CollaboRent (The Rental Accord):
From the course: Sustainability Studio, taught by Nathan Shedroff and Susan Gladwin
Nicole Chen
Paul Colando
Erica Frye
Mei Lan Ho-Walker
CollaboRent is a non-profit organization dedicated to measurably improving the sustainability of rental homes. To this end, CollaboRent has developed a program, The Rental Accord, that engages renters and owners to collaboratively create efficient, comfortable homes and raise awareness of how their choices affect their communities and the environment.
Specific objectives of The Rental Accord are to:
- Create collaborative relationships between renters and owners
- Raise awareness of residential resource consumption
- Provide assistance to owners to maintain and upgrade their buildings sustainably
- Improve the health, efficiency, and comfort of rental housing
- Engage renters as partners in the community
- Inspire behaviors that benefit the community and environment
Unique conditions make addressing sustainable retrofitting of multi-unit homes challenging, requiring a different approach from solutions that exist for new or owner-occupied housing.
Rental Challenges:
- Split Incentives: The party that pays for upgrades or utilities and the party that benefits from them are often not the same. For example, an owner who purchases a new, energy-efficient appliance for a rental unit must pay the upfront cost, but if the renter is responsible for utility costs they are the ones who enjoy the savings. Conversely, an owner is motivated to upgrade efficiency if he pays for utilities, but in that case the renter is not motivated to conserve.
- Power Imbalance: Renters often do not feel empowered to suggest changes to their living units and even fear that landlords will retaliate by increasing the rent or imposing eviction. This leads to a lack of control and feeling of insecurity in one's living environment, which ultimately leads to less personal investment in the residence.
- Mistrust of Renters: Just as renters do not believe landlords will address their needs, property owners often do not trust their renters to take good care of their buildings. They will, however, work harder to keep tenants that have proven to be responsible and respectful.
- Knowledge Acquisition: Finding information and resources about what changes are most effective, what financing options are available, and how to execute these changes is cumbersome. This presents a significant barrier to initiating building improvements even when the property owner is motivated.
From these findings, it is clear that improving the renter-landlord dynamic is necessary to encourage sustainable building improvements in multi-unit buildings. In addition, an effective solution must address the fundamental renter and landlord needs CollaboRent identified in its primary and secondary research.
Renters' Basic Needs:
- Find the right apartment: Preferences regarding attributes such as price, location, security, amenities, comfort, and utilities are the key factors for renters in choosing a new unit.
- Experience physical comfort: Renters want to be physically comfortable in their living environments, but often there are issues such as temperature or mold that are discovered only after moving in.
- Feel in control: While renters understand their rights are limited, they still want to feel some control over their living spaces and be given the freedom to decorate and initiate improvements.
- Have reliable landlord: When problems do arise that are out of the renter's control, renters want to know that they have a reliable landlord that will address the issue promptly.
Landlords' Basic Needs:
- Be in control: Owning a rental building is a large investment, and property owners and managers need to feel like they are in control of this investment and have the ability to make decisions that affect their buildings.
- Improve property value: Because the building is a financial investment, property owners desire to maintain and ideally improve property value of their buildings.
- Identify and retain reliable tenants: They need to feel that tenants living in their buildings are reliable and responsible. They wish to identify good tenants at the time of lease, and will work hard to retain those that have proven to be responsible and caring of their living spaces.
- Reduce burden implementing changes: Planning and implementing changes can be time consuming and costly, as property owners must deal with building codes, materials, vendors, and financing. Initiatives that can reduce this burden would encourage proactivity.
- Stay in compliance: Property owners must ensure that their buildings are compliant with local government regulations. Rules can be complex, and owners often must seek outside help to navigate the web of building codes.
The combination of direct challenges to sustainable rental housing and general user needs that must be addressed therefore makes the issue of improving the sustainability of rental housing complex.
