🏡💚 Going electric when you answer to a landlord
November 17th, 2023
My stove has been broken for awhile. The latch to the oven door doesn’t stay shut, so we’ve had to put a chair in the kitchen to hold it closed. It’s been a bit of a process to talk to our landlord about getting it fixed, but she finally agreed to purchase a new stove.
While we’re replacing the stove, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to switch away from gas to a new induction stove. As someone who works on advocating for building decarbonization, I thought it would only be right to push our landlord to make the switch. My housemates and I did the research on available rebates, induction stove options and the approximate cost, and what it would take to go electric. We drafted up a message to our landlord with all the information, asking that we use this chance to get an induction stove.
… and a few days later, our landlord told us she had ordered a new gas stove, and that it would be at our home in a few days.
There are a variety of reasons why this happened, but at the end of the day I had two major takeaways: (1) not enough has been done to make going electric (as we need people to do) the easiest option, and (2) this is a small microcosm of the split incentive problem, and the fundamental difference in interests between landlords and tenants.
The term split incentive is commonly used to describe the different incentives between tenants and landlords for home investments, where (the typical thinking goes) the landlord pays for the improvement, but the tenant is the one who benefits. This doesn’t exist for homeowners who live in their homes, because they benefit from the investments they make.
This often comes up in the context of building decarbonization and energy efficiency investments, which have both individual benefits for renters (e.g. reduced utility costs, improved habitability, improved air quality) and societal benefits (e.g. reduced emissions), but don’t directly benefit landlords.
And in fact, the main benefit for landlords are things that come at the direct expense of tenants, such as trying to pass through the cost in the form of increased rents, or using the renovations as justification to evict the current tenants. These tenant impacts are the major risks of inequitably designed building decarb and home retrofit programs, and something we need to be very aware of.
This partially explains why building decarb and energy efficiency programs are largely designed to benefit homeowners (the other major reason being that renters are poorer, more politically marginalized, and less considered in policy). As stated in this article in The Verge from this week, “Policymakers haven’t yet built a solution for renters despite a need to decarbonize the entire housing sector.”
California’s Equitable Building Decarbonization program attempts to partially address this by being structured as a direct-install program — which means they pay for the full upfront cost of installing new appliances, heat pumps, and remediation improvements. But the problem still doesn’t go away, since typically you are doing outreach to residents, but really you need to convince the landlords.
The split incentive problem brings the contradictions of for-profit, private ownership of rental properties into stark relief — where the incentives for landlords (profit) are fundamentally misaligned with social, environmental, and equity goals.
Social housing is a direct challenge to this model. As now defined in California law, social housing means “residents have the right to participate directly and meaningfully in decisionmaking affecting the operation and management of the housing units in which they reside.” For our current way of thinking, this is almost hard to imagine. You have control and governance over your home, even if you rent?!
This is one of the unique ways that social housing is actually a direct solution to the policy problems we face in decarbonizing housing. It’s a way to transcend the split incentive problem by addressing the “split” head on.
Of course, even if we were able to rapidly scale social housing, we’d still need to decarbonize the private rental home market. Including strong tenant protections is crucial for that (and I’ll take this as an opportunity to once again plug SAJE’s excellent report on tenant protections for building decarb policies).
But social housing helps us think of a future where these split incentives between social benefits and profits aren’t a fundamental barrier to effective policies and programs. In the meantime, I’m still cooking with gas.
I interpret this as an induction stove being burned on a gas range. Illustration Credit: Nico H. Brausch for The Verge
Have you had a similar experience trying to go electric? Have you been able to successfully make the switch to induction as a renter? Let me know!
WHAT WE’RE READING
How to electrify your life when you rent (The Verge) — referenced above, but worth a read if you didn’t click on that link!
Climate change affects your life in 3 big ways, a new report warns (NPR) — article covering the recently released National Climate Assessment, which for the first time includes chapters on climate change's toll on the economy, as well as the complex social factors driving climate change
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