Investments in renewables, as we've seen many times, can bring economic and social equity. By unburdening homeowners with high energy costs, as seen here, money comes back from the grid into the community and into families spending for education, health and welfare.
There are great organizations through out the world doing similar work. The goal is to bring energy independence--or as close to it as possible--in all low or affordable housing as a step towards personal and environmental sustainability. It is hard to list the many positive social benefits these programs bring our cities. The ROI, on all sides, is extraordinary.
Perhaps we did not see the social improvements transformation could bring us, but they are here and we should relish the results.
Program Aims to Reduce Energy Costs and Keep Rents Affordable in Bronx
Long before it finally died last month, the old, rusted boiler in the basement of the five-story apartment building in the Bronx needed to go. It routinely broke down, leaving tenants without heat or hot water. It burned through copious amounts of heating oil and ran up thousands of extra dollars in bills.
But the old boiler stayed in the building, at 2629 Sedgwick Avenue, because the owner, Workforce Housing Group, an affordable-housing developer, said it could not afford to pay $400,000 to replace it after taking over the property in 2012. “Before we got to the building, the boiler was a mess,” a partner in the group, John Crotty, said. “And it’s not a unique situation to this building or to this area.”
The Bronx is dotted with aging apartment buildings that have weathered the changing economic and social landscape of the borough and today offer some of the most affordable rents in New York City.
But unlike newer housing developments, which routinely include green technologies, many of these buildings do not have the resources to undertake major repairs and renovations to make them more energy efficient and to improve living conditions for tenants.
So the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., has teamed up with city housing officials to create a program that will help those buildings pay the upfront costs for energy improvements, such as replacing an old boiler, insulating windows or installing solar panels on the roof. In return, the building owners agree to use future energy savings to keep rents affordable for tenants and pay back the program through leasing fees for the equipment. “This is the type of thing that really sells itself,” Mr. Diaz said.
The Bronx program comes amid expanding efforts to address what many city officials, advocacy groups and others see as a growing crisis in affordable housing. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has made housing a focal point of his second year in office, and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced this month that they were taking additional steps to protect and improve existing affordable-housing units. The measures include a “green-energy savings program” that would help small and midsize buildings finance energy- and water-efficiency improvements to lower operating costs.
“There’s an enormous need for smart energy retrofits,” said Moses Gates, director of planning and community development for the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a research and advocacy group. “Rents are rising across the city, and keeping energy costs low is a key part of a responsible owner being able to keep rents affordable and buildings in stable financial condition.”
Mr. Diaz said that the Bronx program would start this year with about $2.5 million, of which $1 million would come from his office’s capital budget and the rest from private investors and other sources. It would be open only to buildings in the borough and would initially begin with apartment buildings with 50 or more units and eventually expand to include smaller buildings.
Mr. Diaz said that he expected the voluntary program to initially pay for energy retrofits in three to five buildings, and as those buildings paid the program back through leasing fees, to use that money to pay for additional buildings. The program would be administered by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Bomee Jung, a city planning commissioner and a senior director of Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit research and finance group that has overseen energy retrofits of affordable-housing buildings, said the Bronx program could fund modest projects that might not get money or attention in larger programs. The program could work closely with individual owners to take other steps to promote energy savings, Ms. Jung said, such as installing monitors that track water use to identify leaks. “It sounds to me, in some ways, the perfect thing to do on a small scale and in a local context,” she said.
The Bronx program has also drawn support from building owners. “It’s acknowledging an operational deficiency and coming up with a plan to fix it,” said Mr. Crotty, whose group owns 14 apartment buildings in the Bronx. “It’s not terribly sexy, but if you live in the building, you’re happy someone’s paying attention.”
Mr. Crotty’s group paid less than $2 million to acquire the mortgage for the Sedgwick Avenue building from a bank in 2010 after the previous owner fell behind on payments, he said. Two years later, the group received the title to the building, which has 35 rent-stabilized apartments, and began making repairs, which included fixing water leaks and rebuilding a fifth-floor apartment gutted by fire.
But the group was unable to get additional financing to replace the building’s 1971 boiler, which consumed nearly three times the amount of heating oil as a new boiler. Mr. Crotty estimated that with a new boiler, the building’s heating oil bills would drop from an average of $16,161 a month this past winter to $3,500 a month.
Miguel Polanco, 34, the live-in building superintendent, said he managed to keep the oil boiler going through a patchwork of repairs. He had to manually refill the water every two to three hours because the automatic feeder line no longer worked. If he did not, the boiler would go out. “I had to wake up twice at night to feed the boiler,” he recalled.
After the boiler broke for good, there was no heat in the building for nearly four days until a temporary boiler could be installed. Mr. Crotty said his group now pays $8,000 a month to lease the boiler and $10,586 a month for oil. It has applied to city housing agencies for financial assistance to purchase a new boiler.
Pilar Ciraco, 65, a retired maintenance worker at Yankee Stadium who pays $882 a month in rent, said the boiler should have been replaced sooner. “I couldn’t do anything because there was no heat or hot water,” she said. “I didn’t cook, I didn’t take a shower. I stayed home and covered myself with a really good blanket.”
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