Will New York City Renters Get the Right to Be Cool?

By Willy Blackmore | Word In Black

Overview: Each year, 350 New Yorkers die from heat stress, and a disproportionate number are Black. Brooklyn’s City Council representative is proposing a “right to a cool home” law, modeled on a 1900s-era law guaranteeing renters heat in the winter.

(WIB) – A new bill would require landlords to provide air conditioning in most buildings.

Nearly every New Yorker has air conditioning — or at least that’s what the big-picture data tells us. Of the8.3 million people who live in New York City, 91% have access to A/C. 

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Yet at least 350 people die from heat-related illnesses in the city every year. Black New Yorkers are more likely to die from heat stress, with death rates two times higher than White New Yorkers, according to NYC.gov, the city’s information website. 

Lincoln Restler, a Brooklyn lawmaker, aims to curb that problem with new legislation that would require landlords to provide air conditioning, similar to a 106-year-old law forcing them to provide heat during the wintertime.

“When we looked at the data of who is dying from heat-related illnesses, the single biggest risk factor was not having air conditioning in their homes,” said Restler, whose district includes  parts of central and northern Brooklyn on the New York City Council. And in poorer parts of the city that are predominantly Black and brown — including the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, which Restler represents — it’s much more likely that people do not have air conditioning.

“When you look at lower-income communities, particularly lower-income Black communities, a quarter of households lack air conditioning,” Restler said, “That’s why, disproportionately, the people who die of heat-related illnesses are low-income African Americans.” 

Real-estate organizations gave the bill and unsurprisingly chilly response. Jay Martin, who heads a landlord group called Community Housing Improvement Program, told the New York Times the proposal would put an unbearable burden on property owners who are already financially stressed. 

“Financial penalties are already exacerbating a high-operating-cost environment we have in New York,” he said.

But there’s long-standing precedent for making New York landlords responsible for providing a safe and comfortable environment during dangerous weather. 

The city’s Heat Code became law back in 1918, setting a minimum threshold of 68 degrees for all centrally heated buildings between the beginning of October and the end of May. While the minimum temperature has changed at times over more than a century, it’s a mainstay of being a renter in the city: heat and hot water are provided at the landlord’s expense, with very few exceptions.

Restler wants teeth behind his proposed A/C requirement, just like there is for the heating rule, and the bill includes a maximum $1250 per day fee for noncompliance.

“We have an incredibly effective enforcement system in New York City that conducts thousands of inspections annually for heat-related issues,” Restler said. “Almost all New Yorkers have access to heat in the winter to stay safe—similarly we need to ask landlords to step up and keep New Yorkers safe in the summer.”

The primary difference between the right to heat and a potential right to cool, however, is fuel. 

Many apartment buildings in New York get heat through boilers, which mostly run on fuel oil, while others some buildings provide steam heat with radiators. But a growing number of remodeled or newly-constructed apartments use heat pumps — stand-alone units which provide cool air in the summer and warm air in wintertime. 

Both air-conditioning window units and heat pumps run on electricity instead of oil or steam. 

Therefore, if a landlord installs a heat pump, or if they have a tenant who uses an A/C window unit, the landlord would be obliged to pay an electric bill for the heat and cooling — separate from what tenants pay for their own electricity use. 

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There are various assistance programs that can help low-income New Yorkers pay the $200 or more that a new window-unit air conditioner costs from the store. People who meet certain income requirements can apply for a subsidy or receive a unit free of charge. Various community and mutual-aid organizations connect people with free A/C units, too. 

But those piecemeal options still can’t meet the increasingly urgent need to cool stifling apartments in the summer to keep people safe. This summer in particular has been brutally hot, with three record-setting separate heat waves already occurring. 

Restler said that it will be necessary to have subsidies to cover those costs for the low-income New Yorkers who need air conditioning the most, there’s precedent there too. 

“We looked back at the summer of 2020, when policy makers and society at large wanted people to stay safe in their homes during the height of covid,” Restler said. “Subsidies were made available to low-income individuals to run their A/Cs more liberally.” 

Around $75 million of those subsidies were priced through Consolidated Edison, the local electric utility. A similar amount, negotiated by the state government, which regulates utilities, will be needed to make an A/C requirement work for all New Yorkers. 

“The changes that we’ve all experienced in the intensity of heat waves during our lifetimes is dramatic,” Restler said. “We now need new policy frameworks and new solutions to keep people safe in extreme heat.”