Corporate landlords probably have more motivation to repect enforced obligations. So the ultimate corporate landlord is some level of government, and then we've arrived where I think we should be: public housing is a right.
It’s a low bar, and even lower when you know how poor the average house quality is within New Zealand.
The average European house is ludicrous hot inside compared to NZ housing.
Home efficiency matters to people who own a home, not renters. Renters only care about making rent and being able to eat. They don’t have the luxury of thinking about energy saving appliances when the landlord hasn’t fixed the appliances they do have. Renters are trapped with capped wages and increasing rents.
Plus, people generally aren't doing chores or using appliances unnecessarily. That means it's difficult to find ways to save meaningful amounts of energy other than adjusting the thermostat. Most household energy use outside heating /cooling comes from the appliances they can't upgrade, so the alternatives are quality of life issues like fewer showers and less laundry.
Surely they can ask for what the expected utilities are? Failing that, asking for what the trailing 12 month's bills were.
I had a bunch of work done after a kitchen fire in my house and it did genuinely cut my electrical bill. It also cost a lot of money and is something I wouldn't have done by choice especially in a rental property.
I purchased a home with a walk-out basement (brick exterior, cinder block foundation, >80% above grade). As it turned out, the prior owners had pulled a fast one and faked their framing with 1x4s and added no insulation. Our monthly power bills ranged from 400-500$ on a 2,000 sqft home.
I spent most of last year gutting the interior of the basement, framing, plumbing, electrical, insulation (R-13 fiberglass batt insulation), Sheetrock, paint, trim, flooring (laminate @ 2$ per sqft). I spent approximately $10k on this project doing the labor myself.
As a result, my bills are now in the 200-250 range. I had the insulation work done by 01/2025 for context. So, perhaps a new efficient water heater? But any serious work is unlikely to be worth the costs.
That puts it roughly at 7.5 year ROI.
How many renters rent a single space for that long? There goes the answer to the article.
It's a great project if it's your forever home, though.
Insulation upgrades are heavy remodel jobs: Opening the walls requires people to leave the space for the duration of the job. Even if you can stack contractors back to back perfectly it's still a lot of time and displacement.
These things usually happen between renters when the space is vacant. In larger units you can some times shuffle renters between similar spaces but it's a huge pain and they usually don't want to do it.
It's rare to have a kitchen appliance that requires a specialized space that you have to build the kitchen around. Unless you're dealing with odd very high end appliances, a skilled installer can almost always find something from the local home store that fits into the old space.
(Source: Time spent in construction and renovation)
And the over-the-range microwave is what caused the fire in the middle of the night in the first place while I was sleeping.
Dishwashers are pretty standard as are stovetop widths although I decided to shift to a range from my prior double ovens and cooktop.
> I got cabinet above fridge taken out because fridges have basically gotten taller.
You're right that refrigerator heights aren't standardized but you must have had a really short space if nothing at all would fit.
Installations are typically supposed to leave some additional clearance for the heat to escape from behind, although some builders will try to tightly integrate them for a different look. (High end and commercial refrigerators are designed to actively exhaust and don't have the same limitations)
Any idea of the specific failure mode?
Every little repair and upgrade I've made has been more than worthwhile, and I only wish I had made more.
Though, a friend in a nicer place went and made a deal with his landlord, for landlord to pay for only materials for substantial DIY renovation friend would do. Suddenly, his apartment had higher market value...
[1] Unless landlord participates in RealPage/YieldStar, and is pushed to illegal price-fixing.
The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The second best time is now.
The two I really can’t do on my own that I absolutely would are replace the windows and put in solar.
It was noticeably reduced when I took the time to 3M wrap all my windows one winter, but I didn't want to do it again.
It's very popular in Germany, with several million units installed. They call it balcony solar panel. People hang the panels on their balconies in apartment buildings. Germany allows up to 800-watt systems.
It's a very simple system, a solar panel coupled with a micro inverter that converts DC to AC power. It is plugged into a regular wall outlet to provide additional power to the home. The added power is an additional source of electricity in addition to the grid. Any electrical devices drawing power from the circuit draw from the closet source first (due to Kirchhoff's Law), i.e. from the solar panel, then any additional need will be drawn from the farther away grid.
The micro inverter needs to be UL 16741 compliant for anti-islanding protection, to shut off in case the grid has shut power down, so that the solar panel won't back feed power into the grid.
In U.S., Utah has already passed a law to allow plug-in solar systems for up to 1200 watts without permit requirement and allowing back-feed into the grid. A few other states are considering.
There are limits to the power fed into a circuit. Normal household electrical wire can handle up to 15amp (1800 watts on 120V) of electric load. The plug-in power from the solar panels should not exceed the limit. This means the power generated is meant to supplement the household power need rather than completely covering it. Any reduction from the grid helps.
I talked to my city's (in California) building department. They haven't heard of it and need time to do research. The building inspector says that as long as the solar panels are not modifying the structure of the building (on roof or on wall), they don't care. They said putting the panels on the ground in the yard is fine.
That's swell if you have a balcony facing the sun and enough space for 4m2 of solar without blocking your neighbors' sun. In my unit for example, it's completely infeasible.
So why do anything to improve rental units? Make them slightly better than a corrugated steel shack? No thanks, that just means the landlord can market it as a "luxury condo" and charge me up the ass for it. I'll live in my steel shack thank you very much.
One of the… problems with that is that a lot of our housing stock is very old, and honestly not ever going to reach that. The grading don’t take partial improvements into account so if you do internal wall insulation on half your house it means absolutely nothing on the EPC. The means to get to C for older properties basically require insulation (not practical in pre cavity wall buildings without an ungodly amount of work) and renewable installs. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try but it’s a tall order to ask anyone to rip everything back to brick and build cavity walls in th pre 1930 stock (which there’s absolutely craploads of)
My kid has been renting the same apartment while in school and their fridge failed over the summer. She manages the utilities and mentioned that their power bill halved as a result of the replacement. She said what they were paying before didn't seem outrageous so it came as a surprise to see the newer bills were consistently half of what it had been before.
You've highlighted one of the downsides of rent control: It changes the incentive structure dramatically in ways that aren't always a win for the tenant. I had a friend in a rent controlled apartment who would quietly do things like upgrade his appliances and fix things because his rent was so low he didn't want to rock the boat for any reason at all.
Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the problem is caused by price caps so it's not worth carmakers competing, or perhaps the law limits the number of cars that can be produced so there's always a shortage. Or perhaps it's the soviet union and there's no incentive for them to improve anything because the planners haven't demanded that they do.
The fact that people buy EVs and hybrids at all, despite their higher upfront cost, suggests that at least some care about fuel efficiency.
honestly both have far more acceleration than I use or want in the real world. But the fun factor is still there at lower acceleration in the ice.
Which traditional car maker actually cared about EVs before Tesla came along?
(Even Toyota, which was sorta "caring about it" did not believe in going "all in" and for a very very long time would only do Hybrid and nothing more).
Every other established car maker did not invest in this until "forced" by Tesla so to speak. And then spurred on by things like the EU regulations to no longer allow any non-EV new car registrations by ... was it 2035? Which I hear they're now thinking about undoing.
A "market" includes consumers, almost by definition, so the statement is true. Otherwise it just becomes a meaningless statement where companies can't be said to do anything.
For a slightly less contentious example, consider gaming chairs. I think most people would assume it's something "the market" came up with, considering that there wasn't some government regulation mandating gaming chairs. Consumers demanded gaming chairs, and chair companies filled the gap. A market success story, right? Nope, according to the above definition, chair companies can't do anything. They only made gaming chairs because consumers demanded them. It's actually consumers that made (?) gaming chairs!
But "the market" (i.e. consumers) did not "do it by itself". Regulations had to force car makers to care about fuel economy. And while once Tesla came around (or a bit earlier a Prius) some consumers did buy those vehicles, they were premium vehicles. Prius owners were laughed at not imitated by the general public to an extent where both Toyota and every other car maker suddenly only made Hybrids or started making EVs. Thus my apprehension for my parent's "the market did it!" ;)
Like, let's go back to what made me reply from my parent:
Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing
Guess why in Europe smaller cars and cars with better fuel economy were and are more popular? Because gas is more expensive through regulation. "Regulation" there takes multiple forms. The earliest being simply taxes on gas, which are much higher in Europe. But also previously mentioned by me EV mandate, which is a Tesla+ era regulation. And before that the CO2 emission kind of regulations, which made me mention the "skirting". As in, manufacturer are skirting the CO2 emission rules, e.g. because some of those regulations only apply to a manufacturer entire assortment of offers. How is it the poor manufacturer's fault that people only buy their high emission models, when they have a "SMART" type choice on offer too? Essentially the market didn't work (again especially in the US with too cheap gas) with people buying SUVs and F150 type trucks over a Fiat Panda or SMART.
Assuming the work was free (it never would be but just go with it), the upgrade would save about $100/month in electricity. To a prospective tenant, that means they'd be willing to pay up to $100 more in rent to break even. Now since we live in the real world, that upgrade now has to be paid for. The work cost $4.8k and the landlord wants to pay for it over 2 years so now there's a $200/month increase. But the work will only save $100/month. The tenant is now paying an extra $100 in total living expenses. By the time the 2 years are up, the landlord isn't going to cut the rent by $200, he'll just continue to charge the same or more than what it was 2 years ago. The tenant will forever be paying that extra $100 in living expenses while the landlord gets to pocket an extra $200.
What's needed is a baseline of acceptable housing for tenants and rent controls that force the landlord to share at least some of the financial burden.
If most landlords have newly updated units on the market for $2000/month and someone tries to rent a similar unit untouched since 1970 for $2000/month, that unrenovated unit is going to sit on the market for a very, very long time.
Just let people create value and trade.
PS: Sad that you're getting downvotes for a thoughtful, polite comment, too. Downvotes are for hiding idiocy and meanness, not viewpoints that you disagree with.
I spent 15 years living in my current state before I bought a home. In that time I moved on average every 2 years often due to changing jobs or changing living circumstances. There is no way I could have afforded to buy a home when I first moved here, and even if I could have, I didn't know anywhere near enough about the area or where I would be in 5 years let alone 10 or 20 to have made a good choice for where to buy that home. I love my home but owning this home has cost me well over 50k in repairs and maintenance in the 15 years I've owned it. That is absolutely money I would not and did not have when I first moved to this state and it would have financially ruined me to have bought and owned a home when I first moved here.
Have I had some crappy landlords? Sure. I've also had some great ones too and have very fond memories of some of the places I've lived over the years. None of which would have been possible without landlords in general.
I'd like to know which lenders allow you to do this, given a standard mortgage starts at 20% down and needs to be paid down from there. Unless you're committing mortgage fraud you can't exceed whatever initial leverage you started out with.
No, they provide capital. In modern society it's hard to picture what "capital" actually is aside from some wall st bankers in suits, but at the most basic level it's forgone consumption. Every dollar invested in a company or a house is a dollar that could have been spent on an iPhone or a nice steak, and whoever forgone that consumption needs to be compensated for it, otherwise nobody would bother doing so.
If you're trying to imply that absent landlords, every renter in Manhattan is going have $3000 (or whatever) more in their bank accounts per month and can buy so many iPhones and steaks, it quickly breaks down when you think of second order effects:
1. There are only so many apartment units in Manhattan. How do you dole them out? First come first served? How's that any different than the current situation where boomers are set for life, and young people are locked out of the housing market unless they're rich or they inherit? Everyone giving up $3000/month for a place to live in might not be ideal, but it's better than the alternative. In areas without a rental market, but where supply exceeds demand, a black market eventually develops where it basically turns into rent.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58317555
2. If there's no cost for continuing to live in an apartment, what incentive is there to vacate a unit? Manhattan is expensive to live in because that's where the jobs are, but if lived there and then retired, why bother moving? It's not costing your anything, why bother uprooting your life, or even downsizing? Note that even owners have incentive to vacate their unit, because it means they can either rent it out for $$$, or sell it to someone else. Absent that you'll have to pry them from their cold dead hands.
3. How would new housing get built? Skyscrapers are expensive, so you need some of capital to build. It might be hard to picture, but not buying an iPhone means that the global economy has slightly more resources that can be put towards building a new apartment tower. So capital will still be needed. Who will provide it?
It's true that the housing economy would become less dynamic. The metagame would have to shift from forcing people to vacate existing properties to the government led construction of attractive new units and some kind of planning to ensure that new areas are not starved of jobs. Kind of like China.
Ain't no different than leasing bajillion dollar process equipment.
The basic problem in America today is an absolute lack of democratic control of the government and our capitalist class. I can go into this in some detail but it is a large digression from the topic at hand. But I will add, that even Donald Trump is afraid to directly cut popular programs, or at least has some limits.
Yes, every time my lease was up, I elected to stay or move. I did that multiple times for 15 years. By contrast, every time I moved, I was in the same state, so never changed governments.
By comparison, if I had lived in a world where all residential property was owned by the state, I would likely have to wait anywhere from 2-6 years before I could even begin to make a change in management. Then I would have to hope that the majority of voters in my area wanted the same things I wanted from my management. Then assuming that my preferences carried the day, I would have to hope that whatever changes I voted for were implemented before the next election or run the risk that they would be overturned by a subsequent election loss. And all of that for no additional upsides. The ability of the public to dictate rental law remains the same. The only difference is now every possible change, whether it would normally rise to the importance of a legislative debate or not, is now subject to that legislative debate process.
The only solution to this that demonstrably works is for the state to provide a significant amount of housing to keep the private secotr honest [2].
Everything else is just propping a system that steals from the poor to give to the already rich.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
That said, I would obviously support the government building a large amount of high quality housing, assuming they could do it at a reasonable price.