If you rent an apartment or buy a condo, you have little ability to anticipate how much your utility bills will be, and little confidence whether the structure is energy-efficient.
Conversely, if you build multifamily housing, you may have little incentive to build with energy-efficiency in mind because someone else will be paying the bills.
A new law in California addresses this very issue. The legislation, signed into law earlier this month, will set energy benchmarks for multifamily housing, and will require multifamily housing projects to report annual energy usage, making the information available to the public.