Looming Climate Law Has Co-op and Condo Owners Fretting About Funds to Retrofit Buildings

This article was originally published on Jul 5 5:00am EDT by THE CITY

Property owners with lower or fixed incomes are scrambling to fund renovations to comply with a city climate law that requires buildings to reduce their carbon emissions.

They say the city has not provided viable financing options, or explained what mitigating factors could ease potential noncompliance penalties for the law that’s set to take effect in just six months.

Local Law 97, passed in 2019, will apply beginning in January to almost all buildings 25,000 square feet and larger — running the gamut from schools and multi-family homes to hospitals and distribution centers.

The law’s intent is to address climate change by forcing buildings — which are the city’s biggest polluters — to reduce carbon emissions with the goal of lowering them 40% citywide by 2030 and 80% by 2050.

Then-Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the law as part of his “Green New Deal,” calling it “the strongest city policy in the world to cut greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.”

But the administration tasked with implementing the law — under which buildings will have to submit a report on their emissions by May 1, 2025, and then annually — is still working out how to do that.

“There is a big challenge here,” said City Councilmember James Gennaro (D-Queens), who chairs the Committee on Environmental Protection, but was not serving in Council when the bill passed in 2019. The law, he said, “was not well thought through.”

Its financial impact on small-scale homeowners, Gennaro added, had been “left out of their thought process completely” by the lawmakers who wrote and passed it.

But “it’s already law, and we didn’t do it. So we’re trying to deal with it,” he continued. “The Adams administration didn’t do it, and they’re…