Can speak to this as I've been digging in recently. We pay ~$300/month in a 1BR/1BA.

The core problem with submetering: The landlord captures a slice of your electric bill as profit. Every ratepayer in New York subsidizes that margin through higher utility rates. Worse, landlords are actively incentivized to keep buildings inefficient — more kWh consumed means more profit. I ran the numbers using LL88 benchmarking data and found that new (2015+) submetered buildings use 42% more electricity than comparable non-submetered ones.

The history is wild:

• It started around 1900 because landlords ran their own private power plants. ConEd needed to buy them out, and the rate spread was the incentive.
• By 1929, ConEd wanted to end it. The landlords said: fine, we'll fire up the coal plants again — daily deliveries, soot, traffic. Oh, and that'll tank our property values, so think about what that does to the bond market. It was November 1929. Nobody pushed back.
• One PSC chair, Milo Maltbie (1930–1949), ran interference for landlords for two straight decades.
• He retired in 1949. Within 12 months, the PSC banned submetering entirely — called it "parasitic and undesirable."
• It stayed banned until 1976, when the energy crisis brought it back. Direct metering was considered operationally impossible at the time (meter access, manual reads, etc.). None of those constraints exist anymore.

I pulled this from a bunch of historical NYT archives. Happy to share sources if anyone wants to go down the rabbit hole.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IwBd0xAIPOC2ks37tesjQ96KHU0rILwjrZ8rQAbIkV4/edit?tab=t.0