My apartment tower has broke garbage disposal chutes on _every single floor_. That is, the building's waste disposal system is entirely broken. For 2 years now. Nobody can get it fixed because by my estimate under 20% of residents are owner-occupiers.
Real Estate agent says to contact building management, building management ignores you, real estate agent says there's nothing they can do about that. Perfect denial of responsibility.
Move elsewhere? It's all the same in other buildings.
Picking a specific solution like passive solar or PV on the roof is likely to get outdated relatively quickly but cost is a useful metric.
At some level it would make sense for municipalities to actively identify inefficient buildings and offer the owners incentives to improve them. Fraught, but likely to improve things faster than waiting decades for stock to cycle.
It didn't seem to have that much of an effect. The government has now had to ban the renting out of units that are too badly insulated [1], with landlords complaining about this.
Of course, with there not being nearly enough units in some markets as is (Paris, for example), combined with rent-controls, I bet watching this unfold will be interesting.
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[0] The rating has existed for a while, though I think it only recently has become mandatory. In my neck of the woods (Paris), when I was looking to rent, it would be exceptional to not see the rating on the advertisements.
[1] The rent is not allowed to be raised on G-class units, and they'll be banned from renting altogether starting in 2025.
Not surprised. In most cities housing is a seller's market so people can't be too picky about stuff like energy efficiency of the unit if they want to have a roof over their head so landlords get away with not doing any maintenance for decades while still collecting rent.
>ban the renting out of units that are too badly insulated [1], with landlords complaining about this.
Great. Maybe the landlords should do less complaining and more renovating instead of keep being slumlords and keep making money without doing any work.
Something like "mpg" will depend a lot on your lifestyle, how many family members, etc. It's not realistic. But what you could do is create a generic "score" -- which I think is what you really want -- that takes into account things like insulation and double pained windows, and then you can buy houses with higher scores. This was the idea behind LEED certification for office complexes, so I think you want something like that for residential housing. The good news is that this exists!
https://www.usgbc.org/leed/rating-systems/residential
So what I think you really want is to mandate that every residential construction project obtain a LEED rating -- or equivalent -- which of course will add to the cost of residential housing. That's a trickier question.
But seriously, we don't need more housing subsidies. Whether or not more regulation is needed is a quantitative question. Newer homes already have better insulation tech, for older homes, it depends on whether the owners upgraded them. If they did, you can be sure they will advertise this info in order to get more when they sell it.
Regulating disclosure of this for rental housing by landlords might be a good idea, though.
Having big stickers with annual costs on them at point of sale is just as much about influencing manufacturers as consumers. Think about the steady improvement in refrigerator efficiency, it’s not that everyone compares these numbers it’s that more people do.
Someone being able to roughly find this out if they jump through some hoops isn’t particularly meaningful to the overall market. Someone building 1,000 homes however has to predict consumer behavior and looking obviously worst than the competition is never appealing.
New houses need to have an energy label A+++ or A++++ ( eg energy usage of at most 50 kWh/ m2/per year, which in practice means all new houses come with good isolation, a heat pump and solar panels. Restrictions are also coming in 2030 that forbid renting out a house with a poor energy label, and subsidies are provided to home owners for measures that improve the energy label of your house.
Cost however has a great way of ordering the scale because the biggest differences are also the most impactful differences.