This is exactly the stuff I work on and it’s so encouraging to see it in The New York Times. In fact, the subject of the article, Sean Neill, is a colleague whom I’ve worked with for a few years. Last March, I helped organize a conference on green leasing; he was a speaker.

Building legislation and green leases aren’t sexy. They don’t make headlines on sites like Treehugger. But they will ensure that New York City remains the most sustainable city in North America for decades to come.

Last year, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed four laws and two programs that would have required the owners of New York’s largest buildings to pay for improvements to make their properties more energy-efficient.

The City Council passed a modified version of the proposal in December that required landlords to audit their buildings’ energy use once a decade and publish the results, but made investments to reduce energy waste optional.

Building owners had questioned the feasibility of mandated improvements, arguing that they often bear the burden of paying for investments without any codified way to share costs with tenants.

Sean Neill, a 37-year-old economist who started a consulting company a year ago to address the murky question of how landlords might pay for retrofits, says change will be very difficult to achieve if it does not address the way leases are written.