City Council Debates Mandatory Air Conditioning Bill

A bill debated in the City Council Tuesday would create a “cooling season” from June to September, during which building owners must ensure temperatures in their rental apartments don’t exceed a set maximum—a response to increasingly hot summers fueled by climate change.

In New York City, landlords are required to provide residential heating from October to May, what’s known as “heat season.” But there’s no similar mandate for keeping homes cool during the sweltering summer months—though a bill in the City Council could change that.

Brooklyn Councilmember Lincoln Restler’s proposal was the subject of an oversight hearing on Tuesday, alongside a slate of other tenant-related bills. It would require property owners to maintain apartments below a maximum indoor temperature of 78°F in when the outdoor air temperature is 82°F or higher, from June 15 to Sept. 15. “Owners without central cooling would have to install cooling systems within residential units,” the bill reads.

The legislation, Restler said Tuesday, is a response to increasingly warmer weather fueled by climate change. Heat kills an estimated 350 New Yorkers each year, according to the Health Department, with lack of air conditioning the most important risk factor. Heat also disproportionately impacts Black New Yorkers, who are twice as likely to die from heat stress compared to white residents.

“The climate crisis is here. New York City keeps getting hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter; we had twice as many days over 90-degree heat this past summer as we did 50 years ago,” Restler said. “We have a moral responsibility to act, to intervene, to make a difference, to make sure that each and every New Yorker is safe from the number one climate killer: extreme heat.”

But the bill has drawn concerns, including the worry that building owners will pass the costs of installing and running air conditioners onto their tenants in the form of rent hikes, and about the impact the mandate could have on the city’s power grid during heat waves, when energy consumption is already at its peak.

A landlord group, the New York Apartment Association, said that requiring air conditioners in new construction “makes more sense,” but that mandating it for existing buildings, as the bill does now, would result in “astronomical” costs, and be at odds with the city’s Local Law 97, which requires large buildings to lower their carbon emissions output.

“The City Council needs to understand that unfunded mandates drive up rents and make the city unaffordable,” the group’s CEO, Kenny Burgos, said in a statement. “We appreciate their efforts to improve housing, and are willing to work with them, but we have to be realistic and honest about the cost of providing that housing.”

Restler said his bill includes caveats to address those concerns: it includes a four-year “ramp up” period before any requirements kick in, giving “ample time” to address cost concerns, potentially in the form of expanded city and state subsidies.

“It’s also imperative that we set efficiency standards for these new cooling devices to…reduce emissions overall while protecting the health of the most vulnerable,” he said. “This is a complicated bill. It’s a bold bill, but it’s a necessary bill, because people are dying.”

The majority of New York City apartments already have air conditioning: roughly 89 percent, according to the most recent housing and vacancy survey in 2023. But access is uneven across neighborhoods, with low-income communities and communities of color more likely to go without. The Council pointed to 2017 data showing that in areas like Morrisania/East Tremont and University Heights/Fordham in the Bronx, as many as 20 percent of households lacked A/C.

But access to an A/C unit is just one barrier. Approximately 21 percent, or 493,000 rental households across the city, have an air conditioner but don’t use it because of the cost, last year’s housing and vacancy survey found.

“Without enhanced financial support for tenants, reassurance of air conditioning alone will not be enough to ensure safeguards against extreme heat at home,” Dr. Diana Hernandez, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health who specializes in energy, housing and health, testified before the Council.

The type of air conditioner matters, too: according to testimony on the bill from the city’s Independent Budget Office, the cost of running “a small, energy-efficient window air conditioner” for 12 hours a day would increase a household’s electric costs by about $130 a month. But “an inefficient, oversized window air conditioner run full-time” could cost over $500 a month, the IBO found.

There are existing programs to help subsidize air conditioners for low-income households, but they have limits. New York State’s Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP), for example, provides up to $1,000 for the purchase and installation of a fan or air conditioner for eligible tenants.

But it tends to run out of funding every year by mid-summer (it closed to applicants this year by July 19, state records show). And while the Heating Assistance portion of HEAP can offer subsidies to help participants pay their utility bills, the Cooling Assistance arm does not, something advocates have urged the state to change.

Restler acknowledged the conflicting priorities related to his proposal, saying further revisions are likely. “We’ll craft a sharper and better bill as we work to pass it,” he said.

“I just want to say plainly and clearly on the record that this legislation requires access to cooling devices,” he added later in the hearing. “But the second piece of what we’re trying to accomplish here would be significant city and state subsidies to make it affordable for the lowest income tenants to actually be able to utilize those cooling devices.”

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