As New York City endures its third heat wave of the year, a city councilman plans to introduce a bill this week that would require landlords to buy, install and maintain air-conditioning units or cooling systems for tenants during the summer, with fines of up to $1,250 per day for noncompliance.
The idea behind the legislation, proposed by Councilman Lincoln Restler from Brooklyn, is to update the existing housing code so that building owners are just as responsible for keeping people cool in the summer as they are for keeping them warm in the winter. The bill would apply to high-rises, walk-ups and multifamily buildings, including those owned by the city.
“This will save lives as we reckon with the challenges of the climate crisis,” Mr. Restler said.
Every summer, about 350 New Yorkers die from heat-related illnesses, according to the city’s health department. Black New Yorkers are twice as likely to die from heat as white residents, and a lack of home air-conditioning is a major driver of heat-stress deaths. According to city data, 91 percent of households had air-conditioning as of 2017.
Property owners, some of whom are already working to comply with Local Law 97, which curbs carbon emissions from large buildings, have several concerns, especially about cost. If the new law passes, buildings would have four years to ensure compliance.
“Any proposal in this space must carefully balance the needs of New Yorkers, the diversity of the building stock, the added cost burdens on tenants and owners, and the ability of the electrical grid and distribution system to meet the added demand,” a spokesman for the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade group, said.
Jay Martin, the executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, which oversees rent-stabilized buildings in the city, said, “Financial penalties are already exacerbating a high-operating-cost environment we have in New York.”
As the Northeast rapidly warms, primarily because of the burning of fossil fuels, it’s not just short-term extreme heat but more sustained periods of hot weather that can be deadly, said Caleb Smith, the resiliency coordinator for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit in Harlem that consulted on the bill.
“It’s really about a right to safe housing, a right to cooling,” Smith said. “We’ve already agreed as a society that no one should freeze in their homes. But there’s no reason we should accept sauna-like conditions.”
Last year was the Earth’s hottest on record, and this year — the beginning of which was the planet’s hottest start ever — seems to be on track to surpass that. Smith noted that the city’s most recent heat-related mortality report showed that people were also dying on “non-extreme heat days,” when the temperature was above 82 degrees but below the “extreme heat threshold” of 95 degrees.
Although most New Yorkers have air-conditioners, that does not mean that they can consistently cool their homes to 78 degrees when it’s 82 degrees outside, which is what the bill would require.
Those temperature caps are based on the approaches of other cities that are dealing with extreme heat, like Phoenix and Dallas, and the advice of health experts, Mr. Restler said.
According to a city report released earlier this year, neighborhoods with the least access to air-conditioning also have high rates of heat vulnerability (which means that residents have a higher risk of heat-related illness) because of other factors, like pollution and lack of green space. These areas include Central Brooklyn, Harlem, Southeast Queens and the Bronx.
Mayor Eric Adams, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens, told reporters on Tuesday that “everyday New Yorkers don’t have air-conditioners” and that he had grown up without them. He joked that his mother would tell him to put his head in the refrigerator on hot days.
But times have changed, some experts say. “The increasing number of days with above-average temperatures means that the lack of air-conditioning can be a matter of life and death,” said Sheila Foster, a professor at the Columbia Climate School.
(Air-conditioners also contribute to global warming, accounting for about 7 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions, an amount that is expected to triple by 2050. The refrigerants most responsible for those emissions, hydrofluorocarbons, are being phased out, while more energy-efficient coolants, models and systems are under development.)
Should the bill become law, landlords would have two years to contact the Housing Preservation and Development Department about their cooling plans. They would also have the option to apply for a delay should they face financial hardships, like major capital improvements. After four years, all buildings would need to be in compliance.
But Mr. Martin, from the Community Housing Improvement Program, said property owners would need more time. There are a million rent-stabilized buildings in the city, about 90 percent of which were built before 1974, he said. These older properties would require expensive retrofits to allow for consistent cooling, as well as energy savings, he said. And although heat pumps — energy-saving contraptions that both heat and cool homes — show potential, the technology is not quite developed enough for them to work in older buildings, he said.
Additionally, Mr. Martin said that rent-stabilized buildings are regulated by the state, and questioned how a city law would affect them. Mr. Restler said the city has jurisdiction over regulations for cooling homes.
Amy Turner, the director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University, said the bill was consistent with state and city rules for landlords to provide “safe and habitable housing,” which should help protect it from legal challenges.
Tenants would be able to make complaints about cooling deficiencies to the Housing Preservation and Development Department, which would then conduct inspections. Initial fines for inadequate cooling would be similar to heating fines, ranging from $350 to $1,250 a day. Landlords who resolved the cooling problem within 24 hours of the first violation would pay $250.
The next hurdle, should the bill be approved, would be subsidizing the energy bills of low-income residents, Mr. Restler said. Both he and Smith aim to work with city, state and federal agencies to make this happen, they said.
