Amid extreme heat, the fight to make landlords turn down the thermostat

FRESNO, Calif. - On a 114-degree day, May Yang was seeking relief - from her own home.

Her ground-floor, two-room apartment sits in direct sun for much of the day, making the inside unbearably hot, despite her air conditioner’s feeble attempts to cool it down.

In California and many other states, renters like Yang are entitled under the law to heating that maintains a minimum temperature during the winter. But there are few mandates nationwide - including in California - that require residences to stay below a certain temperature in the summer.

As heat waves intensify in a warming world and a growing body of research shows the deadly effects of extreme heat, some renters, politicians, tenant advocates and environmental health experts are pushing for stronger hot weather protections, such as requiring rental units to be cooled to a certain temperature.

Gary Allen, the supervising attorney at the Harvard Tenant Advocacy Project, said cold has long been considered life-threatening, but only recently have many thought of heat in the same way. “The rationale for heating standards is that low temperatures are recognized to constitute a risk to health,” Allen said.

Cold temperatures kill more people than hot temperatures. But the World Meteorological Institute says heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather - which the world is seeing more of due to human-caused climate change.

The effects of extreme heat are severe and have been linked to heart, kidney and respiratory failure. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about a third of recorded heat-related deaths in the United States have occurred in people’s homes between Jan. 1, 2018, and July 13, 2024.

Under many state laws, if a rental unit comes with an air conditioner, landlords are required to keep it in working order - but not cool the dwelling to a specific temperature. Most cooling policies exist on the city or county level.

Phoenix, Dallas and New Orleans have ordinances that require landlords to keep residences cooled to certain temperatures. But Arizona, Texas and Louisiana do not have state-level laws mandating cooling.

“We really haven’t thought about cooling as a basic right or basic need,” said David Konisky, a professor of environmental policy at Indiana University. “But I think it’s something that we need to take into consideration.”

In some places that have been hit by major heat waves in recent years, officials are working toward enacting maximum temperature requirements or ensuring tenants have access to air conditioning.

Oregon launched a program to subsidize air conditioning, but “when the number of applications exceeded the number of devices available, the state paused the application process to make sure all current requests could be fulfilled,” said Amy Bacher, a communications officer at the Oregon Health Authority.

New York City Council member Lincoln Restler proposed legislation this month that would mandate air conditioning for tenants citywide. If passed, the bill would require landlords to provide air conditioning capable of keeping apartments at 78 degrees when the temperature outside exceeds 82 degrees.

“A landlord is required to provide a safe and habitable home for their tenant,” he said. “There’s just no way that an apartment without a cooling device is safe or habitable.”

In California, legislation to mandate a maximum safe indoor air temperature for residents stalled in 2022, but lawmakers are requiring the California Department of Housing and Community Development to craft policy recommendations on safe indoor temperatures. The department released draft recommendations in June that said the state “should consider a maximum safe indoor air temperature of 82 degrees Fahrenheit (27.8 degrees Celsius) for newly-constructed residential dwelling units”

Tenant advocates feel more needs be to done, especially for low-income renters.

“I am hearing more and more from people that fans and evaporative coolers do nothing at all,” said Phoebe Seaton, co-director of Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, a community advocacy group that supported the California bill and opposed the draft recommendations.

“If we fail to act, people will continue to get sick, miss school, work and other important life events, and even die due to prolonged heat exposure,” she said.

Fresno does not require property owners to provide air conditioners. If a dwelling has an air conditioner, the owner is required to maintain it. The city declined to comment on whether it would support legislation that included temperature mandates.

“I just wish that one year the city of Fresno will require people to change to cooler AC,” said Yang, 61, as she sat in a cooling center during record-breaking heat earlier this month. Temperatures in Fresno were an average of 10 degrees hotter than normal during the first half of July, according to National Weather Service data.

Theresa Hollingsworth, who has lived in Fresno for more than 50 years, came to the cooling shelter with her two children and dog, Miley, who is named after Miley Cyrus. Their evaporative cooler, a system that uses water to make cool air and can be useful in climates with low humidity, like Fresno, wasn’t standing up to the heat that Sunday.

Two days later, the cooler broke. “Sleeping is very rough,” Hollingsworth said. She had fans on but they were blowing nothing but hot air. The cooler was fixed within about 48 hours, she said.

Eighty-nine percent of U.S. homes used some form of air conditioning as of 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But if they, like Yang and Hollingsworth, live in one of the nearly one-quarter of American homes that use non-central cooling systems including window or evaporative units, they may not be getting effective use out of their devices, said C.J. Gabbe, an associate professor of environmental studies and science at Santa Clara University.

“Just because you have some kind of AC, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to keep temperatures at a healthy level,” Gabbe said.

He said some residents with working units also may not run them because of the cost.

“People who live in lowest income households tend to spend a bigger share of their income on cooling costs,” Gabbe said.

Julia Margarita Alonso, who lives in Cantua Creek, a rural community in Fresno County, has air conditioning in her home.

“I don’t turn it on as often because of high energy bills,” she said. Once her bill was more than $300, she said. While a government program helped her partially pay the amount, she said she is still reluctant to run her air conditioner unless absolutely necessary.

Energy costs could be an obstacle in trying to implement or enact these policies, experts said, and it’s not yet clear who will shoulder them.

Tom Bannon, chief executive of the California Apartment Association, which represents apartment owners and developers, said he would support any cooling mandate that would be entirely or heavily subsidized by the government, because of the significant cost of retrofitting older buildings to run air conditioning.

California has hundreds of thousands of structures that were built before 1939, he said. He estimated the cost of increasing the electrical capacity of an old, single-family house in the Central Valley to accommodate one window unit would run between two and three thousand dollars.

The association did not support the 2022 cooling legislation because of its potential cost and worries that implementing a temperature mandate would open landlords up to lawsuits.

“Am I going to find myself in court because I couldn’t get the temperature down because I had an electrical problem?” Bannon said. He added that the group is involved in advising the state’s housing department on its planned 2025 policy recommendations.

Experts see other pitfalls with cooling mandates.

“If a landlord is requiring AC, they might raise the rent,” said Sanya Carley, a professor of energy policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “Once the rent is raised [residents] may curtail the electricity even more.”

Some advocates have decided not to push for maximum temperature rules.

Roseann Bongiovanni, the executive director of Greenroots, an environmental justice organization based in Chelsea, Mass., said her group has been working with the city to obtain grant funding for air conditioners and to make buildings in the city just north of Boston easier to cool. But, ultimately, providing air conditioning isn’t a perfect fix, she said: Units are difficult to install, especially in older structures, and they are expensive to use.

“We haven’t pushed for policy statewide or greater-Boston-wide to mandate air conditioning,” Bongiovanni said. State law requires owners to provide heating in the winter, but does not mandate air conditioning.

In Fresno that Sunday, as the sun began to dip below the buildings, residents trickled outside, though the night offered little relief. Some sprayed themselves down with a garden hose. Others chatted with family on the outskirts of sprinkler mist.

When the cooling centers close at 8 p.m., Yang goes home and takes a cold shower.

In her apartment, she could feel the stickiness start to grip onto her bare arms and legs. It felt at least 10 degrees hotter than outside.

“Sometimes it’s so hot that I get a headache or grow dizzy,” Yang said.

She sleeps on her living room couch, where the heat is a little less oppressive.

“When you sleep it’s suffocating,” she added. Her window unit rattled in the background, set to as cold as it could go. “So I really hope they change that soon.”

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Philip Cheung in Fresno and Jason Samenow and Dan Keating in Washington contributed to this report.