Green Landlords Project

BC Sustainable Energy's Green Landlords Project works to enable residential landlords and tenants of apartments to invest in energy and water efficiency upgrades and to act more sustainably.

Rental housing in BC tends to be energetically very inefficient, and this sector lags badly behind other building sectors in investment in efficiency upgrades. Much of the problem is due to the 'split incentive', whereby tenants often pay the energy costs, leaving the owners with no interest in efficiency. Or conversely, if landlords pay the energy bills, the tenants have no incentive to conserve energy.

Rental housing is also under-served by government policies and incentives for energy efficiency, and many concerned players - tenant advocates, owner advocates, building trades, governments - must be involved and coordinated in order to move forward with solutions.

The Phase I Executive Summary and Full Report (2008) address all the issues and the players, proposing nine interlocking solutions to address the economic, social and political barriers to energy efficiency upgrades (the technical barriers are easy by comparison!)

You can review a presentation from the March 2009 webinar on the Green Landlords Project Phase I.

Funding for Green Landlords Project Phase I was provided by The Vancouver Foundation, Vancity, the City of Victoria, and United Way. Funding for Phase II is being provided by The Bullitt Foundation, The Vancouver Foundation, BC Hydro, and the Ministry of Energy and Mines, for which we are very grateful.