction:
These pain-in-the-ass annual reports will be stuck in a file cabinet and never seen or used, or (if e-filed) will be maintained on a City Hall server and never seen or used.
On a server
In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".
42
RIP Douglas Adams
Warrantless pot farm hunts
We might hope that the City would first make the data available so prospective renters can choose a building based on energy efficiency. Failing that, anybody can submit a public records request to the City to get the data.
Police in many places look for unusually high electricity consumption to identify indoor pot growers. Now, not even a court order is needed.
Couldn't they just ask NSTar
Couldn't they just ask NSTar and National Greed, how much did you pump into our city today?
No.
The electric utilities can only tell you how much energy they supplied. They can't tell you how efficiently it was used. As an example: They have no indication of what the 1600 Watts they supply is doing. That 1600 Watts can be running 10 160 Watt light bulbs which are 50% efficient (10X160W = 1600W). In which case, most of the electricity is just becoming heat (who here remember when light bulbs used to get really hot?). Or that 1600W can be running 100 16W light bulbs which are ultra efficient (100X16W=1600W). These smaller 16W light bulbs could then be made with LEDs and run much more efficiently than 50%, and are cool to the touch. In the end, Nstar only knows they put 1600W into your building. What you do with it they don't know.
Landlords don't know what
Landlords don't know what kind of lightbulbs are being used inside people's apartments either.