Leonard McBean had been told for months that his south Los Angeles home was a firetrap. Decades-old wiring had never been replaced, a common situation in his low-income neighborhood. One Tuesday morning, McBean asked a friend about the electrical contractor working on their house. By Wednesday night, the same contractor—a man who gave his name as Yogi—had approved the Jamaican immigrant for $18,000 in energy-efficient improvements.
“I said, ‘I don’t have that money,” McBean, a 67-year-old retired medical shuttle driver, told me. “He said, ‘Mr. McBean, don’t worry, you’re not going to pay a lot, just $100 a month.’ He said it was an Obama program.”
When McBean electronically signed the contract two years ago, he didn’t realize he was consenting to have a lien placed on his house, meaning the county could take the home away for lack of payment. He didn’t know the escrow payment attached to his mortgage would jump $400 a month. He didn’t know the lien would make the home difficult to sell.
“If I saw anybody with this intention, I would tell them no, don’t do it,” McBean said. “It’s going to be a nightmare for you, it’s going to be a rip-off.”
McBean was ensnared in a harmless-sounding program called Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), which helps people finance solar panels or energy-efficient windows with no money down. Homeowners pay through a surcharge assessed to property taxes, enjoying clean-energy upgrades that might otherwise be out of reach financially. And society benefits from more energy-efficient housing stock. “You can go solar right now,” President Obama, a longtime PACE booster, said last year. “And in the process, you can help America lead the world in the fight against climate change and for a cleaner, safer planet for our kids.”
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