This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Dual Crises: Housing in a Changing Climate
During the summer of 2021, organizers with Bed-Stuy Strong, a Brooklyn-based mutual aid collective, realized that many of their neighbors were desperately in need of air conditioners. Mentions of hot apartments kept popping up in conversations at community events they hosted.
“One of our organizers was talking to a bunch of people who needed ACs and it kind of dawned on them that a bunch of other people in the neighborhood [were] really trying to get rid of their ACs,” says Bridget Johnson, a Bed-Stuy Strong organizer. That first summer, Bed-Stuy Strong redistributed about 60 air conditioners.
When we think of environmental devastation, most minds gravitate toward wildfires, hurricanes, or tornadoes. These climatic events grab the attention of our eyes and ears. But when it comes to loss of human life, the deadliest weather-related killer is invisible and silent.
Between 1998 and 2017, global heat waves resulted in over 166,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. The CDC recorded over 1,700 deaths in the U.S. from extreme heat in 2022. And in New York City, about 370 residents die of heat-related deaths each year, according to the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice.
“That’s way more than [deaths caused by] cold. Cold is an average of 15,” says Kara Schlichting, an urban environmental historian at Queens College.
Experts think the number of deaths in the U.S. related to heat is actually much higher than estimated, since research shows that heat deaths are often not recorded as such. As global temperatures continue to increase, death tolls are anticipated to rise.
2023 was already a hot one—Earth experienced its warmest year on record, as did New York City.
“Typical summer days are becoming warmer and we’re experiencing more heat waves,” says Kathryn Lane, an environmental epidemiologist with New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “In the future, they’re going to be more frequent and more severe.”
It’s important to note that heat mortality is preventable. If those New Yorkers had had some sort of relief from the heat, they might not have died from it. It’s a matter of resources, as well as awareness of the threat.
“A lot of people don’t really perceive heat as a danger until it’s kind of too late,” says Jessica Bellinder, a supervising attorney with Legal Aid Society’s Bronx Housing Justice Unit. “Whereas people perceive cold as a real threat to themselves and their families in a different way.”
Community Helps
There are ways that civic-minded city dwellers can help alleviate the issues brought on by extreme heat. Mike Harrington, director of sustainability engagement at The New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center, says to start within your own neighborhood.
“We need to be cognizant and pay attention to one another,” Harrington says. “I know in New York, it’s very easy to not interact with your neighbors . . . but I think we need to keep our eyes open and our ears open and be willing to help people if you see them struggling in the heat.”
That could mean checking in on your neighbors—including those who are unhoused in your community—to see how they are dealing with the heat. Do they need water? Could they use help finding the nearest cooling center? Maybe you have an extra fan they could borrow.
Studies continually point to social connection as a protective factor against extreme heat exposure. In his own research, Harrington found “that lack of social cohesion was one of the biggest determinants of dying from urban heat.”
Extreme heat forces people inside, isolated from their communities. Those who live alone may not have anyone checking in on them during heat waves. That’s why Bed-Stuy Strong centers face-to-face conversations in its AC redistribution efforts.
“Just talk to your neighbors because I guarantee one of them needs an AC,” Johnson says. “Talk to the people in your building, get to know the neighbors on your block, ask the people who work at the deli if they know anybody who needs an AC.”
Black Americans are basically the ones dying from [heat-related causes] at a much, much higher concentration than other people.”
Mike Harrington, director of sustainability engagement at The New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center
Certain neighborhoods in cities feel much hotter than others. Climate Central, a climate communication nonprofit, mapped temperature differences across major U.S. cities. In some—including Philadelphia, Tulsa, and Las Vegas—hotter temperatures concentrate in an “urban core” of the city. But cities like New York, Seattle, Miami, and Phoenix are “dominated by sprawling heat intensity”: large stretches of land are affected.
In any city, “temperatures remain higher in neighborhoods that are covered with stone, concrete, and brick,” Schlichting says. “It’s particularly obvious in the evening.”
This is due to the urban heat island effect, a climate phenomenon affecting cities. A neighborhood gets hotter when grass is replaced with asphalt and trees are cut down to make room for skyscrapers.
“[New York has] a built environment of tall buildings and a lot of pavement that kind of traps heat,” Lane says.
A survey conducted during the city’s 2022 heat wave found the hottest neighborhood to be Washington Heights—where just three percent of the neighborhood is sheltered by vegetation. The Heights was 8 degrees hotter than Ferry Point Park in the Bronx, which sits on the water and is 77 percent covered with vegetation.
Research shows that neighborhoods with low-income and non-white residents have higher temperatures than affluent and white neighborhoods within the same city.
“Black Americans are basically the ones dying from this at a much, much higher concentration than other people,” Harrington says.
Black New Yorkers are about twice as likely as their white neighbors to die from heat-related causes, according to a 2022 city report. Historically racist housing policies—notably redlining—are linked to these inequities. Formerly redlined communities in the city also tend to have less tree canopy to provide cooling benefits.
Bed-Stuy Strong
When the summer heat hit in 2021, Bed-Stuy Strong had already built a robust food distribution system to assist neighbors dealing with food insecurity. It tweaked that model to create an air conditioner collection and distribution strategy. Bed-Stuy Strong finds donors and recipients through neighborhood flyers, social media, Google Forms, and community events. Most of the group’s donations come from people who are moving or upgrading to a larger AC unit. ACs are housed in a storage unit with the rest of the group’s mutual aid supplies.
Bed-Stuy Strong asks all donors, recipients, and redistribution volunteers if they’re able to carry the units themselves—if not, they’ll send a member who can lift ACs. Sometimes donors drop off ACs or recipients pick them up directly, but volunteers often use their own vehicles to help. One volunteer even has a rig on his bike to transport ACs.
[RELATED ARTICLE: The Shift to Using More Electricity Will Change How Affordable Housing Is Built]
“A lot of us are really invested in the climate,” Johnson says. “We kind of have our finger on the pulse of ‘people are dying; something needs to give.’”
The group helps some AC recipients with installation and provides set-up FAQ sheets for those who want to DIY. This year, the organization said they planned to purchase extra wings panels, foam, and tape to help with installs.
Johnson thinks that the AC redistribution program can often feel like a “last option” for those trying to stay cool at home.
“I do think that because we’re small and scrappy, we’re able to address the issue really quickly,” Johnson said.
When An AC Isn’t an Option
Some buildings are better equipped to mitigate heat than others. The Legal Aid Society gets a lot of complaints about electrical systems in older Bronx buildings, according to Bellinder. And there’s “no requirement that they be retrofitted to upgrade them to modern expectations,” Bellinder says. “New buildings have to meet a certain standard, but the older buildings—unless they’re considered to be actively unsafe—are not required to upgrade their electrical supplies to meet the actual usage of the tenants.”
Bellinder has found that many of her clients “can’t use their air conditioning—and any other appliance in their household—without blowing out the electrical circuits for their unit.”
Many tenants have to rely on extension cords to plug in all their various devices.
“If that’s happening in a building that was wired in the early 20th century, it’s just not built for that,” says Bellinder. “People will come in and blame tenants for using extension cords, but if you only have one electrical socket in the whole room, that does not reflect anybody’s normal usage anymore.”
Housing rights lawyers notice clients having more concerns about heat in recent years.
“Many of [our clients live] in apartments with poor ventilation, no cooling systems, no access to purchase and pay for the additional utility costs, [and] no permission to have those units in their apartments,” says Rosalind Black, the citywide housing director at Legal Services NYC, a nonprofit organization providing free civil legal assistance to low-income New Yorkers.
Who’s at Risk?
Older adults are especially vulnerable to extreme heat. They make up many of the recipients of the ACs redistributed by Bed-Stuy Strong, according to Johnson.
Some buildings with long-term tenants have become naturally occurring retirement communities where residents are aging in place.
“That’s a particular population that should be able to pull in their elected officials or the Department for [the] Aging and try to get someone involved to assist them,” Bellinder says.
If that’s not an option, Bellinder says to reach out to Legal Aid Society, Legal Services NYC, or other organizations specializing in housing law to help fix building-wide problems.
Many of Black’s clients have disabilities or health conditions like asthma that are exacerbated by heat. While the city opens designated cooling centers in air-conditioned buildings to the public during heat waves, it can be difficult for elders and residents with limited mobility to get there.
“The seniors who need these air conditioners, they’re not going to be able to travel to the [cooling centers] necessarily,” Black says. “I’d say the stronger priority is to get cooling into [their] homes.”
Is the City Helping?
There are government programs in place to provide ACs and utility bill assistance to New Yorkers in need, but they are not adequately financed. The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP) is a federally funded program administered by the states, tribes, and territories. In New York City, it provides one-time AC (or fan) installation for eligible New Yorkers. Residents can also apply for utility bill assistance. It has run out of cooling funding by July three summers in a row.
This summer, $22 million was available in HEAP cooling funding. In 2023, around $17 million was allocated to cooling.
To qualify for HEAP, households must meet an income threshold and be home to at least one tenant who either has a medical condition made worse by heat or is younger than 6 or older than 60.
How to Get Help
Check with local mutual aid groups, senior centers, nonprofits, and/or places of worship to see if they have any cooling resources. See if you are eligible for federal cooling assistance initiatives, like LIHEAP, which helps pay cooling bills, or the Weatherization Assistance Program, which provides funding to make energy-saving home upgrades. Many states have free fan programs for eligible households, including Kentucky’s Fan Fair, North Carolina’s Operation Fan Heat Relief, and San Antonio’s Project Cool.
At the same time, there is confusion about these programs across city agencies. In 2023, the New York City Housing Authority threatened to evict residents who had received a free AC through Get Cool NYC, a 2020 program, unless residents removed the unit or began paying an $8 monthly fee (per AC) that had been previously waived.
“Vulnerable tenants were obviously caught in the crosshairs of, let’s say, a lack of coordination—or maybe potentially a disagreement—about tenant access to air conditioners and that just shouldn’t be,” Black says.
The housing authority ended up extending the deadline till October to remove the ACs or pay the fee and said that the tenants wouldn’t be evicted. But conflicting agency messaging creates confusion for residents who want to take advantage of cooling assistance programs. Black thinks many tenants don’t feel they can acquire air conditioners for fear it could lead to eviction.
“Air conditioning is definitely not a luxury anymore,” Lane says. “It’s really important for staying safe and cool in the summer.”
Lane co-authored a paper that examined the impact of the city’s AC distribution program during the summer of 2020. About 73,000 ACs were given out to older, low-income residents in both public and private housing. Survey results showed that residents who received a cooling unit were three times more likely to report staying home during hot days compared to low-income New Yorkers who had no AC and didn’t participate in the program. Non-participants were also more likely to feel ill at home due to the heat.
Residents may rationalize that being inside and away from the sun’s rays will protect them from heat, but being indoors can be hazardous without proper cooling.
“The place of exposure in New York City where people are most often exposed to dangerous heat is actually in their homes,” Lane says.
Temperatures can be much higher indoors than outdoors without proper cooling. 71 percent of New Yorkers who died of heat stress between 2010 and 2019 perished in homes without AC.
But air conditioners aren’t the perfect solution to urban heat.
“Air conditioning takes the heat inside an apartment and moves it outside. It doesn’t cool the air, it displaces hot air,” Schlichting says. “The more air conditioning units we put in, the hotter the ambient temperature is outside of a building.”
That means that air conditioners are a short-term fix.
“We can’t solve the problem of heat with these air conditioning units that are, in the end, reliant on our energy grid, which is reliant on fossil fuel, which is where our climate crisis is originating,” Schlichting says.
We can’t solve the problem of heat with these air conditioning units that are, in the end, reliant on our energy grid, which is reliant on fossil fuel, which is where our climate crisis is originating.”
Kara Schlichting, urban environmental historian at Queens College
NYC renters who are struggling to deal with the heat in their apartments should be aware of their options.
“If you are a renter and you moved into an apartment that had an air conditioner, usually the expectation is that that air conditioner is an amenity or an appliance that is being offered to you by the landlord and it has to be maintained [and] in working order in the same way [as] when you moved in,” Bellinder says.
If you’re in a rent-stabilized building in NYC and your landlord refuses to replace your broken AC, you can file a complaint with Homes and Community Renewal for rent reduction due to decreased services. Some tenants could qualify for a rent freeze, “which sometimes puts financial pressure on the landlord to fix the problem,” Bellinder says.
NYC landlords are legally required to have their units meet heating minimum temperatures between Oct. 1 and May 31. But there are no regulations on temperature maximums for rentals during the hotter months.
A few areas of the country, like Los Angeles, have begun pushing for cooling requirements in rentals. In July, City Councilmember Lincoln Restler introduced legislation to require ACs in New York City rentals. Some other areas already have laws in place around providing or maintaining ACs.
Bellinder encourages residents to gather with their neighbors to resolve buildingwide cooling issues.
“We find always that tenants are generally more effective if they’re working together,” she says.
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