B1.6 Rental housing energy efficiency baseline *
Pass ordinance to require rental units to meet baseline levels of energy efficiency and make the requirements more stringent over time.
Ann Arbor’s housing code has included weatherization and insulation requirements for rental housing since 1985.
Boulder’s SmartRegs ordinance required all standard long-term rental housing in the city to meet a basic energy efficiency standard by Jan. 1, 2019 as part of their rental housing licensing program. According to the ACEEE’s Mayor’s Toolkit (p. 11), by the end of 2019 22,500 of Boulder’s 23,000 licensed rental units were in compliance. The average upgrade cost has been $3,022 per unit, of which an average of $579 was paid by rebates. (The program has not worked well for some landlords, though.)
Burlington Vermont requires ongoing weatherization improvements in rental housing with an energy intensity rating of greater than 50,000 BTUs per square foot as part of the minimum code enforced by the Department of Permitting & Inspections, which includes inspections of every property on a cycle that ranges from one to five years, depending on the performance of the property. Staff prepared a background memo for the discussion of the ordinance.
Austin’s Energy Conservation and Disclosure Ordinance (2008) requires multifamily properties that use 150%+ of average energy use for similar properties to conduct retrofits that lower energy consumption by at least 20%.
RCW 82.46.015 and RCW 82.46.037 currently limit jurisdictions’ use of up to a million dollars a year of real estate excise tax (REET) revenue for capital projects if they place “any requirement on landlords, at the time of executing a lease, to perform or provide certain improvements or modifications to real property or fixtures, except if necessary to address an immediate threat to health or safety.” (The RCWs do exempt regulations enacted by local governments pursuant to building code requirements, nuisance regulations, and unfit dwellings provisions from the restrictions.) However, jurisdictions requiring retrofits might simply be able to shift funds from their capital construction budgets with funds from their capital construction budgets to work around this limitation.