Last year, L.A. became the nation’s largest city to require all new buildings to be all-electric. But when it comes to unhooking cities from fossil fuels, retrofitting existing buildings to be all-electric is the bigger challenge — and has implications for a city of mostly renters.
Though other major cities, including New York and Boston, are moving forward with similar policies, such a large-scale effort hasn’t yet been completed.
“To a certain extent, this is new ground,” said Daniel Carpenter-Gold, a researcher who studies building electrification at UCLA School of Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
He said a similarly scaled policy includes retrofits around earthquake resilience.
“But the level of work is so much beyond that, that I'm not even sure that's a good point of comparison,” Carpenter-Gold said.
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Electrifying buildings, otherwise called “building decarbonization,” is one of the primary ways cities can reduce their carbon footprint, as long as those buildings are hooked up to a cleaner electric grid, which is slowly, but surely happening here in California.
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From their materials to gas hookups, the close to a million existing buildings in L.A. make up more than 40% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions.
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California is working to generate all of the electricity that powers homes and businesses through carbon-free sources such as wind and solar instead of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.
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Then when we electrify the stuff we use every day — such as stoves, furnaces and cars — we can significantly reduce emissions, because we’ll be plugging into a cleaner power grid.
What does electrifying buildings mean for renters?
Carpenter-Gold said there are a lot of unknowns about how this policy may affect renters since efforts have only just begun and the policy is in development.
“There's a lot to gain as well as a lot at risk for renters,” Carpenter-Gold said. He recently published a report of recommendations for how to make L.A.’s policy supportive of tenants.
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There’s also challenges ahead for property owners who could be required to start work as soon as next year. While constructing electric buildings from scratch is actually on par with or cheaper than traditional construction, retrofitting existing buildings is a lot more expensive.
Carpenter-Gold said a strong, well-enforced policy has the potential to improve health and ease costs for renters, particularly lower-income Angelenos who disproportionately live in substandard housing and pay a larger share of their income for utility bills.
Carpenter-Gold said main positives of building electrification for renters include:
- Healthier in-home appliances (a recent peer-reviewed study, for example, found gas stoves increase the risk of childhood asthma).
- More energy-efficient appliances can help save on bills (heat pumps, for example, are three to five times more energy-efficient than traditional methane gas boilers).
- Rooftop, community solar and other "distributed energy" efforts could lead to significant bill savings for renters.
However, Carpenter-Gold said a good policy without adequate enforcement could lead to retrofit costs being pushed onto renters, raised rents and even evictions.
“Any program that the city adopts for building decarbonization, it's going to lead to a large-scale program of building owners doing substantial work on their buildings,” Carpenter-Gold said. “And we know from being in the housing space that when landlords do work on buildings, it can lead to evictions and it can lead to rent increases.”
He said that’s why beefing up existing tenant protections to incorporate decarbonization, as well as improving enforcement of those protections, is essential to making sure that electrifying existing buildings doesn’t lead to the unwanted impact of forcing more Angelenos’ out of the city or even onto the streets.
Policy to prioritize tenants
Despite the risks, Carpenter-Gold said a strong policy could help dramatically improve the lives of Angelenos and even help efforts to improve the affordability of housing.
“There are real opportunities to specifically target folks that have been left behind previously by both climate policy and housing policy,” Carpenter-Gold said.
In a report published last week, Carpenter-Gold laid out policy recommendations for the city. The main recommendations include:
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- Prohibit property owners subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance from passing the costs of decarbonization retrofits on to their tenants.
- Eliminate provisions in the Los Angeles Municipal Code that allow landlords to evict tenants in order to renovate their properties.
- Strengthen enforcement and oversight of existing tenant-protection measures.
- If L.A. city provides subsidies to landlords for building decarbonization, require enforceable agreements from those landlords to protect tenants from rent increases and evictions.
- Require that landlords prioritize retrofits that improve tenants’ health and quality of life, such as appliance electrification and ventilation improvements.
- Ensure that an appropriate portion of energy savings from conservation or efforts such as rooftop or community solar is credited to tenants’ accounts.
- Create an oversight body of current tenants and community leaders to ensure the policy benefits frontline communities and low-income renters.
- Promote housing models that better protect tenants, including publicly owned housing, deeply affordable deed-restricted housing, and community land trusts.
What’s next for L.A.’s policy?
The city is expected to propose a comprehensive policy for retrofitting existing buildings later this year.
Last year, L.A.’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Office conducted outreach with renters, tenants unions, and community-based housing and environmental justice organizations to develop policy recommendations for the city council to ensure building electrification is equitable. City Council approved the recommendations in that report last September. Many of the recommendations align with Carpenter-Gold’s research, though they are not yet part of an official policy.
The city’s Energy and Environment committee will hear a report from the Bureau of Engineering on how to carry out the policy on Friday.
Last year, L.A.'s city council directed the Department of Buildings and Safety, which is in charge of overseeing this policy, to report on the plan and its impact on low-income tenants. The department did not respond to a request for more details from LAist by publish time.
