NYC Local Law 97 and the movement to drive out the middle class

Bob Dylan, asked about the meaning of some of his lyrics many years ago replied, “I just write them, and let the hippies figure ‘em out”. That’s how the green lunatics address global warming: they write feel-good laws and leave it to others to figure out how to make them work. Unfortunately for the residents of New York, no one can figure out how to make the latest mandate from the City Council, Local Law 97, work.

Among the disastrous effects of the folly called Local Law 97, which requires most apartment buildings to change their heating systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is that electric heat  – the city’s preference – doesn’t  work as well as boilers that burn fossil fuels.

Bob Friedrich, board president of Glen Oaks Village in northeastern Queens, the city’s largest garden-apartment complex, warns that heat pumps for electrical systems “are only efficient for temperatures in the 30s and 40s. Below that they become less efficient to heat a home.”

In other words, he said, “Get out the heavy coat and gloves.”

The law to take effect at the end of the year can only drive more middle- and working-class homeowners owners out of town. Friedrich calls it “insane.”

Residents of Glen Oaks Village and the Bay Terrace Cooperative, both in Queens, face staggering future costs for “environmental” overhauls.

The loony law spells financial ruin for many of the city’s 3,700 co-op and condo buildings, which are home to  800,000 apartments. It  requires buildings with more than 25,000 square feet to either switch to electric heat or replace their boilers so as to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

Warren Schreiber, board president of Bay Terrace for twenty-five years, said, “I’ve never had an issue that actually kept me awake at night.”

Unlike at rental apartment towers owned by real estate companies with substantial revenue bases, the costs of heating conversions in co-ops and condos will be borne by individual shareholders and owners either as assessments or whopping hikes in monthly maintenance costs.

But do it, the city demands — or face gargantuan fines. The Real Estate Board of New York estimates that affected buildings would face more than $200 million in penalties if they can’t comply with the changes, rising to $900 million by 2030 when emission rules would be even tougher.  

Climate change might well be occurring albeit much more slowly than New York Times panic-pushers want us to believe. But that we must freeze our patooties off to stave off a strictly theoretical climatic holocaust belongs to the Sci-Fi Channel.

Building managements, including at the Upper East Side high-rise where I live, are all grappling with the law’s ramifications.

But the most pain will be felt by residents of modestly-priced buildings that do not have large reserve funds or other resources to pay for the “woke” diktats.

At  the 200-unit Bay Terrace complex in  Bayside, Queens, Schreiber said,  “We don’t know how we’re going to pay for this.”

He can’t even figure out what steps would put the complex in compliance because the rules are too dense to follow.

To go all-electric would cost Bay Terrace $3 million for heat pumps alone, he said, in addition to myriad other expenses needed for conversion.

Shareholders would pay huge assessments or a 30 percent hike in monthly maintenance. Schreiber noted, “We don’t have million-dollar luxury units like in Manhattan. We are a middle-income and working-class co-op. We have lots of teachers, civil servants, single-parent households and senior citizens.

“Many seniors would have to downsize” to smaller units to afford to stay.

At sprawling Glen Oaks, home to over 10,000 residents in 134 buildings. “We have 96 boilers” that would all have to be replaced, Friedrich said. “We’d have to spend $24.5 million for new boilers we don’t need.

“Even if we put in the most efficient boilers,” he said, the fines would be a little less but “would not go away” entirely because emission-reduction thresholds are impossible to meet without switching to an electric system.

But “switching to electric  would cost $35 million and saddle our working-class homeowners with the highest electrical rates in the country,” Friedrich said. He called it “the largest unfunded mandate the city ever imposed on their constituents.”

If Glen Oaks made no changes at all,  “We’re facing $1.1 million in fines every year,” Friedrich said.

Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian also has some thoughts on what’s coming, but focuses on a NYT article that, naturally, knowing its readership, describes the woes of a luxury highrise in Manhattan proper:

Countdown To New York's Rendezvous With Energy Impossibility

… New York City’s bid to create the first real test of an impossible green energy deadline is found in its Climate Mobilization Act of 2019, the key part of which goes by the name Local Law 97. LL97 (formal name: New York City Administrative Code Sections 28-320 and 28-321) imposes energy efficiency standards on large residential buildings starting in 2024 — next year. Buildings that fail to meet the standards are subject to large and accelerating fines starting right away.

It appears that the owners of these buildings are just now figuring out that the standards that have been set cannot be met, at least not in any remotely reasonable way. What next?

The New York Times had a big front page article on Monday about the maneuvers of one large building to try to comply with the law. The headline (online version) is “A Huge City Polluter? Buildings. Here’s a Surprising Fix.”

The building that is the subject of the profile is called The Grand Tier. It is a large (280 apartments), newish (built 2005), and very high-priced building that you may even have seen, because it sits directly across Broadway from Lincoln Center at West 64th Street. To give you an idea of the market segment the building is in, the only apartment listed at the moment on the Streeteasy website is a one bedroom for $5895 per month.

Menton, using portions of the Times’ article, describes the impossible twists and turns the company is doing to satisfy the new law’s requirements before concluding,

A few of the other wealthiest landlords will likely try something like the Glenwood gambit. But I can’t imagine any substantial number of landlords, most of whom are not remotely in Glenwood’s market niche, actually going through with full building rewirings and installation of heat pumps that will fail on the many days per year when temperatures here are in the 20s and below. We’re about to see thousands of buildings designated as law-breakers and subjected to punishing annual fines, with no realistic way to get around them. Let’s see how long this can continue.

But this is all fine, and all part of the plan to return New York to serfdom, with two classes, the very, very rich and the very poor. With lots of abandoned former middle-class housing in which to store the homeless, the stateless, and the drug dealers.