Appearing in the Los Angeles Times on August 26, 2026, Audrey McGlinchy talks to Olivia Wein, senior attorney at NCLC, about how renters say shared utility bills have soared unpredictably under formula-based systems run by third-party companies, while requests to see the underlying math go unanswered.
Olivia Wein, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, first heard about ratio utility billing systems 20 years ago. Since then, she said, she’s fielded more and more complaints about the practice from tenants and advocates.
“This practice just kept emerging,” Wein said.
Wein said it’s common for these kinds of billing systems to show up in older apartment buildings, where individual meters were not installed during construction. In the last decade, states have started mandating individual meters in multifamily buildings; in 2018, California began requiring that water submeters be installed in newly constructed residences with two or more units.
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