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Priced Out of the Air We Breathe

Submetering at Roosevelt Landings Converts Comfort into Profit While RIOC Watches from the Balcony

Theo Gobblevelt

Nov 21

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It used to be you could sit by the window and breathe in a little peace. Now, that costs extra—and someone’s cashing in.

That’s the new reality for residents of Roosevelt Landings, the 1,000-plus unit complex formerly known as Eastwood. Once a bastion of Mitchell-Lama affordability, it now finds itself at the center of a long-simmering crisis—one where residents are being billed, quite literally, for the air they breathe. As electric submeters are installed unit by unit, tenants are being introduced to a new line item in their monthly budget: comfort. And behind that comfort? Profit—on the books of a private equity-backed landlord and blessed, implicitly, by the inaction of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC).

A Fifteen-Year Scheme Finally Lands

Submetering at Roosevelt Landings is not a new idea. The push began as early as 2009, when then-owners proposed shifting from master-metered electric (included in rent) to tenant-paid submeters. The Public Service Commission (PSC) approved the plan—until it learned that the building used all-electric baseboard heating, lacked insulation, and subjected tenants to bills nearing $1,000/month in winter. The PSC promptly halted the rollout, citing affordability, safety, and a lack of transparency.

But the idea never died. Instead, it mutated.

In 2011, after a brief procedural reset, submetering was reauthorized—this time with conditions. The PSC required capital improvements, no billing for heat, and automatic rent reductions to offset new tenant costs. Ownership changed hands again in 2019 when L+M Fund Management, through BSREP UA Roosevelt Landings LLC, took over the lease. By 2024, management claimed the conditions had been met and began issuing sample electric bills to residents. Before submetering began, L+M projected what each unit would pay under the new system. But when the actual bills arrived, some tenants were charged more than three times those projections.

Submetering was rebranded as environmental justice. But let’s be clear: this isn’t about sustainability—it’s about plausible deniability. It became an accounting maneuver: taking a known building defect (poor insulation and inefficient heating) and repackaging it as the tenant’s responsibility.

The Math That Makes It Work

Let’s talk numbers. In 2019, RIOC approved a lease assignment to L+M that included a key financial clause: the Tax Equivalent Payment (TEP)—essentially the landlord’s in-lieu-of-taxes rent—was frozen at roughly $6.41 million a year for the remainder of the lease. That’s about $534 a month per apartment if you divide it across the Landings’ 1,000 units. It hasn’t changed since.

Meanwhile, by submetering tenant electricity, the landlord is poised to offload what experts estimate could be $2–$3 million in annual energy costs—about $165 to $250 per unit per month—straight onto residents. Rent reductions exist, yes, but they follow a state schedule and appear to offset only a fraction of actual usage, especially in larger or poorly insulated units.

And here’s the twist: residential electricity is billed at higher rates than commercial service. What might have cost the landlord $250 a month under a master-meter now arrives at the tenant’s door as a four-digit bill in peak months. The same energy—just priced differently—turns from an expense line into a profit strategy.

Add it up: a fixed tax burden for the landlord, a rising utility burden for the tenant. What’s framed as modernization is, in practice, revenue engineering—a steady windfall for ownership and volatility for everyone else.

There’s no cap on the tenants’ exposure, only on the landlord’s.

A Cold Apartment and a Hot Bill

Tenants are now discovering what submetering really means in a building like Roosevelt Landings. Heating is all-electric, delivered through aging baseboard units that are infamous for breaking down—or not working at all. Thermostats fail to trigger heat, forcing residents to turn to space heaters or, in some cases, oven burners to stay warm.

One tenant, writing anonymously to the PSC, described a winter routine of sleeping next to a space heater while wrapped in multiple blankets. “The thermostat never turns on. The heat is broken. Now I have to pay for the space heater too?”

Another resident reported monthly electric bills jumping from $219 to over $700. Even with the promised rent deduction, the math didn’t add up. Not when the air you need to breathe or the heat you need to survive is metered and charged back to you.

To compound the insult, many tenants report poor ventilation, broken windows, and unsealed drafts—deficiencies that magnify energy usage and ensure that conservation tips fall flat. When a building leaks heat, the only way to stay warm is to pay more. Submetering, in this context, doesn’t promote energy efficiency. It punishes inefficiency without fixing it.

Who Let It Happen?

This is where the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation steps in—or doesn’t. RIOC, the state authority that owns the land and leases it to landlords like L+M, has long touted its commitment to affordability and quality of life. But in the case of Roosevelt Landings, it has become a quiet co-signer to tenant distress.

When the 2019 lease transfer was approved, RIOC froze the landlord’s TEP at $6.41 million. It made no new demands about affordability, energy retrofits, or tenant protections beyond what had already been signed. In 2024, as tenant complaints surged and electric bills began arriving, Board Member Ben Fhala and CFO Dhruvika Amin Patel attended a tenant “education session” hosted by building management at the Carter Burden Network center. The session was meant to explain submetering. Instead, it became a public airing of grievances.

“The team was underprepared and overwhelmed,” Fhala later wrote in an email to RIOC’s Real Estate Committee chair. Residents described the session as insulting—an attempt to sell them LED bulbs while ignoring decades of heating failures and fire-prone baseboard units.

His call for transparency went nowhere. Committee Chair Howard Polivy favored quiet diplomacy with the landlord. A scheduled hearing never took place, and the issue quietly disappeared. No formal vote, motion, or resolution addressing submetering at Roosevelt Landings has ever been taken by RIOC’s board.

The Price of Inaction

So what is the cost of RIOC’s silence?

For tenants, it’s measured in dollars and degrees—ConEd bills that eat into fixed incomes, and rooms too cold to live in comfortably. For L+M, it’s millions in shifted costs and frozen payments. And for the island’s broader vision of affordability, it’s another crack in the foundation.

Submetering was supposed to be about conservation. Instead, it has become a weaponized efficiency—leveraged not to save energy, but to save expenses for ownership.

The building’s facade upgrades—still underway—may eventually help. But by the time insulation improves in 2026, the damage will be done. Bills are arriving now. The air is already priced. The heat already costs too much.

RIOC, for its part, says nothing. And that silence is a decision.

In the end, submetering at Roosevelt Landings isn’t just a utility shift. It’s a story about how affordability erodes—not with a dramatic collapse, but with the slow turning of a meter and the quiet signing of a lease.

The residents are watching. And they know who left the door open.