Through the Climate Legacy Initiative passed by the Minneapolis City Council and Mayor unanimously in 2023, the City is finally funding local climate action at a scale needed to build momentum toward meeting the ambitious goals the city has on paper. This means it is time for a revived nudge to city leaders to make sure renters can be included in and have access to the benefits that come with implementing the new Minneapolis Climate Equity plan. Community Power has long been bringing attention to making energy efficiency programs more accessible to renters since we held listening sessions back in 2015 with the Corcoran Neighborhood organization. 

Before sharing some Policy Ideas for the City to adopt (Coming Soon!) there are a few points to ground them in:

1) Energy efficiency is a big livability and affordability issue for renters.

2) InquilinXs UnidXs recently has had an incredible win with properties involved in AG Ellison's lawsuit

3) Inclusive Financing for Energy Efficiency could remove the upfront cost and credit barriers if it is given a chance

Energy efficiency is a big livability and affordability issue for renters.

Just over 50% of Minneapolis households rent, including 3 out of 4 immigrant and BIPOC residents. 

• Many tenants of older, lower-quality multifamily buildings have shared first-hand experience in listening sessions which Community Power participated in about management being unresponsive to maintenance concerns, such as drafty/ nonfunctional windows, lack of proper heating, poor insulation, and inconsistent hot water.
•  Sometimes the wall a/c units are not working making the temperature extremely uncomfortable in the warmer months. Very often, tenants are not provided a cover for a wall a/c unit to protect against cold air entering the unit throughout the cold months.
• In buildings that are set up where tenants cannot control when the heat gets turned on, it has led to concerning stories of tenants using their ovens or space heaters to warm the unit.

Buildings with deferred maintenance issues are often leaky and inefficient. That wastes energy that could be saved by available, cost-effective improvements and also makes utility bills unnecessarily high. However, when it is the renters themselves who pay the energy utility bills, many landlords lack a financial incentive* to invest in energy efficiency improvements, while tenants do not have the authorization to make these changes to the units themselves.

While renters can request a Home Energy Squad visit, asking renters who are just scraping by financially and are transient / may not live there for very long to invest their money into a property owned by someone else is not a useful or logical strategy, particularly in cases where the owner may seem to have limited care for it

As a result, there are two general types of measures need to be put into in place to resolve this dilemma: 

1)    We need to increase landlord "yes's" and galvanize building owners to participate in clean energy retrofits either by carrot or stick and create real incentives by removing upfront cost and credit barriers. 

2)    We need to protect renters from price spikes in fossil fuels and associated rent increases. 

* Not all landlords can be painted with the same brush according to the Minneapolis Renter’s Coalition’s Community Engagement for Energy Efficiency Pilot Project back in 2016-2017. It included a survey which has shown that market-rate property owners range from being interested in energy efficiency and cost savings (and may have already completed some upgrades) to being disinterested in investing in the property and only planning to keep the spaces operational. The latter results in piecemeal upgrades such as only replacing appliances when a repair cannot be made. 

InquilinXs UnidXs recently has had an incredible win with properties involved in AG Ellison's lawsuit 

Attorney General's Office settles with landlord accused of neglecting north Minneapolis homes HavenBrook Homes agrees to pay $2.2 million in restitution, forgive up to $1.9 million of tenants' debt and attempt to sell its rental homes. 

By Susan Du Star Tribune March 15, 2024

This is story connected to Community Power’s work in addressing local energy democracy goals:

• We celebrate this as being aligned with our work in energy because it is a community ownership takeover from bad actors.

• It is a solidarity wins for renter's rights (low-wealth communities)

• In addition, giving renters more control over their home means narrowing the "split incentive" a landlord lacks financial incentive to provide energy improvements leading renters to live in drafty/expensive/unhealthy homes. 

• IX has been a partner with Community Power in the Minneapolis Renters Coalition and in the Energy Efficiency Cohort. 

Inclusive Financing for Energy Efficiency could remove the upfront cost and credit barriers if it is given a chance

Many of the less wealthy landlords genuinely want to do the right thing but run up against the barriers to energy improvements that many middle-income homeowners do. The most common barrier is lacking the front money required to enroll in a program or to wait for rebates. That is sometimes compounded by an additional barrier of not having a minimum credit score required to take out a loan for it. A third common barrier is when the energy saving programs are too complex to navigate.

Landlords who mean well, just like anyone else, will show greater interest in financing options to fund efficiency projects as long as it is simple to set up/sign up. That is particularly the case for landlords who pay for heating in the building and when the energy savings outweigh the cost of improvement. 

Having inclusive financing for energy efficiency as an available option would allow us to pay for home energy improvements on our monthly utility bills, in a way that would eliminate the up-front cost, minimum credit score, and program complexity barriers. Having a program that would allow us to save money on Day 1 for projects in which the long-term energy savings outweigh the initial costs would galvanize landlords to say yes.