A Message from the Publisher – Spring 2023

Welcome, dear reader, to our issue focused on energy transformations. Here we find ourselves just out of the starting gate of 2023, and I am so excited to see what we can accomplish together before the end of the decade. Many countries and companies have set goals to reduce emissions “fill in the blank” percent by 2030. For those of us who haven’t yet, there is still time to jump on the bandwagon.

Most of us who work in multi-family real estate have stumbled across this fun-tastic industry by mistake (or perhaps you’d call it luck?). You see, I don’t know many of us who went around in third grade telling our parents and teachers and friends, “I want to work in the apartment industry when I grow up!”

That said, I have loved buildings for as long as I can remember. Maybe you’re the same. For me, it began with a fascination for sketching rough floorplans of every building that I spent much time in. My parent’s house, hotels, etc. Now that I mention it, I suppose it was focused on residential buildings – places that people lived and slept within. In high school, I aced my drafting classes and started making plans with a likeminded friend named McLain to open a McArchitecture firm when we grew up. (In retrospect, we probably would have needed to change that name before any banks would loan us any startup capital.) Once I started college, I ended up dropping my architecture major after a semester or two realizing that degree had a built-in extra year standing in between me and graduation. Then, after an exploratory semester as a civil engineering major, I steered away from the built environment for a while. But as Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) says in Friends, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” Ok, fine. You classic movie buffs who just yelled at me are right. Joey probably borrowed this line from Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in The Godfather III.

Anyway, the point is about buildings, and how GREAT it is to work in this industry. I stumbled into multi-family while still in grad school, and now it is almost 25 years later. But to take a little poetic license with another movie quote: “with greatness comes great responsibility.”

I was recently shocked while reading about us in a study published on US EPA’s website. Their study breaks down the share of national emissions by economic sectors: Transportation, Industrial, Agriculture, and Buildings. Of those four sectors, where would you guess Buildings ranks?

First place. That’s right: we’re the biggest! But this is one of those rare cases where bigger is not better because it means our beloved buildings are driving the most emissions in the United States at 31% of the total. Rounding out the list is Industrial at 30%, Transportation at 27%, and Agriculture at 11%. So, for those of us who are working toward being more sustainable, we’ve got a big job ahead of us.

Like me, you may have had a strong emotional response last year watching news reports of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Eventually the feelings we had for what was happening abroad morphed into fear for our own family finances when we realized that conflict set off a cascade of price hikes. It disrupted the global flow of natural gas driving up rates. Speaking of economics, one of its basic principles is supply and demand. In this issue, Chris Laughman will help us connect the dots to how the demand side of energy economics impacts our properties. Mary Nitschke will share with us about the transition from gas to electric as part of the strategy to get a property to Net Zero. She will also demystify what Net Zero really means – or at least what it is supposed to mean! And one of Lori Hanson’s multiple articles will further unpack one piece of the electrification topic that Mary will overview for us. But wait, that’s not all! In his guest editor column, Tim Haddon will get us oriented and ready for even more articles in this jam-packed issue on transformation.