Electric vehicle sales have recently fallen short of carmakers’ hopes, but there are signs EVs may have staying power in the market. In the third quarter this year, EVs accounted for nearly 9% of automobile sales, according to Cox Automotive. That was their highest share on record.
With more electric vehicles on the road, more drivers will be looking for places to charge. Right now, for most EV owners, that’s easiest to do if they have a garage or driveway. But over 45 million U.S. households rent, and many of them live in multifamily buildings. As EVs grow their market share, more renters are looking to charge at their apartment complexes, presenting challenges for renters and developers.
For architecture student Philip Kiefer, those challenges include prowling his Burlington, Vermont, neighborhood for open public chargers when he wants to charge up his Chevy Bolt. He found one on a utility pole on a residential street one recent evening.
“Twelve feet above us on a telephone pole is this black box with a plug sticking out of it,” he said. “And when you turn it on, it comes falling out of the sky.”
Kiefer then pulled the plug and its cord across the hood of his car to the charging port, plugged it in and within a few hours his car was fully charged.
Kiefer’s mapped out all the public charging spots in his neighborhood, like this city-owned charger, because he can’t charge at the apartment he rents. He’s got several options, which he said made it feasible to buy an electric car. But they’re all at least a few minutes’ walk from his apartment.
But just around the corner, tenants at a different apartment complex don’t need to leave their building at all.
Through the garage door underneath a building called One Lakeview is a private parking deck with an impressive view of Lake Champlain and the distant Adirondack Mountains, and there are chargers for residents who own EVs.
Standing in the garage, building owner Erik Hoekstra said the two JuiceBox chargers are available — for no extra cost — to tenants who pay for a spot in the garage. It’s been that way since the building opened in 2019, he said.
Since then, Hoekstra said, the residents’ demand for charging has grown. So he’s in the early stages of adding chargers to five older properties in the area that he runs. And compared to building them upfront, that’s complicated.
“You’ve got to wire it in, and you’ve got to have a pretty robust electrical service,” he said. “If you’re putting stations outside, you might be doing site work and excavating to put a conduit in the ground and run the power out to a parking lot.”
The costs add up, as apartment developers around the country are learning.
“The word’s getting out to apartment managers that you really want to future-proof your development. It’s so much cheaper to do this upfront, when you’re building new construction,” said Jeff Allen, executive director of Forth, a nonprofit that advocates for electrifying transportation.
Charging is likely to become an increasingly popular amenity among apartment dwellers, Allen argued. Last year, the National Multifamily Housing Council found that 34% of tenants want EV chargers in their building, 7 percentage points higher than the previous year. But, Allen said, demand varies a lot by region.
“If I’m in San Jose, California, and I manage apartments, I need to be providing charging today,” he said. “If I’m in Leavenworth, Kansas, and I manage an apartment building, I might have 10 years.”
Whatever timeline they’re on, apartment owners can tap into incentive programs from utilities, cities, states and at least for now, the federal government.
The Inflation Reduction Act includes a tax credit that developers can use for EV charging in certain circumstances. But that might not last under the Donald Trump administration, said Ingrid Malmgren, senior policy director at the nonprofit Plug In America.
“I think we’re going to see a shift from efforts at the federal level to efforts at state and municipality levels, county levels, working with partners who are interested in moving this forward. And there are a lot of states who are committed to this,” Malmgren said.
Those states include Vermont. Funds from the state and the local electric utility are supporting the charging systems that property manager Erik Hoekstra is working to install with an eye toward the future.
“I won’t be surprised if within the next decade or so, something like half of the vehicles out there are going to need access to charging of some type,” Hoekstra said.
Until other developers get on board, he said, adding chargers now will give him a leg up in attracting tenants.
