This post was originally published on Word In Black.
By: Willy Blackmore
After Miami sweated through the famously hot city’s hottest summer ever last year, elected officials in Miami-Dade County attempted to make changes for future record-breaking extreme heat. The county came close to passing what would have been the strictest heat protections for outdoor workers in the country — but after the measure failed last year, following intense lobbying from both the agricultural and construction industries, Florida’s climate-change-denying Governor Ron DeSantis banned local governments anywhere in the state from passing such laws.
Another effort to keep South Florida residents cooler did move forward last year without as much controversy, however: Miami-Dade County installed air conditioning in around 1,700 public housing units that are under its management. Those new A/C units are now helping residents keep cool during a record-smashing May heatwave that saw the heat index top out at 112 degrees — six degrees higher than the old May high.
When the initiative was announced last year, Morris Copeland, a county administrator in charge of housing, said in a press conference that air conditioning “should be a right, not an amenity.”
And while that is a growing belief across the ever-hotter country, efforts to cool public housing have not always gone as smoothly as Miami-Dade’s appears to have — despite the disproportionately poor and Black residents who live in such developments (48% of the people who live in public and subsidized housing are Black) being at the greatest risk of heat-related illnesses and deaths.
Because while there is a legal requirement that public and federally subsidized housing is heated to a certain temperature during the winter months, there is no cooling requirement — and the cost of running air conditioning, even on a dangerously hot day, falls on public housing tenants who are not in a good position to take on additional expenses.
New York City is home to more public housing units than anywhere in the country: with over half a million tenants, the New York City Housing Authority population is larger than the entire city of Miami. Around 43% of NYCHA tenants are Black, 44% are Latinx, and all are low-income. That makes the long-standing practice of charging a $8 monthly fee to have a window unit — in addition to the cost of buying an air conditioner and having it professionally installed (a NYCHA requirement) a high bar for many residents.
There’s an additional fee because public housing tenants aren’t individually metered for their electricity use, and instead have their utilities expenses averaged and rolled up into their rent payments. Since running the a/c results in higher electric use, the monthly fee is added on to a tenant’s rent to cover the difference.
The largest increase in cooling for NYCHA tenants came early on during the COVID pandemic when then-Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s administration began a program that distributed free air conditioning to low-income New Yorkers in order to make the isolation of the summer of 2020 more tolerable.
Around 16,000 window units were installed in NYCHA apartments, and not only were they free, but the monthly utility fees were waived too. But that ended last year when a letter was sent to recipients of the free air conditioners saying that if they didn’t either agree to begin paying the fee or have the units removed, “it could be grounds for the start of possible termination of tenancy proceedings.” The letter went out in May, and gave a deadline of July 1 — already peak summer in climate-crisis New York — before eviction proceedings could be started.
In Massachusetts, there was a similar program in 2021, aided by an $800,000 philanthropic grant, that made free air conditioners available through a lottery system to low-income residents, including people who live in public housing. A/C units came with a $300 check to help cover utilities. Having a bit of money for the electrical cost is better than none, but an air conditioner is something that you can use summer after summer, and $300 isn’t going to go very far in terms of covering cooling-season electrical bills. The demand was far greater than the supply for units, too: In Chelsea, Mass., the lottery received over 700 applications for just 73 air conditioners.
There are signs that the federal government could eventually embrace a right to cooling for public housing residents, as it already has for winter heating. The Department of Housing and Urban Development made a statement to NPR last year saying that it was “exploring options” for a cooling requirement. HUD doesn’t allow federal money to be spent on adding air conditioning to public housing developments because the window units that are most often the only option for the older buildings in the system are considering a temporary upgrade — making them ineligible for HUD funding. But the agency clarified to NPR that it has told local housing agencies that federal money can be used to develop new, permanent facilities like cooling centers in public housing.
In Miami-Dade, there has been a requirement to include air conditioning in any new or redeveloped public housing going back to 2001. After more than two decades, A/C had been added to nearly all of the city’s 8,000 public housing units, with the 1,700 installed last year covering nearly all of the remaining apartments that still lacked cooling systems. The remaining 100 units that don’t yet have A/C are currently being redeveloped, and once that work is completed, Miami-Dade County will have a fully cooled public housing stock.
About Post Author
