Building Baselines: Max Stewart
In the ongoing effort to make affordable housing more energy-efficient and resilient, Mercy Housing stands out as a national leader. As the largest non-profit affordable housing provider in the United States, Mercy Housing is tackling the intersecting challenges of environmental sustainability and housing affordability head-on. At the heart of this mission is Max Stewart, Senior Environmental Analyst within Mercy Housing’s Green Hope sustainability team.
Max plays a pivotal role in advancing Mercy Housing’s energy and water efficiency goals by analyzing utility data across the organization’s extensive portfolio. His work helps identify opportunities for savings, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and ensure that properties are not only more sustainable but also more cost-effective for residents and owners alike.
In this interview, Max discusses the unique challenges of managing utility data across multifamily affordable housing, the power of better data access, and how partnerships and innovative technologies are helping Mercy Housing pave the way toward a greener, more equitable future.
Can you start by telling us about Mercy Housing and your role as a Senior Environment Analyst within the Environmental Sustainability department?
Mercy Housing is the largest non-profit affordable housing provider in the United States. I sit on our sustainability team, known as Green Hope. Our team works to implement energy and water savings measures across our portfolio, with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making our properties more resilient, all while saving money on our utility expenses. My role specifically as the data analyst on our team is to track our portfolio’s energy and water data, and to find savings opportunities from that data.
What drew you to working in sustainability within affordable housing?
We work at a very specific junction of two important problems. I was drawn more to the sustainability side of things, but I have found it interesting to get to know the affordable housing industry as well. Contributing to environmental sustainability efforts is made even more rewarding by the fact that we get to help under resourced communities lead healthier lives.
What are the biggest challenges you face when trying to access and manage utility data across Mercy Housing's multifamily properties?
Access to whole building data that we can be confident in is a big challenge. We recently found that a lot of our meter configurations that we thought were adding up to whole building data were not, and we had to start fresh with new feeds from utility providers. We have also had trouble getting access to interval data from utility providers. Many providers do not have an easy way to share this data, even though they are collecting it from smart meters wherever they are installed.
Contributing to environmental sustainability efforts is made even more rewarding by the fact that we get to help under-resourced communities lead healthier lives.
How do these challenges impact your sustainability initiatives?
It makes prioritizing low efficiency properties much more difficult when we are not confident in the data that we are provided. We also know from some success stories that access to real time interval data can lead to significant savings by catching issues much faster than we otherwise would. Since we don’t have access to this data from all utility providers, we are likely missing out on a lot of opportunities.
How do you navigate the complexities of data privacy regulations and resident consent when gathering utility information from multiple units?
We request tenant aggregate data wherever possible. This allows utilities to share tenant utility data with us without sharing any private information. Not all utilities are cooperative in sharing this data though, so we still do not have whole building data available for our entire portfolio.
Let’s dream a bit. Tomorrow, you wake up and every utility can deliver a complete data set for the built world, including Affordable Housing / Multifamily buildings, when owners ask for it. Utility program owners can use it to empower and inform their programs. Customers and building owners can use it to make smarter decisions for their buildings. What are you most excited about and why? What else do you think is possible with this whole building data access?
I would be most excited for the opportunity to accurately prioritize our work. There are likely properties that we would be trying to make more efficient if we knew the full state of its current use. I also think that this would lead to more accurate reporting of our emissions, helping our entire industry to become more efficient.
Another benefit would be easier reporting of benchmarking data. We currently pay a third party to help submit all of our required data to various Cities and States. We could save a lot of time and money of this data was readily available.
What building programs has Mercy Housing implemented to improve energy and water efficiency tracking, and how do you balance sustainability goals with affordability?
We have worked with Bright Power using their Energy Score Cards system to track energy and water data since the inception of our team. We have leaned on them a lot to make improvements to our data collection and quality assurance over the last few years, freeing up more of our team’s time. We have also started to use tools developed by Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF), a peer group that we are a part of, to better track our emissions data. This has helped us prioritize our work based on emissions, rather than only prioritizing based on energy use.
Balancing sustainability and affordable housing goals usually comes down to funding sources for our team. We try to rely mainly on grants and rebate programs for our work, so that we do not interfere with a property’s budget.
How do you address the split incentive problem, where property owners invest in efficiency improvements, but tenants receive the utility savings?
Because of budget constraints in affordable housing, most of our work needs to be mostly or completely funded by outside sources like grants or rebate programs. Since we usually do not need to ask for a significant investment, we can afford to pass utility savings on to our residents and property owners alike. Obviously we would also like to be able to help struggling properties save on utility costs, and there are cases where we need to spend significant money in order to implement a project, so we do need to prioritize owner savings in some instances.
Can you share a success story where better utility data management led to significant environmental or financial improvements for a Mercy Housing property?
Access to interval data from San Francisco Water has allowed us to catch many water issues at our SF properties sooner. San Francisco has some of the highest water rates in our portfolio. Identifying leaks within a couple of days rather than a few months has already saved hundreds of thousands of gallons, and thousands of dollars for our properties. We are also in the process of collecting electricity and gas interval data from PG&E, and we are hoping to use this to better identify savings opportunities throughout our California portfolio.
What policy changes at the local, state, or federal level would make your work with utility data more effective, and what innovations in this field are you most excited about?
A policy change that would require utility providers to share whole building data automatically with building owners and with any jurisdictions that require this data would be very helpful. We are required to submit benchmarking data for most of our properties and it would save a lot of time and money to have this done automatically. I am personally most excited for innovations related to real time metering. Access to data from smart meters installed by utility providers and from third party metering solutions that we can install help us gain access to our utility data sooner. These also allow us to better verify the whole building data that we are receiving from utility providers, since we have another data source.
Mercy Housing 2024 Green Hope Highlights
Explore how Mercy Housing’s Green Hope team is driving measurable sustainability impact across the country. The 2024 Green Hope Highlights report showcases real-world results—from electrification and solar installations to weatherization and efficiency upgrades—that are transforming affordable housing communities. Discover how data-driven strategies and strong partnerships are helping reduce emissions, lower costs, and improve quality of life for residents
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