Overheating at Home - The Margin

Cecil Brooks Jr. has lived in the South Bronx his entire life. He spent a lot of time outside in the Mott Haven neighborhood where he’s from, exploring what he calls “one of the best places, the most convenient, the most colorful…” Being outdoors lets him escape the heat: The South Bronx is home to some of New York City’s most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods, meaning hot summer days there are more likely to sicken or kill residents.

Summers pushed the 31-year-old out of his home for most of his life. His Honduran parents long resisted A/C, and he habitually frequented libraries, game shops, or went window shopping with friends to stay cool. When he learned to ride a bike, he caught a breeze as he whizzed around to find shade. When his parents caved and purchased an air conditioner, Brooks recalls installing the window unit every year and monitoring how long it was on. 

“Did we go over 20 hours? Are we watching the Con [Edison], the utilities? It was always a big project to manage just to stay cool,” he said. “I guess that's kind of why you don't think of staying home when it's hot. You look for wherever you can cool off.”

Now, his beloved neighborhood is much hotter—most of the planet is. He keeps a small air conditioner in his bedroom that he runs just one to three hours before bedtime but rarely overnight because “the costs are crazy,” he said. He works as a senior campaign manager for a nonprofit focused on creating more public spaces and improving streets. Some days, he works from the living room, but he often leaves his place to work remotely somewhere cooler.  “I have a limit if I’m indoors,” he said. “[I]t’s much worse when you’re stuck in a shoebox closet.”

Brooks still helps his parents reinstall their window A/C unit, but says they usually hold off “as long as possible in the summer and see if things get better.” It’s the same at his place. Before he gives in, Brooks weighs whether he has the “right” or a “good reason” to turn on the air conditioner: Is it humid enough? Is there condensation on the wall? 

“I still find myself repeating patterns of what my parents did; funny how cycles continue,” he said. “I have my own mental calculations — measuring the angles of the sun, triple-checking the actual temperature, just to make sure it's actually necessary when I do turn on the A/C, because again, utilities are a real thing."

Over the last few summers, about 500 people died each year from heat-related causes, according to city health data, up from 370 deaths in 2022 — a 35 percent increase. The city tabulates “heat-exacerbated” fatalities, meaning the heat contributed to premature deaths, and heat stress deaths directly caused by heat exposure. Both of these categories are undercounted. Most of these New Yorkers died at home, in unbearably hot apartments. No one who died of heat stress at home between 2016 and 2025 had a working air conditioner, according to provisional data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. 

The death toll from heat isn’t shared equally, either. Last summer, Black residents died from heat stress at three times the rate of white residents, an increase from summer 2024, when Black New Yorkers died at twice the death rate of white New Yorkers. Latino residents died from heat stress at twice the rate of white residents.

No working air conditioning in use

Of the 25 New Yorkers who died of heat exposure at home between 2016 and 2025, whose air-conditioning status was known, not one had a working AC in use.

The crisis is almost certainly far worse than documented. Heat-related deaths are vastly undercounted because most people aren’t dying from heat directly. Instead, heat may aggravate existing health conditions like heart, lung, or kidney diseases. As summers get hotter (July 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in the U.S.), the season is more lethal than winter months, with far fewer dollars allocated to help New Yorkers cool down. 

At least 20 New Yorkers died outside last winter, amidst the city’s most intense cold snap in decades. New Yorkers sprang into action with novel programs and a citywide response that drew attention and criticism, under the newly minted Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The Mamdani administration carried over some of the lessons and resources from the winter, sending nurse-staffed vans to do indoor and outdoor wellness checks this summer.  

Winter response also dominates state funding. New York State spends half of its federal funds for the Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP), a state-administered social program created in the 1980s for low-income residents, towards heating assistance. By contrast, four percent of those funds go to providing residents with an air conditioner or fan in the summer. As of now, HEAP is the largest safety net that the city has for low-income New Yorkers seeking assistance with their energy needs. 

Smoldering summers pass without the same attention to danger, and existing programs to provide cooling assistance are burdened with red tape, shrinking application windows, and limited funding that applicants deplete quickly. A new law will require NYC landlords to provide tenants with a “cooling system,” such as a window-unit capable of maintaining 78 degrees in each “primary sleeping place” by June 2030. Yet, questions remain surrounding the equity, feasibility, and enforcement of the law, and whether the city will address rising heat-related deaths year-over-year in the interim.  

Where is cooling assistance going? 

The Margin analyzed data from more than 60,000 applications the city received for air conditioning assistance between 2024 and 2025. Our analysis shows that nearly one in five of all applications submitted by New York City residents for cooling assistance were denied because they either didn’t provide enough documentation or did not have documents proving they had someone in their household with a medical condition that would worsen because of the heat.

Application denials hovered around 60 percent across the city. The Bronx was home to the seven most-denied ZIP codes last year, six of which the city scored the highest for heat vulnerability.

Where Heat Vulnerability Overlaps

Comparing heat vulnerability with cooling-assistance applications within Black and Hispanic populations.

City agencies and environmental organizations have argued for years that meeting some of these documentation requirements is a “significant and unnecessary” barrier for low-income New Yorkers seeking help to stay safe and cool in the hotter months.

“It's not that you don't have the need. In fact, some of the people who have the hardest time with the compliance actually have the greatest need,” said Diana Hernández, a leading expert on energy equity, housing, and health at Columbia University and the co-author of “Powerless: The People’s Struggle for Energy.”

The Margin’s analysis of cooling assistance applications showed that only a few hundred applications were denied in 2024 and 2025 because applicants were over the income limit. Yet only half of income-eligible households actually receive HEAP benefits, said Yeung.

“The demand for heating and cooling assistance far exceeds the amount that we're actually able to give just because of the limitations of the program amount itself,” Yeung said. 

In a statement to The Margin in response to these findings, Yeung said, “Unfortunately, New Yorkers need more help to pay their utility bills than HEAP currently supports, and onerous medical documentation requirements are barriers for participation. The City of New York continues to advocate for reforms to improve and expand energy assistance programs, while also investing in long-term solutions to keep New Yorkers cool and safe."

A spokesperson for the NYC Department of Social Services (DSS) told The Margin that “DSS is committed to helping New Yorkers access the benefits to which they are entitled, and whenever possible, removing barriers to these critical supports.”

Even though NYC is getting hotter, there were fewer applications in 2025 than the summer before. The state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) says this is the result of shorter application windows. Cooling assistance applications open every year in mid-April, available on a first-come, first-served basis, and residents can apply until funding runs out. But because demand for cooling assistance has gone up, funding has run out earlier every year in recent years, from July 19 in 2024 to June 23 in 2025 to June 5 in 2026.

“The rate of applications remained roughly consistent across both years. At its core, the issue is not a lack of demand or awareness but funding availability,” an OTDA spokesperson told The Margin.

City residents can apply for cooling assistance in the spring in person, by mail, or online through Access HRA, according to the city’s Human Resources Administration. But applicants who spoke with The Margin have found the submission window is underpublicized and short. This means denials received after the application closes are not eligible for an appeal. New Yorkers denied for medical reasons or for lacking other supporting documents may not have enough time to produce supporting documents until the application opens the following spring.

NYC heat puts more vulnerable residents at risk

Cities like New York are abundant in concrete, asphalt, and large, dark-colored buildings. Limited shade and sparse tree canopy trap heat and make temperatures feel even hotter than forecasted. This is called the urban heat island effect. An analysis by Climate Central, an independent nonprofit group of scientists and communicators, found that 83 percent of people in New York City feel that effect more than any other city in the country. In the last decade, the warming seasons in the city have elevated New York City from a “humid continental” to “humid subtropical” climate.

During the summer of 2025, the most recent year this data is available, more people died due to heat stress directly than in any year in the last decade, primarily due to a single heat event in June. 

“Maybe 10 percent of the number of deaths that occur during heat waves are these heat stroke deaths,” says Tom Matte, a physician and environmental epidemiologist who studied the effects of heat on the city. Deaths that are caused by hot weather are “excess deaths” that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the heat. 

Older adults are among those most vulnerable because regulating body temperature gets more difficult as adults age. Many common medications can also make the body even more sensitive to heat, including SSRIs, which can cause the body to sweat too much. ACE inhibitors and some hypertension medications used to lower blood pressure and treat heart issues can reduce thirst and raise the risk of dehydration. 

Getting dehydrated can increase the concentration of the medication in the body, heightening the risk of side effects because of water loss, according to Khalil Savary, a pediatric physician at Rutgers University Hospital in Newark.  

“When that concentration of medication is higher, you are at higher risk for side effects like an overdose,” Savary said. “You could be over your recommended dose if you're not at a standard level of hydration.”

Children are also less resilient to heat, and Savary says as we experience longer, hotter seasons, we can expect genetic health issues like asthma to get triggered more often. “That's going to manifest as more patients, more adverse outcomes,” he said. 

New Yorkers with chronic illnesses can also be affected by extreme heat. Extreme heat and poor air quality worsen asthma symptoms, increasing the need for rescue medication. Many medicines and medication delivery devices, like inhalers or EpiPens, can also malfunction or become less effective if they’re exposed to heat.

Then there’s the infrastructure. Old buildings meant to trap heat for warmth make staying indoors more suffocating. 

“Our buildings are made to keep us warm in the winter and not cool in the summer,” explains Kara Murphy Schlichting, an associate professor of history at Queens College and researcher at Melting Metropolis, a group of scholars in New York City, London, and Paris documenting how past and present experiences with urban heat affect city residents and their health. But she says the data can’t account for how New Yorkers live with heat. 

Number of Days At or Above 90°F

New York averaged 17 days a year at or above 90°F in the 1981–2010 baseline. Explore the city’s projected ranges below.

The number of households with an air conditioning unit is “relatively high” — at about 90 percent, according to city estimates — says Daniel Cumming, an urban environmental historian of heat, housing and inequality in New York City and fellow researcher at Melting Metropolis.

“That number can be very misleading,” he said. “Within an air-conditioned household, you have incredibly hot rooms, you have incredibly hot times of day, you have the energy bills you have to navigate. You have all these other intersecting problems… yes, you might have an air conditioner [or] fan, but that doesn't mean you have relief or comfort.” 

There are also swaths of the city where the lack of air conditioners is more concentrated in neighborhoods like Brooks’. In many of those neighborhoods in the Bronx, the city estimates that up to one in four households in some areas do not have air conditioning.

Crisis management instead of crisis prevention

Last year, New York State allocated just four percent of its federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funding to cooling assistance. By contrast, the state spent about 50 percent of HEAP funds towards heating equipment and utility bills last winter. The funding for this program varies year-to-year, but the funding disparity persists in each budget, with as little as one percent given to cooling assistance from 2019-2021. In 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul announced additional funding for the HEAP cooling component, but in 2025, that funding was reduced to roughly pre-2024 levels, according to the state's Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA), which determines HEAP’s funding allocation to each county or social service district across the state.

HEAP funds for winter can be used to install and replace heating equipment like boilers and assist with winter utility bills. Unlike with winter assistance, HEAP funds only cover the installation of an air conditioner or fan, and don’t help residents who qualify for cooling assistance with their electric bill, making a substantial number of residents reluctant to turn it on because of the cost, says Diana Hernández, an associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University who researches the intersection of energy, equity, housing and health.

“Summer HEAP is very limited,” she said. “It's crisis management instead of crisis prevention.”

Hernández says that ever since LIHEAP was created decades ago, most states, including warmer states, spend an outsized portion of their energy assistance budget on warming costs in the winter rather than cooling in the summer, even though heat stress is more lethal. Each state has the ability to adjust how much they allocate to each, but Hernández says that leaders in northern states like New York still think of their states as cold places and haven’t adjusted their spending to keep up with the climate, even though the demand for cooling assistance has gone up. Around 40 percent of the U.S. population is coping with energy insecurity, she said.

Last year, New York City’s Comptroller’s Office found the energy burden is getting worse for city residents: they estimate that electric bills from Con Edison are expected to increase about 30 percent over the next three years.

Federal funding for heating and cooling assistance has been around since the early 1980s, but has come under threat from the Trump administration multiple times in proposed budget cuts, when layoffs eliminated the roles of roughly 25 administrators who distribute the funds across the country, despite the program broadly having bipartisan support.

"The combination of rate increases plus the risk to the LIHEAP program… are likely to be a double whammy on New Yorkers, as we have what will probably be again, the hottest year on record,” said former city comptroller Brad Lander. 

The threat of cuts to federal programs trickles down to the livelihoods of the seniors who get a meal and attend programs at the Hamilton Grange Senior Center in Harlem, a designated cooling center, says the center’s director, Requithelia Allen. Some have gotten HEAP benefits, or received an air conditioner, she said, but inflation and reductions of social program funds have deepened the affordability crisis in the country, and for her seniors. 

"If the funding for HEAP goes away, it's going to be one more thing that they can't afford,” Allen said. “They're going to be deciding between paying Con Edison and eating, or paying this bill and having food, you know, and it's gonna be awful."

The federal budget for energy assistance is just a fraction of other federal programs like SNAP, and the vast majority of folks who are eligible to receive cooling assistance receive those benefits. One in two New York state households are eligible for HEAP benefits, Hernández said.

A tenant’s right to cooling

New York City is now joining a small number of major cities that will require landlords to provide cooling to their tenants. A bill introduced in 2024 by New York City Councilmember Lincoln Restler became law this year. The legislation sets a maximum indoor temperature for the majority of the city’s residents to 78 degrees when outdoor temperatures reach 89 degrees or higher, and will make air-conditioning access available to all renters who request it. 

It’s a “massive new right that tenants have in New York City to ensure that they have access to cooling and can stay safe in extreme heat,” Restler said. He said that he hopes that 2027’s city budget will start funding the infrastructure necessary to develop an enforcement mechanism through the city’s Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) agency. Landlords must comply with the new law by June 1, 2030. 

“We'll be working with HPD on their rulemaking process, so that we can give landlords more granular specificity on how they can comply with the law,” he said.

Yeung at the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice celebrates the new law, saying that her office worked closely with New York City Council to pass the legislation that would provide an upper temperature limit indoors, just as the city has a lower temperature limit for the winter months.

"It's important to have our laws and regulations keep up with the pace of our changing climate, and so we're really excited about that legislation,” she said. Cooling, she says, “becomes a human right, not a luxury." 

Hernández, who says she owns a small residential building herself, acknowledges that the new law puts New York City ahead of most around the country on addressing heat. However, the challenge to stay in compliance for smaller landlords will be "administratively burdensome,” she said, with costs that landlords aren’t supposed to relay to the tenant with rent increases. “Most small building owners are where the naturally occurring affordable housing is happening, but they can't be held to the same standard [as] these big, behemoth, profit-motivated [owners].” 

“A decision that's meant to be benevolent and health promoting, might actually be the reason why your rent goes up another $50 a month,” she adds. 

The cost of turning a new air conditioner on would still fall to tenants, but the new law would require residential property owners to provide and install air conditioning if a tenant requests it, covering costs to purchase the cooling unit. Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, an advocacy group for thousands of landlords managing rent-stabilized buildings in New York City, calls the law “well-intentioned” but says the added costs for air conditioner repairs and labor costs to install and remove units in the winter and store them are an increased strain.

“There's no question that tenants should have the ability to have their apartments cooled and shouldn't live with hot apartments. But the question is: who is the responsible party and who should bear the burden of the price?” he said. “What has been the consistent answer for the past several years has been property owners.”

Burgos says another challenge is the energy capacity of older buildings—many of the landlords he represents own 50-to-60 year-old buildings that may not have the electrical grid capacity to support increased electric demands. Complying with this and other regulations “ignores the conditions of these buildings, the financial strain they already have because of other laws and regulations tacking on the cost. It’s just sort of the death by a thousand cuts,” he said.

Even with new cooling rules and regulations taking effect approximately four summers from now, hundreds of New Yorkers will likely continue to die in their apartments in the meantime as summers trend hotter. Although the new law says landlords will be required to cool sleeping areas to 78 degrees, it’s unclear if tenants will be required to monitor rising indoor temperatures, or how indoor temperature thresholds will be enforced. In the winter months, landlords are legally required to provide New Yorkers with heat, making many question how the right to cooling will come to fruition. 

Environmental historian Schlichting has written about New York City needing a more comprehensive response to heat, saying she believes appointing a heat officer to work across the city’s departments, as some cities have, may be a start.

“If we get a rat czar, we definitely get a heat czar!” she said. “[Heat’s] in so many corners of our lived experience in the city that trying to do it in a single department… is not yet effective. It has to be comprehensive, from playground slides to senior centers to water fountains to anything you can imagine.” 

Louise Yeung from the Mayor’s Office says that aside from planting trees, the city hopes to launch pop-up cooling stations in highly-vulnerable areas in each borough, in collaboration with community partners.

In his first few months in office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered solutions to a winter blizzard overwhelming the city’s streets and sidewalks with snow, paying New Yorkers $30 an hour to shovel in their communities. But in summer months, any civilian effort to check on vulnerable neighbors in their homes is a largely voluntary effort. 

While designated cooling center sites — which include libraries, senior and community centers — are often recommended by city officials, they aren’t all open to the public unless the city issues a heat advisory when temperatures exceed 95 degrees Fahrenheit for two days or 100 degrees for any amount of time. Cooling centers typically operate in already-funded, public establishments, but the city doesn’t independently dedicate resources or funding for water, activities, or nourishment.

For now, New Yorkers can call 311 or search the city’s map for their nearest cooling center, but hours are often limited to daytime hours during the week and not necessarily accessible to everyone, Hernández says. 

“Not everyone has the luxury to work from the library… and what happens overnight?” she said. 

Research finds that cooling centers provide some respite from heat but don’t save lives. 

"Filling in the gaps in the cooling centers network is important, though, obviously, keeping people cool in their homes is a better first-order project,” Lander said. "We wouldn't tolerate 11 percent of New Yorkers living in homes without heat, and we shouldn't tolerate 11 percent of New Yorkers living in homes without cooling. So that's a solvable problem that I hope Mayor Mamdani will address.”

Selma Jackson, who volunteers at a senior center in Brooklyn, lives on the seventh floor of her Bedford-Stuyvesant building and says it gets “impossibly hot” in her one-bedroom apartment at times. The 81-year-old who has lived in New York City nearly her entire life says her regimen for staying cool has had to adapt over the years. Now she keeps her freezer stocked with electrolyte popsicles and frequents the cooling center downstairs from her apartment. She was shocked to see one of her neighbors’ electric bills that was over $200. “Well, you know, I use my air conditioner,” Jackson recalls her neighbor saying.

Jackson and a group at the center encouraged the neighbor to join them during the day to limit her A/C use. “And then she was saying that she runs it all night long. We're like, ‘No, switch to your fan! Don't kill yourself like that!’” 

But Jackson is also giving in to turning on her air-conditioner more. 

“I have used A/C a lot more often than I have in prior years,” she said. “I'm thinking as I get older that my body temperature is changing such that a high heat or uncomfortable setting requires that you do that."

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This reporting was supported by the Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting Grants funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

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