The heat crisis is a housing crisis

Air conditioning has long been considered a luxury in much of the world. Not anymore.

For example, consider a move earlier this month by the Biden administration: For the first time, public housing residents can ask the federal government to pay their air conditioning bills during periods of extreme heat. The program, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is optional and allows local public housing authorities to use federal funds to pay residents’ cooling costs. It could affect the more than 1.6 million low-income public housing residents who can now find relief in their homes from the dangerously high temperatures that are killing people worldwide.

While the measure was seen by experts as a step in the right direction, the need is much greater. Tens of millions of Americans can’t pay their energy bills, and there is often no legal requirement for landlords or building owners to provide air conditioning. That’s not to mention the millions of Americans who are struggling to pay rent, or who are homeless, or who are dying in their homes with broken air conditioners.

As thousands of people fall ill or die from the heat each year, public health experts increasingly point to a broad set of challenges with one unifying factor: housing is at the heart of what makes people vulnerable to high temperatures.

It’s no news that the United States is mired in a housing crisis. For many, housing is less affordable than it has been in decades, and finding a way to build more and better homes has been a challenge, even in some of the wealthiest places in the country. The housing crisis and poverty have worsened, leaving many people helpless against the heat.

There are solutions, but implementing them won’t be cheap, said Mark Wolfe, leader of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, a nonprofit that represents states in the federally administered Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides funds to cover costs of energy bills.

“The rules we have to protect families from high temperatures were established many years ago,” he told me. “We need a new approach, a new way of thinking to help low-income families adapt to higher temperatures.”

Systemic challenges

The World Meteorological Organization has said that more people die from heat than from any other extreme weather. Lack of access to indoor cooling is one of the main factors, according to a 2023 study of heat-related deaths in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. Although the majority of people who died had air conditioning, most units were not working or were unplugged.

Housing codes have long required landlords to provide heat to tenants, but they do not require them to provide air conditioning. That is only beginning to change. Cities like Phoenix and Dallas now have laws requiring landlords to do so air conditioning providedBut often these rules are not enforced because Marketplace reported until 2022.

Tenants’ rights are only a small part of this issue, Wolfe told me. Governments should also change building codes to require greater energy efficiency and accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources, so that the increased use of air conditioning does not make energy bills unaffordable and emit even more heat-trapping gases. As we have reported in previous newsletters, refrigeration is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Biden Administration tries to tackle address these issues by rolling out new energy standards for public housing and other federal projects, and providing tax breaks to renovate homes. But transforming the housing system will take a lot of time and huge investments. That’s why Wolfe is calling for more federal and state help for people struggling with energy bills.

“We need both a more robust system for how people pay their bills and a long-term plan to modernize the housing stock,” he said.

But Congress has drastically cut funding for programs to help low-income Americans pay their utility bills, and more than 20 million U.S. households are now behind, according to an estimate Through the nonprofit organization that Wolfe leads.

The housing crisis

America’s housing crisis has worsened significantly in recent years. Already high, home prices soared during the pandemic, rising more than 40 percent nationwide from late 2019 to mid-2021, and have been steadily rising ever since. Now, about a quarter of renters spend more than half their income on housing, and homeless encampments have expanded, as my colleague Conor Dougherty, who covers housing for The Times, recently wrote. That pressure has had a dramatic effect on people’s vulnerability to heat.

“The high home prices in places like California are essentially forcing middle- and low-income people to move to the warmer, much cheaper housing markets of Arizona and Texas,” Dougherty told me.

And then there’s the challenge of building more housing. It’s hard to find a factor that makes people more vulnerable to heat than homelessness, Will Humble, the executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association, told me.

In 2023, the hottest on record, heat-related deaths in Maricopa County rose 52 percent, to 645. Nearly half of the people who died were homeless.

Humble told me that we are talking about how much smoking increases the risk of lung cancer, up to 3,000 percent according to government statistics. But, he added, “being homeless increases your chance of dying from heat in Phoenix by 50,000 percent.”

Related:

3 Practical Ideas to Beat the Heat

An app that helps people find relief from the heat. A small insurance policy that pays working women when temperatures rise. Local laws that help outdoor workers get water and shade on hot days.

With dangerous heat now impossible to ignore, a range of practical innovations are emerging around the world to protect those most vulnerable to its dangers. What’s striking is that these efforts don’t require untested technologies. Instead, they’re based on ideas that are practical and already known to work.

They offer a window into the need to adapt to the new dangers of extreme heat that have become apparent in recent weeks, as untold numbers of religious pilgrims, tourists and election workers continue to die around the world and emergency room visits for heat-related illnesses have increased in the U.S. — Somini Sengupta