On a typically humid day on Guam in September 2025, Leevin Camacho received a phone call that made his stomach churn. 

Life on the tropical island—an unincorporated territory of the United States that plays a key role in the Pentagon’s military strategy against China—was slow paced, particularly in the semirural village of Yigo where much of Camacho’s extended family lived. But that morning, his phone rang with unusual news.

“I got a call from my mom,” said Camacho, 48. Some family members had received letters from the local water authority. “My mom was in a panic, telling me that my kids shouldn’t brush their teeth with the tap water because it contained a pesticide.”

In the letter, authorities said they had detected unsafe levels of a pesticide known as dieldrin in a well, connected to the fresh water aquifer below the village, which potentially represents “an unacceptable long-term cancer risk” to residents. It was the first time many people in the village had heard of dieldrin. The pesticide had been banned in the U.S. by the Environmental Protection Agency since 1987 because of concerns about its toxicity to humans and animals. 

When swallowed, dieldrin is readily absorbed by the gastrointestinal tract and can accumulate in fatty tissue. Long-term exposure has been associated with tumors, while large doses can cause convulsions, tremors, and cardiac arrest. 

Nine days after the letters went out to Yigo residents, the Guam Waterworks Authority and the Guam Environmental Protection Agency issued a joint statement saying they had been working since late 2023 to install a treatment system at the contaminated well supplying Yigo’s drinking water. 

For many residents, the revelation was stunning. How had officials known about the contamination for nearly two years without telling them? 

I thought it was a hoax. It just seemed so out of the realm of the possible that the government would have known that the residents of Yigo had poison in their water and had been drinking it for years. There was a lot of disbelief and then anger and then a lot of guilt.

As the father of two young children, Camacho wondered what the contamination might mean for their health. Had he unknowingly exposed them simply by cooking dinner each night? 

The community wanted to know where the contamination had come from, but Guam’s environmental regulator said it didn’t know.

The affected well, known as Y-15, sits across the road from Upi Elementary, a school attended by many members of Camacho’s family. On the other side of the schoolyard fence is Andersen Air Force Base, one of the largest U.S. military installations in the Pacific.

Suspicion quickly fell on the base as a possible source of contamination. Andersen has a long history of using industrial chemicals hazardous to human health, and a federally funded cleanup of contaminated sites there has been underway since 1993.  

Last September, Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, commander of Joint Region Marianas, the military command for Guam and the Mariana Islands, sought to reassure residents, saying there was no indication that drinking water on military installations had been affected. Although well Y-15 does not supply the base, Mietus announced accelerated testing of military-managed wells “out of an abundance of caution.”

By early October, the military said its tap water was safe. Joint Region Marianas reported that it had sampled water in “all active military wells and surface water sources on military installations across Guam” and found no dieldrin above the action level of 0.2 micrograms per liter.

On the surface, the results appeared to distance the Air Force from the contamination. But internal discussions between Guam EPA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency raised questions about whether military officials had disclosed everything they knew.

The Supreme Court Fight Over the Future of Guam

In a months-long investigation, The Margin and The War Horse spoke with more than a dozen current and former Guam residents who believe the actions of the world’s most powerful military are poisoning them. Previously unreleased military records obtained by the news organizations provide new evidence about the extent of pesticide contamination on Andersen Air Force Base and what officials knew about it.

In the eight decades since fierce battles raged across Guam during World War II, military activity has left a legacy of contaminated land and groundwater. Residents, activists, and former Andersen personnel say they have lived with the consequences, including fears that exposure may have contributed to serious health problems.

The U.S. military is seldom identified as the source of contamination on Guam, and the local government rarely holds it accountable. Camacho, a former attorney general of Guam, described the military’s posture as, “We’re not responsible, you can’t prove it.” 

Our investigation uncovered military documents showing that the U.S. government has spent years excavating and relocating pesticide-contaminated soil as part of a housing redevelopment project at Andersen Air Force Base. The documents were obtained from Guam EPA under the Sunshine Reform Act, the territory’s public records law. 

Military reports and historical government records also show that the Air Force has acknowledged, on Guam and in other contexts, that pesticide contaminated soil could pose a health risk to personnel and nearby communities.

This article is the first in a two-part series examining how the U.S. military buildup on Guam—driven in part by preparations for a potential conflict with China over Taiwan—is affecting the island’s environment, public health, military personnel, indigenous CHamoru communities, and ultimately its sovereignty. (This story uses CHamoru, the officially adopted spelling in Guam.)

Newly obtained documents also show that the military is still contending with contamination from World War II and Cold War-era activities, even as it invests billions of dollars in expanding its presence on Guam. 

The Margin and The War Horse reviewed thousands of pages of previously unreleased records from the Guam EPA, including internal communications between military officials and environmental regulators. 

Among them were soil-sampling and management reports produced for the military’s multiyear housing-replacement project at Andersen Air Force Base, as well as communications detailing a forthcoming Joint Region Marianas-led investigation into the source of dieldrin contamination on base. 

Guam EPA also released hundreds of pages of records concerning the Air Force’s long-running disposal of World War II-era unexploded ordnance and munitions through open detonation at Tarague Beach in Yigo. The Air Force wants to continue the practice, which dates back to 1982, despite longstanding environmental concerns and the development of alternative disposal methods, such as controlled detonation chambers. 

Whether the Air Force was required under the National Environmental Policy Act to conduct an environmental review and consider alternatives is now before the U.S. Supreme Court in Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guåhan. Prutehi Guåhan is a community organization dedicated to protecting Guam’s culture and environment.

A ruling for the Air Force could narrow how the National Environmental Policy Act applies when federal activities are also regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The case has drawn briefs from 21 Republican-led states backing the Air Force and 11 Democratic-led states, along with the District of Columbia, supporting Prutehi Guåhan.

As both sides prepare for oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Oct. 7, The Margin and The War Horse obtained a Defense Department report from Guam EPA finalized in May evaluating alternatives to open detonation on Tarague Beach.

Guam EPA’s comments on the report show that the regulator disputes several of the Air Force’s conclusions and believes the service has interpreted its obligations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act too narrowly.  

Taken together, records related to the dieldrin contamination and open-detonation disputes show repeated friction between the Air Force and environmental regulators over how contamination is investigated, prevented, and addressed as the military pours billions of dollars into preparing Guam for a potential conflict. 

In one letter sent to Guam EPA offering technical advice on Air Force claims, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expressed concerns about Andersen Air Force Base’s response to requests that, according to the agency, other Defense Department facilities “routinely comply with.” 

Monaeka Flores, executive director of Prutehi Guåhan, said the military’s conduct amounts to “environmental racism.” She and other activists argue that U.S. territories such as Guam are subjected to environmental burdens that would be less politically acceptable in the States.

We’re not seeing open detonation take place in places like Manhattan or Beverly Hills. And we have to ask ourselves ... why does it feel like poor, Native people are more expendable?

According to a Joint Region Marianas spokesperson, the command “provides information in accordance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements” and is coordinating with environmental regulators “in support of their regulatory responsibilities and the ongoing dieldrin investigation.” 

“Joint Region Marianas remains committed to providing regulators with accurate, verified information and communicating openly with the Guam community,” the spokesperson said.

Why Are My Friends Dying?

Tessa Robinson vividly remembers the day in 2008 when, living in San Diego, she got a call from her then-husband: They were moving to Guam. 

Chris, a Navy helicopter pilot, had received a permanent change of station order to Andersen Air Force Base. The assignment would last three years, and Robinson would be coming with him. 

“I was thrilled, honestly,” she said. “It seemed like a great time to go. We were relatively newly married, we were in our 20s, and we didn’t have kids yet. It felt like something to experience.”

Like many Americans, Robinson knew little about the island. She went to a bookstore and picked up a Lonely Planet guide to Micronesia, not realizing Lonely Planet was the publisher. 

“I just thought Micronesia was ‘the Lonely Planet,’” she said.

Guam is the largest island in Micronesia, a vast region of the western Pacific made up of more than 2,000 islands. It is home to the CHamoru people, whose ancestors settled there more than 3,500 years ago. Spain colonized Guam in the 17th century, and the United States took control in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. People born on Guam are U.S. citizens, but residents cannot vote for president and have no voting representation in Congress.

Soon after arriving on Guam, Robinson found herself alone on the other side of the world. 

“The deployment schedule was pretty tough,” she said. “Three weeks after we got there, Chris deployed [to Iraq] for the better part of 15 months.” 

The isolation can be difficult for military spouses, but Robinson forged lifelong friendships with the other women on the base. 

“You’re so far ahead in time zones that it’s difficult to keep relationships back in the States and tough to talk to your family from Guam,” she said. “And so these people really become your family.”

The housing itself left a lot to be desired. Many of the single-story duplexes were built in the late 1950s, with concrete walls, concrete slabs, and slightly pitched concrete roofs. 

“[They were] truly concrete bunkers designed to ride out the worst of weather because … typhoon season was always a real big deal,” Robinson said. 

The 750 residences were known as Wherry-Capehart housing, part of a Cold War-era federal program that produced relatively inexpensive military family housing at installations around the world. 

What Robinson didn’t know was what had been put beneath homes like hers.

Beginning in the 1950s, pesticides, including dieldrin, were commonly applied to soil beneath building foundations to keep termites and other insects out. Dieldrin and related organochlorine pesticides like chlordane and aldrin were also widely used in agriculture before concerns about their effects on human health and the environment led to increasing restrictions. 

Dieldrin breaks down very slowly in the environment and can persist in soil for years. It also accumulates in living organisms and can bind to dust particles, allowing wind to carry contaminated dust over long distances. 

The United States banned most use of dieldrin in 1970, with some termite-control applications continuing until 1987. 

Animal studies have linked exposure to neurological and reproductive effects and liver tumors, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies dieldrin as a probable carcinogen.

Back then, none of that was on Robinson’s mind.

With their husbands deployed, the spouses found ways to entertain one another. One friend, Kate, missed Starbucks so much she invited the women over for coffee and tried to recreate her favorite drinks from the chain. 

When Robinson first arrived at Andersen, she heard that women living there were suffering miscarriages. Eventually her own friends began experiencing miscarriages and other reproductive complications. 

“It felt like more than what’s normal in a population of such a small group of people,” Robinson said. 

The women were mostly healthy and in their 20s, Robinson said. One friend, Natalie, experienced three miscarriages while living on base and another, Stacy, lost twins at 20 weeks. Another friend, Anet, gave birth to a baby, Gabrielle, who died two days later after complications involving her heart and lungs. 

“We all really grieved when they lost their baby,” Robinson said. 

After Robinson left Guam in 2011, more troubling news followed.

Some of the women she had known developed aggressive cancers at unusually young ages. Kate died of kidney cancer, and Anet died of ovarian cancer, both in their 30s. Robinson’s next-door neighbor, Jolene, was diagnosed with colon cancer. The person who later moved into Robinson’s former home, Bethany, was diagnosed with leukemia.

Robinson found the pattern difficult to dismiss.

I really love these people and they’re all fucking dying.

She began wondering whether others who had lived at Andersen had similar experiences. 

In 2025, Robinson found an online survey created four years earlier by a former Andersen resident looking for other residents, aged in their 30s and 40s, who had lived there during the 2000s and later experienced serious or unexplained health problems. She circulated it through social media and military community networks. 

On social media, the survey gained more than 150 responses from people reporting aggressive cancers, reproductive issues, stillbirths, birth defects, and other illnesses.

The responses do not establish that conditions on the base caused those health problems. And the diagnoses have not been independently verified. The survey relied on self-selected respondents recruited online, meaning it cannot be considered a scientific study, either. 

But it did identify a previously unrecognized group of former residents who believed they had experienced serious health problems during or after living at Andersen. 

For Robinson, the responses reinforced her suspicion that something in the environment had played a role. 

“You can’t change my mind that it is not something environmental caused by something that happened [on Andersen],” she said. 

Former residents have proposed different explanations. Some pointed to mold in the ventilation systems. Others reported high levels of radon readings in their homes. A report from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that by the early 2000s the military had renovated roughly half of Andersen’s housing in an effort to mitigate radon levels.

Robinson struggled to pinpoint a clear explanation—and with life pulling her attention elsewhere—her research stalled. 

Then, later in 2025, she heard about dieldrin for the first time in news reports about contamination at well Y-15 in Yigo. 

She immediately thought about the water she had used at home. 

“I made bottles with that water for my daughter and I drank it all the time,” Robinson said. 

Whether dieldrin played any role in the miscarriages, cancers, or other health problems reported by Robinson and her friends remains unclear. But research has documented reproductive and developmental effects associated with exposure to the pesticides used at Andersen. 

A 1971 study found increased stillbirths among dogs given aldrin orally for 14 months before mating. Aldrin converts to dieldrin in the body.

A study of women living in pesticide-treated homes found an association between residential treatment and dieldrin levels in breast milk. Researchers identified inhalation as a likely exposure route. Another study found measurable aldrin and dieldrin in indoor air years after homes had been treated.

Those findings deepened Robinson’s suspicion that families at Andersen had been exposed to a variety of environmental hazards.

I think the Air Force knew better. Military families deserve transparency about what was known and when, and the potential health impacts warrant further investigation.

While Robinson was living at Andersen, the Defense Department was investigating pesticide contamination around military housing on Guam.

A 2024 pesticide-management report prepared by military contractor GHD and released by Guam EPA through a records request summarized investigations conducted by Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command housing in Guam and Hawaii between 2004 and 2010. Those investigations repeatedly detected aldrin, dieldrin, and chlordane “above screening levels” in soil around housing at Andersen Air Force Base. 

“The highest pesticide concentrations were found in soil samples collected beneath existing concrete slab foundations and immediately adjacent to the foundations of existing structures,” the report said. 

The report also said the chemicals may have been “routinely applied” and that residues could still be “present beneath and around structures that were treated prior to the mid- to late-1980s.”

The records raise questions about whether pesticides beneath some military homes could have migrated indoors. 

Decades earlier, the Defense Department had identified problems with heating and cooling ducts used in some Capehart housing. The ducts were installed in or beneath concrete slabs and made of inexpensive materials that deteriorated over time, allowing termiticides in the surrounding soil to enter the ventilation system. 

A 1981 report by the General Accounting Office, now known as the Government Accountability Office, described pesticide vapors entering military homes through the ducts. 

“In some cases the vaporization occurred to the extent that droplets condensed on uninsulated ceilings,” the report said. 

The government’s audit covered military housing in Virginia, Hawaii, and North Carolina. The following month, the Associated Press reported that the problem potentially affected about 31,000 military housing units built during the previous 25 years. 

Attempts to fix the problem were not always successful. The GAO found that the Air Force spent $2.9 million sealing or replacing ducts in 1,259 housing units, but pesticide vapors persisted in some homes. 

“When the new ceiling ducts were used, the vapors, which had penetrated the units’ surfaces for up to 25 years, were again present and were believed to be emanating from the units’ interior surfaces,” the report said.

Responding to the survey of former residents, JRM said it “takes concerns regarding pesticide-impacted soil and the health of current and former Guam residents seriously.”  

“The presence of pesticides in soil, however, does not by itself establish that the chemicals entered drinking water, migrated into former residences or resulted in human exposure,” the JRM spokesperson said. 

These publications asked JRM if it knew whether the duct issue affected Capehart housing on Andersen, but it could not confirm.  

“Joint Region Marianas has not identified information confirming that the condition described in the 1981 General Accounting Office report affected former Capehart housing at Andersen or that corrective actions were required or taken,” the spokesperson said.

A Long History of Contamination

The U.S. military’s legacy of contamination on Guam is difficult to ignore. What is much harder to establish is a direct link between specific pollutants and disease among people who lived on the island.

Veterans who served on Guam long alleged that Agent Orange had been used and stored there, claims U.S. officials did not acknowledge for decades. Mounting evidence eventually contributed to the PACT Act of 2022, which expanded benefits for veterans, including those exposed to herbicides in Guam and other Pacific locations.

Families on Guam have long suspected that generations of cancer diagnoses may be connected to environmental contamination. Lawyer and author Julian Aguon, who lost his father to pancreatic cancer, said that “if you are CHamoru, you are always coming back from burying the dead.” 

Overall cancer incidence on Guam is lower than in the mainland United States, but some types occur at higher rates or at younger ages. 

One of the few studies to examine a possible link came in 2011, when an epidemiologist found a possible association between a polychlorinated biphenyl spill from a former U.S. Coast Guard facility and a long-term increase in proportional cancer mortality in a nearby village whose residents relied on the affected lagoon for fishing. A fish consumption advisory remained in place as of March 2025.

Andersen Air Force Base presents another longstanding contamination problem. The base sits above Guam’s sole source aquifer and was placed on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List in 1992 because hazardous substances, including PCBs, pesticides, metals, fuels, and industrial solvents, were found in places including unlined landfills and chemical storage areas. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has described the aquifer as “particularly vulnerable to contamination” because pollutants can move through the island’s porous limestone into groundwater. 

The federal government has rarely paid damages for environmental harm tied to military activity in the Pacific. A major exception came in 2023, when the government of Guam reached a $48.9 million settlement with the United States over the Ordot dump, where the military had disposed of hazardous waste from World War II. 

The attorney general who brought the case was Leevin Camacho.

Military Housing ‘Possible Source of Dieldrin in Drinking Water’

The Ordot dump case had felt personal. But contaminated water flowing through Camacho’s family home hit even closer. 

Pursuing justice wasn’t optional, he joked—his mom made sure of that. 

“In all honesty, my mom won’t let the issue go,” Camacho said. “She’s been very forceful about me doing something [about the dieldrin issue].” 

After the September 2025 revelation of dieldrin in the drinking water, Camacho began laying the groundwork for what could become one of the largest government claims in Guam’s history, seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from Guam EPA and the Guam Waterworks Authority.

Internal emails obtained by Camacho and reviewed by The Margin and The War Horse showed that by October 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was threatening federal enforcement action against the water authority over dieldrin contamination. 

The records also showed that the U.S. EPA had alerted Guam EPA to elevated dieldrin levels as early as 2012. But years passed before federal inspectors returned in 2022 and again pressed the local agency to act. 

One complication was that dieldrin is not federally regulated as a drinking water contaminant. There is no nationwide enforceable limit for how much dieldrin can be present in drinking water, and detections were not appearing in Guam EPA’s routine monitoring summaries, according to an internal email. 

Guam EPA eventually developed its own limit on dieldrin levels, which took effect in August 2025 after a two-year review process. That threshold triggered a do-not-drink advisory for well Y-15. 

For the previous seven months, dieldrin concentrations in the well had averaged 1.75 micrograms per liter—more than eight times above Guam EPA’s new limit of 0.2 micrograms per liter. 

By October 2025, Guam EPA had begun investigating where the contamination might be coming from. After Joint Region Marianas announced that water on base was safe, regulators obtained two reports from military contractors: a 2024 pesticide soils management plan by contractor GHD and a 2024 soil-sampling report by Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command. 

Those records revealed a yearslong effort at Andersen Air Force Base to excavate and relocate pesticide-contaminated soil.

The plan noted that pesticides can become more volatile in hot environments, increasing the risk of inhalation. It also identified dust as a concern for construction workers and nearby residents and called for control measures, including upwind and downwind air monitoring. 

The documents released by Guam EPA included a letter from Pacific Rim Constructors, dated July 16, 2025, notifying the environmental regulator that it planned to begin “encapsulation activities.” But, internal records suggest, the agency first became aware of the notification letter in October and had no prior knowledge of the contaminated soil excavation.

That raises questions about whether the environmental regulator was notified about the nature of the construction activities. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson at Guam EPA said the agency was prohibited from sharing or divulging information on whether it had received Pacific Rim's notification letter in July 2025. The U.S. EPA said it first learned of the military’s soil sampling and management activities in the Fall of 2025. Pacific Rim Constructors did not respond to our questions. 

Guam EPA staff began in November 2025 discussing the need for project-closure reports and additional data to determine whether contaminated soil at Andersen could be contributing to dieldrin in groundwater, according to an email obtained under the Sunshine Reform Act. 

In December 2025, Guam EPA administrator Michelle Lastimoza asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in an email whether it had recent groundwater-monitoring data for “dieldrin hotspots” at Andersen Air Force Base. 

EPA Superfund manager John Chestnutt responded that the agency had not received any such data and questioned whether the military’s expedited September testing had examined the areas most relevant to the investigation. 

“Not sure if the sampling included any monitoring wells closer to the area of interest,” Chestnutt wrote. “I’m not aware that those results are validated yet and that they’ve been released.”

A Joint Region Marianas spokesperson said the command provided Guam EPA with detailed reports of the September testing. 

“The characterization that Joint Region Marianas conducted drinking-water testing to deflect responsibility for dieldrin detected in Guam Waterworks Authority Well Y-15 is incorrect. Because of the Y-15 results, JRM accelerated planned testing of military drinking water wells to ensure public safety,” the spokesperson said. “It was not designed to determine the source of dieldrin in Y-15 and did not replace a source investigation.”

On Dec. 23, Guam EPA and U.S. EPA formally asked Joint Region Marianas to investigate potential sources of dieldrin contamination on the base. 

The agencies cited findings from the military’s own project reports and wrote that dieldrin contamination remained “unaddressed.” 

“Given that the former housing units may be a possible source of dieldrin in drinking water, the stated goal to maximize the reuse of PIS [pesticide infected soils] on-site may need to be reevaluated,” the letter said. 

Five days later, on Dec. 28, Rear Adm. Brett Mietus responded that he would consult with his legal and environmental staff in January about how to proceed.

Guam EPA held a town hall at a Yigo gymnasium on Feb. 25, drawing dozens of residents concerned about the dieldrin contamination. 

Before the meeting, John Salas, environmental director at Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command Marianas, the command that had previously investigated pesticide contamination in the soil on Andersen, emailed Guam EPA senior science advisor Capt. Elizabeth DeGrange to say the military would be “tracking” the event but would “unfortunately” not attend in an official capacity. 

Salas wrote that Rear Adm. Brett Mietus had “emphasized the importance of ensuring our messaging is properly coordinated and synchronized.” He also provided a prepared statement from Mietus that again distanced Andersen from contamination.

“At this time, no data has identified a specific origin,” the statement said, “and any decisions regarding response actions will be guided by verified findings and applicable environmental regulations.”

The town hall was tense. Residents, including Camacho, pressed Guam EPA officials over why the community had not been told about the contamination sooner. 

During the meeting, Capt. DeGrange said the request for Joint Region Marianas to investigate potential dieldrin sources at Andersen was “not a sign of guilt,” according to the Pacific Daily News.  

In response to the newly released emails, Camacho said the community has reason to question whom Guam EPA is “actually working to protect."

Guam EPA can start to rebuild that trust by being transparent about the source of the dieldrin and by taking every action necessary to hold accountable whoever is responsible, including the military.

In an email statement, Guam EPA administrator Michelle Lastimoza said her agency “is committed to protecting public health and the environment.”

“We know that dieldrin was once legal and widely used across the island by both military and civilians, and it is extremely persistent in soil,” Lastizoma said.  

Lastimoza said the Air Force’s soil management plans were “the best known handling of pesticide-impacted soils.” She said the regulator was conducting a thorough investigation of potential sources of contamination in well Y-15, including a joint assessment with the military to “explore potential sources both inside and outside the fence.”

Lastimoza said the regulator welcomed any additional information in their continuing investigation. 

“If a responsible party can be determined, Guam EPA intends to hold that party accountable,” Lastimoza said. “We cannot, however, act on rumors and suspicions.” 

Guam EPA declined to release details of the joint assessment in response to a public records request, saying it was controlled unclassified information that could only be released by the Defense Department. 

But communications between Guam EPA and Joint Region Marianas provide clues about where investigators are looking. The records suggest the inquiry is focusing on several underground injection-control wells and a stormwater drain that may receive runoff from the housing area and discharge into the Y-15 catchment. 

Emails also show that Guam EPA was still seeking potentially relevant information from the military months after they began investigating potential dieldrin sources in October 2025. 

On March 9, Joint Region Marianas sent DeGrange a contaminated-soil closure report covering phases 1 through 3 of the housing project. 

Then, on June 15, DeGrange told a U.S. EPA Superfund manager that “there’s rumors that maybe JRM isn’t sharing all of the data that they already have.”

U.S. EPA spokesperson Alejandro Díaz said the environmental regulators had made “numerous requests” to JRM for pesticide sampling data relevant to the housing project. 

“JRM has indicated they are gathering and will be transmitting available data,” Díaz said. 

Díaz said the EPA was working “collaboratively” with JRM to fine tune the investigation. 

“We understand JRM has completed contract negotiations and plans to award the contract for this work in September 2026,” he said.

The Defense Department has not yet fulfilled public records requests for additional records concerning how pesticide-contaminated soil at Andersen was handled and whether it could have contributed to contamination in Yigo’s drinking water supply.

Groundwater contamination expert James Connors, a hydrologist and geoscientist with the American Institute of Hydrology, said the combination of pesticide-contaminated soil, construction activity, and Guam’s tropical environment created the perfect conditions in which contaminants could readily reach groundwater. 

“It’s almost all of the worst case conditions for this type of contamination,” Connors said. “A Pacific Island with a high rainfall, with a thin veneer of soil sitting on top of a limestone aquifer ... can make contaminants move very quickly.”

The Air Force has known for decades that disturbing pesticide-contaminated soil can create risks. 

In 2005, it urged the city of Victorville, California, to halt demolition of former military housing at the decommissioned George Air Force Base because of what it described as “pervasive” dieldrin and aldrin contamination. 

“The pesticides could present a risk to human health if soils are inhaled, ingested, or contacted by skin,” the Air Force wrote.  

Records also show that pesticides had been detected in Guam’s drinking water long before the housing redevelopment project began in 2016. 

A 1996 newspaper op-ed quoted a Guam Waterworks Authority official describing pesticides in the drinking water as “a real concern.” 

“If we don’t develop a plan to analyze the effects on our permanent water supply and aggressively follow through with that process, we may be sitting on a time bomb that will destroy our most precious resource,” the op-ed warned.

Historical water monitoring data obtained by Camacho from Guam EPA shows one reading at well Y-15 that was analyzed twice, with a dieldrin concentration of 1.3 and 1.7 micrograms per liter in October 2008—nearly identical to the average concentration that would prompt a do-not-drink advisory 17 years later. 

Connors said one possibility is that the dieldrin reapplied around the house perimeters was carried by rainfall from the soil into the aquifer before construction ever began.

What decades of exposure may have meant for residents’ health is much harder to determine.

The Margin and The War Horse spoke with Yigo residents who are now questioning whether contaminated drinking water could have contributed to the deaths of loved ones. 

“I was drinking the tap water all my life,” said Yigo Vice Mayor Pedro Blas, who was born in 1996. “We thought it was safe.” 

Blas was 9 when his mother died after a long battle with cancer.

“I can’t help thinking it was when she moved to Yigo, and she started drinking the tap water that she became sick,” he said. 

Rosita Taitano Huff, Camacho’s aunt, similarly wonders whether health issues she experienced could have been related to dieldrin. 

“I’m really sad because at that time we didn’t know what was wrong with me,” she said. “Even now I get paranoid. I still go buy water.” 

She is particularly angered that hundreds of children attending nearby Upi Elementary were exposed to contaminated drinking water. 

“You don’t know what’s going on with your brains when you start ingesting all those chemicals,” Huff said. 

A treatment system has since been installed at well Y-15, and the do-not-drink advisory has been lifted. 

This year, Camacho has helped residents file roughly 470 claims against the Guam Waterworks Authority and 250 against Guam EPA, each seeking as much as $500,000 in compensation. 

“One of the goals is to push this litigation to force Guam EPA and the governor of Guam to actually take legal courses against the responsible party, which is the Department of War,” Camacho said. 

Administrator Lastimoza said the $500,000 figure “reflects statutory limits under the Guam Government Claims Act rather than being based on any assessments of actual or potential harms.” The Governor of Guam’s office and the GWA did not respond to our questions. 

Blas says that for the community, determining who is responsible matters less than finding out what years of exposure could mean for the people who relied on the water.

He said residents do not want this issue “swept under the rug like a lot of other things on this island.” 

“They want to know if their health has been compromised and if their life has been shortened by simply brushing their teeth,” he said. 

***

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

After a full day cleaning a local high school in May 2026, Ana hustles through her last tasks so she can arrive early at the local produce market. Ever since September 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene hit the small mountain town where she’s lived for more than 20 years, Ana has relied on the free weekly market, housed in a defunct church, to feed her family. As she enters the sanctuary on that spring day, sunlight filters through stained glass, and at the bottom of one window a pomegranate glows. Ana leaves carrying bags full of vegetables and a loaf of bread.

The high school that Ana cleans became a relief center after the storm. Across the street, all the houses on two separate cul-de-sacs were destroyed. Nearly two years later, Swannanoa, North Carolina, continues to navigate Helene’s aftermath. The storm demolished the mobile home that Ana shared with her husband and then-teenage children. They made it out unscathed, wearing pajamas and the small blanket Ana’s kids grabbed, losing everything else. “El cascarón,” a shell, was all that was left of the home, she said.

“In that moment, our world caved in,” Ana said in Spanish.

There’s a richness in her voice, delicate and deliberate, as her eyes, rimmed with blue eyeliner, fill with tears that gently spill over. 

Ana witnessed her community wash away that week. Mobile homes raced down a river of stormwater like “barquitos,” little boats, she said.

Outside the market, operated by the nonprofit Bounty & Soul, she gestures toward U.S. Highway 70, the road that had transformed into an unrecognizable flood during that fateful week. It cuts through the rural town of Swannanoa as its main thoroughfare, flanked by the eponymous river on one side and Interstate 40 on the other. 

Ana and her husband, hometown sweethearts from Mexico, were among the first immigrant families to establish roots in their pocket of Swannanoa more than two decades ago. In addition to her work as a school custodian, Ana runs her own event decorating business, working extra nights and almost every weekend on weddings, quinceañeras, and other celebrations in her community. Her husband works as a house painter. 

In the aftermath of Helene, the family spent 53 days without potable water,and Ana’s husband was without paid work for a full year. The family moved into their renovated mobile home on the same lot in June 2025. But for them and their fellow immigrant community in these mountains, the economic and emotional impacts of the storm linger profoundly. 

Their mobile home, where they started and raised a family, is one of more than 100 mobile homes parked on the same circular drive. Plots of land are small — about 30 by 80 feet — and neighbors live in compact proximity to each other. Each home is unique, distinguished by an array of colorful flowers and lush cacti that grow along their perimeters. Cats claim different porches, rushing indoors to peek through colorful patterned window curtains. It’s a neighborhood full of long-established immigrant families, mostly Latino, with a few non-immigrant neighbors in the mix.

The park sits near the river. As floodwaters rose, nearly every home in the neighborhood was flooded or severely damaged. Ana’s home sat at the bottom of the hill, and it was completely destroyed.

The map below shows NCEM floodplain extents across different storm scenarios, along with the buildings at risk within each area. Hurricane Helene is classified as a 1,000-year storm event.

North Carolina is home to an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants, according to 2024 data from the Center for Migration Studies and the University of Minnesota. Because many of these community members don’t self-report their legal status, the data remains a rough estimation. The Latino population makes up 6% of Swannanoa’s population, or just over 1,000 people of approximately 17,000 total, as of 2023. 

Tight-knit neighborhoods of immigrants, mainly from Latin America with the majority from Mexico, are scattered across North Carolina’s mountain region. Many of which take the shape of rural mobile home parks. 

Buncombe County data shows that Helene hit single-family and manufactured housing (like mobile homes) the hardest. Combined, these dwellings make up the majority of housing in the town of Swannanoa. According to the county’s property assessor, there are 19,000 mobile homes in Buncombe County. 11,000 of which are fixed in place while the rest are a combination of single- and double-wide manufactured homes not on permanent foundations and other fixtures ranging from airplanes to campers and boats. Most of these homes are owner-occupied, while 28% are inhabited by renters. Swannanoa includes at least 940 mobile homes, which made up 16% of the town’s total occupied housing in 2023.

For many, mobile homes are a pathway to homeownership for working-class people, especially immigrants, who can purchase them with cash and avoid the rental market. In the face of a federally declared climate disaster, mobile homeowners qualify for FEMA aid if they are also U.S. citizens. Undocumented homeowners, however, do not qualify for any type of FEMA financial assistance. 

North Carolina’s undocumented immigrants bear one of the largest burdens of loss and displacement post-Helene. In interviews with The Margin, immigrants in mobile home parks relayed numerous difficulties, including barriers to FEMA funding, targeting from xenophobic vigilantes, the threat of eviction and an increased federal ICE presence in small-town immigrant enclaves that previously went under the radar. 

While the ground under many homes has long since dried, these hardships persist for many immigrants like Ana almost two years after the storm. 

“I feel like I’m living in a different place,” says Ana.

How FEMA shuts immigrants out of recovery

Commotion woke Hermila Contreras in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina. Contreras’ mobile home sits on the same street where Ana lives, except at the top of the hill. No one knocked on her door (like a firefighter did at Ana’s) to order them to evacuate. So Contreras decided to wait out the storm as water rushed down the hill.

She and her teenage daughter were crouched inside a bedroom when a large tree toppled and crashed through the roof. Rain fell through a gaping hole directly into the kitchen, living room, and the back bedroom as Contreras tried to save important belongings from getting soaked. She looked out the window to see the water rise and rise, engulfing her car. The rain persisted for days. More trees fell, and mobile homes eventually crumbled into the stream of water. Roads became impassable. The family lost power for four months. 

Mobile homes are referred to as “manufactured housing” in federal data terms. Purchasing a double-wide mobile or manufactured home in Swannanoa, N.C., can cost up to $75,000. Additional costs of up to $50,000 can be incurred for moving the structure, preparing a new site, and installation.

Mobile homeowners at parks pay rent for the plot of land where their homes sit. Contreras said her rent is $600 a month, which was due just four days after the storm, on Oct. 1. Even when they own their homes, residents of mobile home parks can get evicted. North Carolina law requires that landlords provide at least 60 days' notice. 

Contreras said she applied for a FEMA offer of $750 three times; The Margin verified that the agency denied her the last time, in November 2025, because her application lacked specific documents including identification and receipts of purchases lost to the storm, including items she’s owned for several years.

Originally from Mexico, Contreras did not yet have legal permanent residency or a driver’s license when she purchased her mobile home 22 years ago and parked it at the Swannanoa park. For this reason, the home was technically in her oldest daughter’s name when Helene hit, though Contreras had paid it off.

Purchasing a mobile home requires a driver’s license, something that does not necessarily apply to standard homeownership. Undocumented immigrants qualify for a driver’s license in only 19 U.S. states, and North Carolina is not one of them. A common workaround is to purchase these homes using a relative or friend’s name, which can complicate applications for FEMA aid.

Contreras obtained permanent residence in the U.S. in 2017. But even a retroactive transfer of the deed in her name after the natural disaster would not qualify her for FEMA assistance. She thinks this discrepancy in paperwork disqualified her for much of the aid she applied for in the early stage of recovery. She even tried to receive aid from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization, which also told her she did not have the proper documents.

A 2021 report by expert advisors to FEMA cited equity issues with several disaster-relief application processes. The FEMA National Advisory Council ultimately recommended that “alternative forms of documented ownership should also be accepted for instances involving loss of a mobile home.” That recommendation has not been taken.

Like many mixed-status families, Ana said she applied for and received FEMA financial aid through one of her adult, U.S. citizen children. FEMA awarded her family $25,000, meeting only a fraction of their need. Ana estimates total costs for the new home reached $60,000. Her husband didn’t work for a year to oversee the entire project, and did as much as he could himself. They received additional support, such as construction supplies from CORE, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world, now with a team in Swannanoa led by Antonio Garcia, a Salvadoran who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16. Garcia said CORE helped reconstruct 25 mobile homes in Ana’s neighborhood.

As recovery began in the wake of Helene, the end of the month and its various due dates loomed. On Sept. 30, 2024, Contreras said various volunteers who were helping out all day in her neighborhood convened with the on-site park manager, a Spanish-speaking Latino, and a few residents. It wasn’t a planned meeting, but “we took the opportunity to ask about the rent,” she says. That’s when they were told it was still due the very next day.

Through her community and established “confianza,” Contreras connected with community organizer Dulce Mirian Porras-Rosas, who had been advocating for rent forgiveness with a mobile home park in nearby Candler, to no avail. Porras-Rosas told The Margin that she doesn’t personally know of any mobile home park landlord who forgave rent or offered an extension post-Helene.

For almost two years, Contreras has been living with flood damage and a hole in her roof that neighbors helped cover with tarp. Contreras was out of work for months—ironically, her job is in construction. Today, visible signs of black mold have appeared along the ceiling, which has been temporarily patched. 

Fortunately, Porras-Rosas connected Contreras to resources, which eventually led to a successful application with Renew NC, the state’s revamped 2025 home recovery program. Contreras expects a new mobile home by December.

Evacuations and evictions 

Porras-Rosas, who lives in a mobile home in Asheville, has spent years in community activism throughout the Carolina mountain region. She co-founded the Asheville group Semilla de Vida, an organization that began as a way to teach and promote food justice. When the storm hit, the group took action. In a mostly immigrant neighborhood, they distributed generators, water, food, and tools. Organizers also raised and distributed $9,000 in immediate rental and relocation assistance following Helene, money collected from neighbors and friends.

The hurricane not only changed the ecological panorama of the region, but also the economic and social dynamics. Many people had to relocate after having been woven into the fabric of this community.

Buncombe County never implemented a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures despite persistent advocacy from community leaders and housing advocates. In March 2025, a group of state senators introduced Senate Bill 395, the Disaster Relief Eviction Moratorium Act, in the North Carolina Legislature. The bill stalled after going to committee and has not come up for a vote. 

While the federal government can administer programs to prevent evictions through HUD policies and, in some instances, federal aid, the eviction process itself is largely governed by state and local policy. Moreover, there is no federal mandate to disclose eviction data.

“Finding more detailed data on other characteristics, like country of origin, income, or immigration status, can be almost impossible,” said Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager for The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. This means the actual scale of Helene's displacement of North Carolina's immigrant communities is impossible to track, since these communities typically don't qualify for federal disaster assistance.

When demographic information is documented in eviction court records, a court clerk typically enters it manually or a tenant self-reports, making the data neither systematic nor reliable. Even outside of climate disasters, Black and Latina women are more likely to be evicted than their male counterparts. For Latina women specifically, the risk of eviction is approximately 9% higher than it is for Latino men. 

“On top of that,” said Garnham, “we know that there are a large number of people who experience evictions informally and avoid going to court. Local experts and anecdotal experiences point in the same direction that undocumented tenants tend to be part of this group, and it’s extremely difficult to quantify their experiences.”

Burdened with back rent and the looming possibility of eviction, many Swannanoa renters and mobile homeowners sought help from Swannanoa Communities Together, the organization founded by a group of local women in Helene’s wake.

“What we have witnessed here in Swannanoa, starting in the immediate aftermath of the storm, is people who were displaced by the storm, who were living in their cars or tents or RVs, or sometimes if they could get a motel,” said Beth Trigg, co-founder of Swannanoa Communities Together.

To date, Trigg said they have provided almost $1.1 million in financial assistance to almost 1,000 households from October 2024 to May 2026. 

Paulina, who chose to only use her first name, is one of two bilingual Latina leaders at Swannanoa Communities Together. Before the storm, she and her family rented a large swath of land in Swannanoa. At first, only a couple of mobile homes occupied the land. One belonged to Paulina, where she lived with her family, and the other was occupied by the landowner. 

Over the next decade, Paulina slowly purchased more mobile homes to rent out to community members, while she managed leasing the land. By 2024, she collected rent from six households, the majority Latino, some including her family members.

In the early morning of Sept. 27, 2024, at the first sign of danger, Paulina began knocking on her tenants’ doors, every single one.

“We woke up the last family at 2 a.m.,” she said, in Spanish, of the last home they alerted. Within an hour, the two families evacuated to a nearby hotel together. Paulina recalls the electricity going out at 4 a.m, and that by the time the sun came up, everything had flooded. Paulina’s home and all of the mobile homes up on the hill where she lived had been destroyed.

Two weeks later, bouncing from shelter to shelter, Paulina and her team at Swannanoa Communities Together began receiving calls from people desperate to find help paying rent. It dawned on her that, as a landlord, she never collected rent. Neither did the landowner from whom she leased the rental plots.

“There was absolutely nothing left,” she said in Spanish. “How are you going to charge rent?”

When North Carolina mobile home parks evict residents, a landlord or management company can eventually obtain a writ of possession, which could result in the landlord possessing  the property until the debt is paid.  

“If you get evicted from a mobile home park, you will have to choose from the least bad of three options,” said Garnham of The Eviction Lab. “Abandon your property outright, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or try to move it to another location.”

According to an analysis of county court records by NC Eviction Watchdog, a project of the North Carolina Tenants Union, at least 391 evictions for mobile homes were filed in western North Carolina since Helene.

Another tricky reality for mobile homeowners is forced displacement due to the sale of the mobile home park land, often to developers. Dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a federal eviction moratorium, some park owners selling their property would give residents a few months to find a new place for their homes. This type of upheaval continues today for hundreds of families in mobile home parks across the state.

In March 2025, three state senators proposed Senate Bill 518, the Mobile Home Park Act, to better protect mobile homeowners. The bill was referred to committee, but did not come up for a vote. As a housing reform bill, it would provide stronger protection for tenants and require park owners to register with the North Carolina Human Rights Commission. Owners would have to comply with health and safety rules while adhering to new standards that limit rent increases.

‘The house of my dreams is gone’

Monica, a fast food worker, and her husband, who works landscaping jobs, felt excited when they found a beautiful home that they could afford in 2014. For 10 years, the homeowners grew their family on a quiet, friendly street. Five children grew up there, where they played on the swing set in the backyard, hanging piñatas from a large oak tree on their birthdays. The brick house boasts a secluded courtyard entrance leading into a cabin-like interior that, before the storm, warmed the home in natural wood paneled walls, floors, and ceilings. 

Today, the home has been gutted down to the wooden studs. After Helene, people cut the electricity and stripped the copper. The now-naked interior is a sight the family thought they would never see. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred battered and flooded the home. Monica and her family lost all of their belongings. They worked to prevent similar disasters in the future by raising all of their power outlets by six inches. FEMA flood insurance, which the undocumented couple secured after Fred through one of their children who is a citizen, was also running out, with only two months left of coverage. Following Helene, Monica said they did not qualify for further FEMA aid, like the buyout,  due to previous assistance they’d received.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program purchases flood-damaged properties from homeowners for up to 75% of the costs, with the remaining portion typically being funded by state or local governments. Properties are assessed at pre-disaster market value and are restricted by limits to future development in flood-prone areas. However, an undocumented immigrant homeowner cannot apply for this type of buyout.

The family needs funds to raise their home off the ground, Monica said, an expensive effort they cannot afford on their own. And they are still paying a mortgage on a home they cannot live in.

Monica walks out of the house, stepping over a wooden door that she does not recognize, splayed out in the yard, “carried by the water” from a stranger’s home. She rounds the corner to find her Knock Out roses in full bloom, creating a luminous reflection in a large puddle of water on the street.      

The house of my dreams is gone.

                                      ***

The storm hit the same year that President Donald Trump was elected for a second term. 

Historically, undocumented immigrants have been wary of federal disaster relief because FEMA is housed under the Dept. of Homeland Security, which includes both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. After any natural disaster in the U.S., it is common for Border Patrol agents to be deployed to assist in recovery. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Margin that agents were on the ground in western North Carolina after Helene. 

“For us [as immigrants] it’s a double whammy,” said Porras-Rosas in Spanish. “We’re living in really complicated times. It’s immoral, this corner they have us backed into. And it’s unnecessary.”

Reports of militia groups in the immediate aftermath of Helene became a snapshot in international media of the compounding crises of disaster recovery, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Locally, they amplified fear, especially in immigrant communities. These militias seemed to track far-right criticism toward federal aid. 

In 2021, the Biden administration designated places for disaster or emergency response as “protected areas,” where immigration agents would not engage in enforcement actions. However, in January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded that policy, the clearest indication that disaster victims might potentially become enforcement targets. ICE can use what it calls “common sense enforcement” in sensitive locations where those operations were previously prohibited. This previously required a judicial warrant but advocates warned that now enforcement can happen without one, instead only needing an administrative order by the agency

Reports of intimidation continue. In a video obtained by The Margin, a traffic cone with a U.S. Border Patrol ballcap was placed outside of a predominantly Latino mobile home park in Buncombe County in May. CBP told The Margin that they were not in Buncombe County in May 2026. 

It’s an image that feels symbolic. In June of this year, North Carolina passed a law, known as "North Carolina Border Protection Act,” that requires the state highway patrol and the Department of Public Safety to collaborate with ICE, which killed two more people in the U.S. in July. Neither person was who the agency was looking for. The legislation also effectively ends any sanctuary policies in the state. The bill passed after the state House of Representatives overrode Governor Stein’s veto. 

On July 26, sheriffs in Caldwell County, 65 miles east of Buncombe County confirmed collaboration with ICE and the U.S. Forest Service at a checkpoint at Wilson Creek park. The federal immigration enforcement operation resulted in the ICE arrest of 13 people.

Housing on the horizon

There are parts of Swannanoa that feel forgotten. Down the road from Ana and Contreras’ mobile home park, several residential cul-de-sacs are dotted with houses that remain desolate. Large X’s are graffitied on the garage doors and remaining siding. Homes are surrounded by overgrown brush and wildflowers.

Along U.S. Highway 70, a bright yellow sign stapled to a telephone pole beckons for the post office to return in thick black handwriting: “USPS WHERE ARE YOU.” Blocks of empty parking lots are surrounded by locked fences. A lot off the highway was home to the original Athens Pizza, operated by the same family for more than two decades. The business was renamed Athens Grille and has since moved into a smaller gas station alcove. Another lot housed the ACE Hardware, formerly a well-equipped store for construction workers, landscapers and homeowners, now void of any sign that a building once stood there.

If you drive too fast, perched beside the parking lot of a former beauty salon, you might miss a makeshift roadside marquee exclaiming “WE CAN DO IT! SI SE PUEDE.” Upon opening the door to the inconspicuous building, people are met with cozy couches and armchairs, big smiles, and lively chatter in Spanish and English. 

Swannanoa Communities Together transformed the space as their hub, with the intention of being a comfortable and communal haven for people seeking resources. A small food pantry in the back offers fresh produce and packaged foods, along with baby formula, diapers, and general toiletries. The bathroom is stocked with free menstrual products and pregnancy tests. 

Trigg helped found the multi-racial and multilingual organization with other women who had already been working in the community. Many have backgrounds organizing around the myriad issues in local policy, while others are specifically trained through economic justice models.

Other community members shouldered new roles in service of their neighbors. They are translators and interpreters, drivers and case managers who checked on families and helped neighbors navigate assistance systems. With local government agencies and nonprofits offering little Spanish-language information during immediate recovery operations, bilingual volunteers became translators and conduits for recovery information.

“Many stepped forward because they knew official information might not reach everyone or that some families might feel afraid or uncertain about asking for help,” said Carmen Ybarra, director of systems and engagement at Swannanoa Communities Together, via email.

One thing that instantly became clear to these advocates post-Helene is that current aid models limit access through eligibility requirements. As residents of Swannanoa Valley, the team knew that not everyone could show proof of a formal income, provide a Social Security number, present a credit history, or pass a criminal background check. Swannanoa Communities Together, thus, offers assistance to anyone who walks through the door. Folks get help paying bills, rent (even back rent) and more.

But the number one priority continues to be housing. And the long-term sustainability of future affordable housing plans presented by local governments makes Trigg and her cohort wary.

“We can help people by ensuring that they have a roof over their head for emergencies, but the actual transition from that to housing stability is really challenging and takes a long time, even with support from us, because of the lack of low-barrier affordable rental housing,” said Trigg. From 2019 to 2023, the median gross rent increased 58%, from $908 per month to $1,438 for a three-bedroom unit. 

Buncombe County is considering public feedback until August 15, for what’s dubbed the Swannanoa Small Area Plan, its proposal for the town’s future as part of the county’s 2043 Comprehensive Plan. A steering committee that Trigg served on met this year to assess the terms. Initial plans focused heavily on tourism and building out areas in Swannanoa that have already begun to transform. One strip includes a coffee shop, a now-closed brewery, and a food store.

Separate from the official steering committee, the women of Swannanoa Communities Together said they submitted a list of recommendations to the county with suggested revisions to the plan and solutions. The group included a five-year moratorium on short-term rentals like Airbnb, and an emphasis on affordable housing. 

On June 15 in a public session, the county agreed to explore a moratorium on short-term rentals. The motion received almost unanimous support from the steering committee.

Ybarra’s mission is to continue bringing Latino residents and other residents of color into the conversations around recovery and its decision-making process. Her work prioritizes “access, trust, dignity, and making complicated systems understandable.”

“Swannanoa’s recovery should not be judged only by repaired buildings, new development, or rising property values. It should be judged by whether the people who were here before Helene are still able to call it home,” Ybarra said.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Please note this article contains mention of suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

In the early evening of October 11th, 12-year-old Seth Friend went out to fish for tomcod on the Kwigillingok River. It was windy, and the rain tasted like seawater. Dark clouds cast a shadow over Seth’s boat as he navigated strong river currents that nearly towed him away. Spooked, he returned home. 

Seth and his older sister, 20-year-old Ariel, settled into their two-story house—where they lived with their parents, two younger cousins, four dogs, and a guinea pig named Hazel—to wait out what they thought would be just another fall storm. On western Alaska’s Bering Sea coast, late autumn often brings storms that have increased in severity with climate change.

But they weren’t prepared for how devastating this one would be. Remnants of Typhoon Halong slammed into Alaska’s western coast a few hours later, bringing up to 100-mile-per-hour winds and a storm surge that unleashed major floods across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The region, nearly the size of Oregon, is one of the world’s largest river deltas. Kwigillingok and its neighbor, Kipnuk, a Yup’ik community, were the two hardest-hit villages. The storm surge reached up to twelve feet in both villages. Halong came with only 36 hours of warning, presenting a limited opportunity for mass evacuation.  

The National Weather Service’s categorization of Halong as the “remnants” of a typhoon undercuts its sheer force. Bryan Fisher, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, described Halong as the most catastrophic storm he has witnessed in over three decades. Disaster recovery experts have compared the destruction to that of Hurricane Katrina. 

On the night of October 11, as the storm intensified, the Kwigillingok Tribal Council urged all families to seek shelter in the local school, which sat on high ground. But the Friend family was already trapped. Within thirty minutes, floodwaters had rushed in through a hole in the laundry room, inundating the entire first floor. The waters knocked their home of nearly ten years off its foundation. “Our house lifted up,” Ariel recalled. “It went really fast.” 

They ran upstairs. From the windows, Ariel watched as neighboring houses smashed into theirs, shattering their windows and letting in even more water. Barrels of stove oil split, filling the air with the stench of gasoline. A wire snapped, and the power went out. Ariel felt like she was in a boat out at sea in pitch darkness. As she remembers it, the house twirled in circles, and she began to feel seasick. “I was terrified and dizzy because the house was spinning,” she said. 

Ariel didn’t sleep all night. In the morning, after the floodwaters started receding, Ariel went to the bathroom and threw up. “I couldn’t hold it in,” she said, “I just lost my home.

Six months later, as of this reporting, the majority of evacuees have yet to return to their homes. Many have spent the time since Halong in limbo: transitioning from shelters to couch surfing with relatives and friends.  

These transitions have been especially difficult for young people between the ages of 12 and 24, like Ariel and Seth. Tribal leaders and school officials have confirmed at least two youth evacuated from Kwigillingok and Kipnuk have died by suicide in the last six months, and at least one other young person attempted suicide. One 16-year-old boy from Kwigillingok who died by suicide was involved in mental health advocacy and was preparing to go to Juneau to meet with legislative officials at the time of his death. 

This has raised concerns for service providers, Tribal officials, and state officials around gaps in mental health support for evacuated youth. Many are beginning to exhibit a wide range of trauma responses to the climate disaster, including feelings of isolation, depression, and anxiety, according to three school officials, five mental health providers, and 10 youth between the ages of 12 and 24 interviewed by The Margin. 

“Can you imagine being in your home not being anchored, and it floating away with you inside?” asked Jennifer Sahaba, a site administrator for the Lower Kuskokwim School District who has been working to support evacuated youth in the village of Toksook Bay. “That kind of trauma doesn't go away in days and weeks, and maybe even years.

Six months later, Ariel and Seth Friend still have nightmares about the night of Halong. And they’re not the only ones. Children as young as 6 years old are reporting flashbacks and trouble sleeping. These acute stress responses are compounded by their displacement. The storm hit a month into the school year, and many young people are now living hundreds of miles away from their homes, from their villages’ tight-knit social networks, their Yup’ik language, and familiar subsistence lifeways. 

These symptoms are alarming mental health professionals in Alaska, where the suicide rate is more than double the nationwide average, a crisis that disproportionately affects youth.  

From 2011 to 2023, the percentage of Alaska high school students who attempted suicide more than doubled from nine percent to 19 percent. In 2023, the most recent year of data available through the Alaska Statewide Suicide Prevention Council, Alaskans aged 15 to 24 had the highest rate of deaths by suicide of any age group. From 2020 to 2024, youth between 11 and 19 years old exhibited the highest rates of emergency room visits due to suicide attempts. 

The picture is grimmer in rural areas, like the Y-K Delta, which was home to the highest rate of suicide per capita in 2024. And among Alaska Native Youth, there’s a distinct risk. In 2023, an Alaska Department of Health survey found that one in four Alaska Native high schoolers had attempted suicide, compared to one in seven white high schoolers statewide. 

The aftermath of losing one’s home and loved ones, plus the alienating impacts of displacement, is contributing to an already dire youth mental health crisis among Alaska Natives. However, the existing, mounting data on youth suicide risk has not resulted in more resources for mental health; practitioners worry that young people’s emotional well-being will worsen as climate-fueled storms like Halong become ever more frequent. And the complicated, outdated funding models for disaster recovery are escalating stress and uncertainty for young Halong survivors.

In a March 2026 address to the Alaska State Legislature, Representative Nellie Unangiq Jimmie, whose district includes Kwigillingok and Kipnuk, identified mental health support as one of the greatest needs for her constituents impacted by the disaster. She cited these youth suicides as an area of major concern. “From populations [this] small, this is catastrophic,” she said.

‘The houses seem to rise out of the sea’

Ariel lived in Kwigillingok’s downtown area, which bore the brunt of the storm. Powerful floodwaters forced homes like hers off their foundations and sent them barrelling into raised boardwalks. Some houses drifted for several miles, crossing a river that runs from north to south down the village’s center. Panicked livestreams flooded social media that night. 

Residents in Kwigillingok’s uptown area watched helplessly as their neighbors pleaded for rescue. One neighbor opened his window and clutched a light pole to avoid being carried away by strong tides. Another recorded himself as he waded through knee-deep water in his living room, the walls of his home swaying while he frantically tried to retrieve floating items like a guitar case, house slippers, and a trash can.

While the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta often experiences fall storms, Halong was a product of our warming climate. Originating as a category four typhoon off the coast of Japan, the tropical storm trailed east before defying weather forecasts and veering northward. Fueled by abnormally warm ocean temperatures, the storm gathered strength and took an “extremely rare” track to hit villages like Kwigillingok with the intensity it did, according to experts in atmospheric science. The region has only experienced one other fall storm this strong in the last seven decades, and only four other ex-typhoons since 1970. In 2022, Typhoon Merbok—a similar meteorological phenomenon—destroyed homes, critical infrastructure, and fish camps along Alaska’s western coast. The costs of recovery from Merbok have totaled $170 million so far.

Starting on October 11, Halong made an abrupt northward turn, defying forecasts and following an extremely rare path toward Alaska's Bering coast.

Even before Halong, young people in Kwigillingok faced frequent climate-related stressors. For years, the Y-K Delta has been sinking due to a combination of rising ocean temperatures, melting sea ice, and thawing permafrost. Dotted across this flat, low-lying landscape are 56 villages. The population of these communities—ranging from less than ten to over 900 inhabitants—is almost entirely Alaska Native. 

For communities on the Bering Sea coast, like Kwigillingok, some areas are only 10 feet above sea level. As a result, high tides and storms can send seawater over dozens of square miles of low-lying tundra. Strong winds from the south even blow sheets of ice over the village’s shores. These extreme weather events, coupled with sea level rise, are also accelerating erosion of the coastline. 

According to Henry George, a 67-year-old man who grew up in Kwigillingok, the land that the village sits on wasn’t suitable for long-term inhabitation to begin with. “The tundra [in Kwigillingok], it's not hills, it's not bluffs. It's just lowland,” he said. With each passing year, George has observed the tundra growing softer and more sod-like

As with many other villages in the Y-K Delta, missionaries played a major role in the formation of a permanent village at Kwigillingok. In the late 19th century, missionaries dispatched from the headquarters of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, arrived in southwest Alaska. After establishing their missionary center in Bethel, the Church stationed members in Indigenous settlements across the Y-K Delta. At the time, Alaska Native communities were dispersed amongst camps and small settlements along the sloughs and rivers that drained out into the Kuskokwim Bay, and then farther west towards the Bering Sea. They lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle, establishing seasonal villages depending on subsistence needs.

In the early 20th century, the Moravians identified Kwigillingok as an ideal location for a “permanent mission station” because it was accessible by waterways and was populated in the fall and winter. When approaching Kwigillingok from the Kuskokwim Bay, the Moravians noticed how close the village was to sea level. “Houses seem to rise out of the sea,” they observed, “there is really no high ground.” Despite this unstable land, the Church encouraged the Kwigillingok community to establish permanent infrastructure—supplying lumber from a saw mill they ran in Bethel for the construction of log cabins and boardwalks. 

Within decades, Kwigillingok’s traditional sod houses—semi-permanent, insulated dwellings that sheltered residents in colder months—were replaced by year-round western-style homes. The opening of a Moravian day school in 1915 and a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in 1924 solidified Kwigillingok as a stationary village. Kwigillingok’s population increased as Alaska Native people across the Bering Sea moved there to comply with a 1929 compulsory schooling mandate. 

Communities like Kwigillingok, whose locations are the result of colonization and imperialism, are now on the frontlines of climate change in subarctic Alaska. As climate-fueled storms have increased in intensity, the low-lying land of the Y-K Delta has proven especially vulnerable to these disasters.

‘The trauma is coming back up’ 

The morning after Halong, the subarctic sunrise illuminated the village, bringing the full picture of the storm’s destruction into view. The stormwaters lifted large swathes of the village several feet above ground before depositing them in twisted configurations. Pieces of boardwalk lay on top of four-wheelers and snowmachines. In the village cemetery, residents had begun above-ground burials in recent years to avoid disturbing the tundra earth, which was softening with rapid permafrost thaw. Overnight, the storm had ripped caskets from their wooden encasements, leaving black unmarked coffins all over the village. 

When floodwaters finally began receding at 8 am, Ariel’s younger cousin, who lived nearby, came to rescue the Friend family. Their two-story house had tipped forward, blocking access to the front door and windows. Ariel’s cousin stood on top of their porch and ripped open a crack in the siding of their roof so the family could escape from the second story. 

The Friends considered themselves lucky. An intact boardwalk had prevented their house from becoming completely unmoored. But nearly all their belongings were ruined—covered in a thick layer of tundra sludge, brine, and stove oil. Ariel’s parents were devastated by what they had lost, especially her mom, who cried over the precious traditional beadwork she had spent hours on. Their house was beyond saving. The wall joints had split open, and the foundation was ruined. They demolished it in January of this year. “Most of the memories were in the house,” Ariel said. “We moved there when I was in grade school.”  

Ariel and her family went to the local school, where they joined the rest of the village. Many Elders had taken shelter there before the storm started. Some residents had left halfway through the night when staying home became life-threatening, driving four-wheelers atop floating boardwalks with young kids cradled in their arms. Helicopters rescued those whose houses floated miles away. 

Three people were missing—including Ariel’s aunt’s best friend, who was later found dead. “I thought she was gonna be at the school, but then I found out her body was decomposed by the water,” Ariel recounted between tears. Nearly nine months after the storm, one missing resident remains to be found. 

                                              ***

Seth and Ariel Friend still have dreams about the night of the storm. And they’re not the only ones reporting what psychiatrists call “intrusive re-experiencing,” a stress response that involves reliving a traumatic event. Families have reported children as young as 6 years old waking up in tears from recurring nightmares of Halong. Eighteen-year-old Elijah Paul, who lived in an eight-person intergenerational household in Kipnuk, spent the night of Halong sheltering in the local school. He remembers a dream he had following evacuation from his home, which had floated during Halong. “I was alone in the house. There was nobody to help me,” he said. “I woke up crying for some reason.” 

Extreme weather also triggers flashbacks of the storm. Elijah began planning for the future after he finished his senior year of high school in the village of Toksook Bay. He wants to attend technical school to become a welder. But when he hears strong winds, he’s right back in the throes of Halong. “I’m traumatized 'cause [of] how the school was shaking in the wind,” he said. When a low-lying area of Bethel flooded with the spring river breakup, children and teens across town expressed anxiety around another displacement. 

Research has demonstrated the short- and long-term consequences of environmental disasters on emotional well-being. In the months after Hurricane Katrina, rates of anxiety and mood disorders like PTSD among people directly impacted rose to nearly 50 percent; survivors’ trauma responses persisted over a decade later. 

Frieda Evon, whose family evacuated from their Kwigillingok home in the middle of the night when Halong was at its worst, remembers her sons, 5 and 7 years old, trembling in her arms as she drove their four-wheeler atop floating boardwalks to get to the school. She described how the mental health impacts on her children have persisted since the family moved to Bethel. “When it's really windy, they start to ask, ‘Is it gonna flood? Is it gonna flood high?’” she said. “I think it was from being traumatized.” 

For 18-year-old Janel Lincoln-John, whose Kwigillingok home floated during Halong, the sound of whistling windstorms incites visceral dread and terror. “I was worried I wouldn’t make it past that night,” recalled Janel, who lived with her mom and stepdad in the village’s heavily impacted downtown. Memories of the storm permeate her subconscious. Janel hasn’t slept well since her evacuation: she wakes up every day at 5 am, around the time when Halong was at its worst. “I think my mind tries to remind me of that night,” she said

Jim Biela, a school social worker for the Lower-Kuskokwim School District (LKSD), has seen firsthand how young people’s trauma is manifesting: as nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of isolation and anxiety. Biela said he counsels an expanded caseload, including 18 youth who evacuated from Kwigillingok and Kipnuk to other schools in the LKSD. The kids in his care describe nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of isolation and anxiety that make him worry these mental health challenges will escalate risk factors for suicide.

The emotional pain tied to traumatic events, including climate events like Halong, is seen as a major contributor to high suicide rates in villages, according to a 2020 survey conducted by researchers at Montana State University and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

In the first few months after a disaster, service providers like Biela focus on immediate crisis response, ensuring students’ physical needs are met. This initial stage of disaster recovery is adrenaline-filled. Those affected take action and attend to their immediate needs, such as food, water, and shelter. Humanitarian aid pours in. It’s only over the long term that the real emotional toll surfaces. “The trauma does not just happen overnight,” Biela said. “It will develop after a while, especially if you don't talk about it.” Trauma responses look different for everyone. Some ramp up hypervigilance and anxiety, while others sink into numbness and despair. Without early intervention, these acute stress responses can develop into chronic mental health disorders. 

A 2026 Harvard Review of Psychiatry study evaluating global disasters from 1990 through 2024 found that one in five people will develop mental health problems such as anxiety, sleep problems, PTSD, and depression in the initial months after surviving a disaster, and during a second peak about a decade later. Roughly 20 percent of survivors developed suicidal thoughts. The link between climate change and suicidality was reinforced through a 2020 study by researchers at Nantong University in China, which found that extreme weather events were significantly associated with an increase in suicide attempts and deaths. 

Biela believes mental health providers are approaching a critical time for intervention for evacuated youth. “We’re just seeing it now, some of the trauma is coming back up,” he said.

Displaced youth are coming to terms with the long-term consequences of Halong. The schools in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk currently have no plans to reopen, and many school-aged youth are scattered. The LKSD operates schools in Bethel and 26 of the 56 villages in the Y-K Delta region. When Halong hit last October, roughly 130 displaced students transferred to LKSD’s Bethel schools to finish out the year. 

Biela is assigned to a handful of remote villages and acts as a first responder for mental health emergencies. In his two decades with the school district, Biela has lost 18 students to suicide, he said. When Biela encounters a student in crisis, he refers them to just four clinicians in Bethel at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, a Tribal provider that operates the only hospital in the region. Those four professionals cover mental health needs for approximately 26,000 people of all ages across the 56 villages in the Y-K Delta. 

Staffing shortages mean a waitlist: it can take up to six months for a young person in need to see a mental health clinician for an initial evaluation. Even when students are referred to intensive programs, they need to fly to the rural hub of Bethel to access them—a journey that can take up to an hour each way. 

According to Biela, who is one of nine social workers in the school district, staffing shortages and geographic isolation present challenges to mental health care for village youth. Although LKSD’s social workers provide frontline care to dozens of schools in their district, more than half of the villages in the region do not have social workers in their schools. “The sheer volume of kids [...] it's impossible to catch everybody,” Sahaba said.

In many parts of rural Alaska, access to community-based mental health services is already limited. For example, while Anchorage and Juneau have Mobile Outreach and Crisis Response centers, which have been proven to reduce inpatient hospitalization and residential confinement for youth, the entire Y-K Delta region, including Bethel, does not. This means that calling a crisis hotline often leads to law enforcement intervention instead. Young people with a serious risk of suicide are held in the village jail until they are flown to Bethel, then Anchorage, where inpatient care is available. 

“ I've had young girls wait two to three days [...] in the public safety office,” Biela said. 

The lack of community-based mental health infrastructure led the United States Department of Justice to conclude, in 2022, that the state was failing to provide adequate services for youth, with the largest gaps occurring in rural regions.

Biela sees funding as the main explanation for staffing shortages in rural Alaska. State funding for mental health and school-based services has been declining in recent years, and federal grant cancellations under the Trump administration have led to more scarcity, according to lawmakers and advocates. “Funding is the biggest issue,” said Biela. “ The public service, the mental health, and all that's always the first to get cut.” Even when the state sets aside money for behavioral health and crisis programs, Biela said, “the rural areas get less than the cities.” Working with what they have, this summer, the LKSD will begin training on trauma and PTSD in order to prepare staff like Biela to address these crises as the first anniversary of Halong approaches. 

In response to the recent suicides amongst displaced youth, Indigenous youth advocates from rural Alaska are fighting for a series of statewide suicide prevention bills: to establish a mental health curriculum in schools, to expand state funding for the 988 suicide hotline, and to fund the Statewide Suicide Prevention Council. The bill to fund mental health education, which has been under consideration for eight years, passed the state Legislature before Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it in June 2026.

“In my district, there are no therapists down the road, no crisis counselors in every school. When something breaks in a child in rural Alaska, it usually breaks quietly, and we always see how that ends up. We always find out too late,” Rep. Jimmie told news media while advocating for state support for rural suicide prevention during the 2026 Alaska state Legislative session. 

“We are losing kids."

Some Indigenous mental health advocates argue that merely expanding resources for existing mental health interventions is not enough. In 2012, Rose Domnick, a 67-year-old Yup’ik trauma intervention expert, founded Calricaraq, a preventative services program that centers Indigenous ancestral wisdom to address suicidality and other behavioral health issues. The program acknowledges intergenerational trauma is a key factor behind high suicide rates. 

“It’s so culturally grounded in an Indigenous worldview, it's really difficult for Western minds to see and understand that [this] truly is suicide prevention,” Domnick said.

The appeal of culturally-aligned behavioral health programs was highlighted through a 2020 survey of youth from Alaska Native villages, which was administered by researchers at Montana State University, The University of Washington, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Survey participants indicated a desire for community-based suicide prevention programs rooted in Indigenous culture. Evaluations of similar interventions—like the Yup’ik Qungasvik project and the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s New Hope program—have demonstrated their efficacy.

Domnick takes issue with individualistic views of suicide prevention. She sees youth suicides as the result of colonization’s trauma and violence, which hindered the development of emotional coping skills for Indigenous communities. “That is what colonization severed: transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next,” she said. 

Therefore, Domnick added, addressing mental health issues amongst Alaska Native youth requires collective healing to restore the social and emotional supports that historically existed at the community level. She described this process of slow repair. “We will never be as impactful as the parents, grandparents, aunties, and uncles in preventing suicide,” she said. “And so we have to teach the communities, families how to take care of their children in the same way that our ancestors did.” 

Domnick emphasizes that the Calricaraq program is not merely a translation of Western models of behavioral health because: “We can’t utilize what harmed us to heal us.” 

Our healing must utilize our identity, our culture, and our wisdom to move us away from the impacts of historical trauma and colonization.

‘I don't know where home is anymore’ 

Faith Paul spent the summer before her senior year of high school in Kipnuk—a Yup’ik community of 700 residents thirty miles west of Kwigillingok—with her dad’s side of the family. She arrived in Kipnuk at the beginning of the subarctic spring, right as migratory shorebirds were descending on the Bering Sea coast, depositing their eggs in beds of feathers, grass, and driftwood. Her dad took her egg hunting, and they harvested five gallons. 

Then, it was herring season, closely followed by halibut season, and Faith spent long hours helping her friend process the catch. At times, she passed sun-filled days driving boats through gleaming river bends as tall tundra grasses waved in the wind. She reveled in the freedom of village life. Although she spent the school year in Kwigillingok with her mom’s side of the family, summering in Kipnuk was an annual tradition. 

Now, the changing seasons bring Faith painful reminders of routines no longer possible. “It doesn’t truly feel like it’s gonna be summer ‘cause we're not home,” she said.

Having grown up between the two villages hardest hit by Halong, 17-year-old Faith is experiencing a double loss from the storm. After her evacuation, Faith finished her senior year of high school in Bethel, and in the spring of this year, graduated from LKSD’s Kuskokwim Learning Academy. But what should’ve been a celebratory time only dredged up feelings of isolation. Faith has struggled to adjust to the move to Bethel. She wishes she were graduating with her classmates in Kwigillingok—whom she grew up with—instead of with people she barely knows. 

Faith has struggled to move on from the night of the typhoon. She thinks about it every single day. In Bethel, she has found it difficult to access hobbies she enjoys. Her days blur together. “Every day is just the same routine. I just stay home,” she said. “I still feel stuck in October.” 

As she talks about the typhoon, her sentences trail off into whispers, like she forgets to draw in air. And the final words emerge like a gasp, “I think about it every day ‘cause every day I wake up, and I'm not at home.

Meghan Crow, who has worked as a social worker for over two decades for LKSD, has been providing counseling for Kwigillingok youth since their evacuations. Before Halong, Crow served as Kwigillingok’s school social worker and traveled to the village monthly to meet with students. According to her, post-Halong mental health interventions need to address youth’s loss of their physical rooting in the world. 

“The biggest factor is loss of place,” she said. “It’s like an existential spiritual loss that they're grieving.” 

According to Crow, this uprooting affects all areas of mental health. Her students are struggling to adjust to new schools and transition from Yup’ik to predominantly-English speaking environments. 

For Native youth, separation from their familiar landscape also bars them from lifeways central to their identity and self-worth. Ariel spent her summers cleaning and processing fish—up to 40 per day—that her parents would net from the Kwigillingok River. Ariel loves hunting, partly for the thrill, but mostly for the fulfillment of providing for her loved ones. 

“It’s this way to feed your family or friends if they really need it,” she said. “That's what the hunting part is about.” 

Now Ariel lives apart from her parents, who have returned to Kwigillingok with their pets that survived the storm to help with rebuilding efforts. She’s living with an older cousin in Bethel, and sometimes she thinks about going back to Kwigillingok because she misses her dogs, her guinea pig Hazel, and her family.

Recovery efforts in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk are balancing two competing goals—reuniting the community as quickly as possible at an interim village site and preparing for a large-scale relocation in the long term. Roughly 30 percent of Kwigillingok buildings were destroyed, and around 90 percent of buildings in Kipnuk were destroyed. Both villages have voted overwhelmingly to relocate to higher ground, rather than to rebuild in place.

These two efforts will require separate funding mechanisms. 

Repairing damage from Halong is funded under the Stafford Act, the statute that governs federal disaster declarations. The law requires infrastructure to be rebuilt in the same place. “Our law hasn't caught up with the current climate reality of Alaska,” said Rachael Gunn, the chief of staff for Rep. Jimmie. The Alaska state Individual Assistance program provides renters with only three months of rental assistance, and Tribal leaders report that residents are already facing evictions and housing insecurity. 

Both Kipnuk and Kwigillingok want to be reunited at one interim village site while they wait for relocation, according to Tribal leaders. But, state agencies set construction priorities, sometimes without consulting local leaders, according to Tribal officials.

“This violates our Tribal sovereignty,” said Rayna Paul, the tribal administrator and environmental director for Kipnuk. “We want to relocate and do not want to build back in place and have repeatedly stated that to the state and to the FEMA officials." "This is about our survival and the survival of future generations."

According to Gunn, the real limitation is the lack of resources. FEMA has estimated that repairing the damage from Typhoon Halong will cost close to $125 million. But lawmakers are preparing for these estimates to increase significantly. The Trump administration has denied several of the state’s appeals for FEMA to increase its share of recovery costs

Converging crises—many of which stem from federal administration decisions—will likely drive up repair costs over time. The U.S. war with Iran has aggravated a rural energy crisis by driving up gas and home heating prices. Tariffs have skyrocketed construction costs for a winding and delicate supply chain in rural Alaska. 

This funding dilemma exposes structural inequalities across the state’s vast geography, Gunn added. “It's always been a competition between rural and urban Alaska for resources, and rural’s been left behind for a long time.

For Janel Lincoln-John, an 18-year-old who grew up in Kwigillingok, relocation debates ignite feelings of anger and frustration. Janel sees the village’s current predicament as an outcome of governmental neglect. For years, residents of Kwigillingok have raised fears about worsening floods and sought assistance for relocation. 

“It took how many years?” Janel said. “People would try to ask for relocation, and it took Typhoon Halong to [get] people to notice.” 

Faith has experienced firsthand how difficult it is to coordinate a community-wide relocation in her region. Roughly 90 miles northwest of Kwigillingok sits Mertarvik—the new site for the village of Newtok. Newtok’s residents made the decision to relocate their village to higher ground in the face of climate change in 1993, 15 years before Faith was born. The more than three-decades-long relocation process frequently stalled due to anemic funding and a lack of central government planning. It took until 2019, when Faith was 11 years old, for Newtok’s residents to finally begin moving to Mertarvik. 

“I feel like it'll take forever, and by the time it's done, I feel like I'd be old,” Faith said of Kwigillingok’s planned relocation. “It wouldn’t be the same anymore.” 

“Wherever we move in the future, I feel like [nothing] would make it feel better,” she said. “I don't know where home is anymore.” 

Jennifer Sahaba, the LKSD site administrator, has witnessed how environmental stressors impact Alaska Native village youths’ hopes for their future. Even before Halong, villages across the Y-K Delta faced escalating threats of permafrost thaw, erosion, and flooding. “At one point, this was a sustainable future [...] being able to maintain what they grew up with,” Sahaba said. “But as these environmental factors become much more prevalent, it gives a sense of hopelessness.” 

Research across the globe has documented how repeated climate stressors harm young people’s long-term outlook. A study published in The Lancet Planetary Health last year found that adolescents living in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh showed significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression than those in low-flood regions. This research also found that cognitive overload and feelings of hopelessness limit these young people’s ability to plan for the future. 

Still, Faith, like many other young people displaced by the typhoon, longs to return home to Kwigillingok, where locals say a construction crew of 30—more than half of whom are residents—works 12-hour days, seven days a week, to repair Halong’s damage. They are laying fresh boardwalks, patching and repainting damaged walls, and using inflatable airbags to move homes back onto their foundations. During the winter, they salvaged over a dozen houses that the stormwaters had uprooted. As a short subarctic construction season kicks off the summer, cleanup crews plan to flock to the villages to remove hazardous waste, restore safe drinking water, and repair sewage infrastructure.

The goal is to give residents the option to return to the village by late fall 2027. Faith’s home is still intact, but her parents are hesitant to return, in fear of another disaster.

“For the future, I was hoping to still live in [Kwigillingok],” she said. “I'd even want my kids, if I had any, to grow up there.”

***

When Christina Allen returned home from work, she saw an ominous sea of smoke engulfing the skies above her neighborhood during a massive scrap-metal fire in Camden, New Jersey, in February 2025. 

“Everything went kind of dark and dull,” she said.

Allen, a social worker, mother of a young child and lifelong resident of Camden, saw flecks of white ash the size of snowflakes falling from the sky, as she parked her car and walked toward her family’s rowhome. The air smelled like plastic burning in a bonfire. She could taste char in her mouth, and the cloud of smoke took on an orange glow. 

“It looked like it could be a big fire cloud,” Allen said. “It looked like something from out of a movie scene.”

Less than a half mile away, a roughly two-story-tall mountain of metal morphed into a four-alarm blaze at a scrap shredding facility run by EMR, a multinational metal recycling company with U.S. operations headquartered in Camden and global ones in the United Kingdom.

About 100 residents, including Allen, evacuated their homes that evening as the fire raged on for nine hours. Firefighters from nearly 20 companies worked to extinguish the flames. Camden County Commissioner Director Louis Cappelli Jr. said it was "by far the worst fire that has occurred on this site."

The locations above for EMR’s Camden sites, save for the location of the EMR Shredder Facility, come from the New Jersey Office of Attorney General’s lawsuit against EMR.

The Margin and WHYY News interviewed seven Waterfront South neighborhood residents who experienced acute health symptoms or lingering psychological impacts after the fires. 

Allen’s mother, Felicia Biles, and her stepfather, Michael, left for a relative’s house in the suburbs within minutes of smelling smoke and hearing fire engines. They brought Biles’ rescue inhaler and portable oxygen concentrator, which she sometimes needs to breathe. The family stayed at a hotel paid for by EMR. 

The fire in February 2025 pushed Camden leaders to come together to take action to prevent a fire of this scale from ever happening again. The city and EMR signed an agreement meant to improve fire safety, reimburse the city for firefighting expenses and fund community efforts. But many residents weren’t happy, with some filing lawsuits against EMR, one claiming the company’s sites spew “noxious emissions” that stop them from enjoying their homes and another seeking damages for psychological torment and lost wages. 

But in the early morning hours on May 29, 2026, another blaze broke out at EMR’s shredder facility. In its aftermath, city, county, and state elected officials implored the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. EPA and “every other regulatory agency with any jurisdiction” to shut down EMR.

Enough is enough. This will no longer be tolerated by me, my colleagues, elected officials here, and, more importantly, our residents.

Nearly a week later, the city ordered EMR to cease operations at the site. 

EMR is fighting back. The company sued the city June 15 for what it called a “groundless” suspension, claiming that continuing the shutdown would cost jobs and that the agreement itself acknowledged that fires could continue. EMR has blamed flammable lithium-ion batteries in consumer products as the real driver behind the fires. 

Now, as city leaders consider tougher accountability measures, including how long to continue EMR’s junkyard license suspension, some residents are left wondering whether they’ll follow through. 

Allen wants her elected officials to shut down the facility for good. She worries that if the city lets EMR restart its shredder, residents like her will simply be waiting for the next blaze.

“The city officials should really keep their word this time,” she said.

An unpopular agreement 

Weeks after the four-alarm fire in February 2025, Carlos Morales, executive director of Heart of Camden, a nonprofit that has become the neighborhood resource hub for the fires, wrote a letter to EMR’s USA CEO Joe Balzano detailing community concerns. He referenced a meeting with Balzano, Carstarphen, a member of City Council, the city attorney and the business administrator. 

“I came into that meeting hoping to hear something concrete — a real solution, a clear path forward that the community could trust. What I walked away with was something else,” Morales wrote. “I appreciated the blunt honesty from the city team. It was good for you to hear it, and good for me to hear it. There was no spin — just the hard reality that, as of now, EMR cannot guarantee this won't happen again.”

“If another fire happens — and you've said it very well could — the community will act,” Morales added. “People will block your trucks. They will protest. And the anger won't just be directed at EMR. It will fall on everyone who tried to work with you in good faith.”

Nearly two weeks later, Camden announced a memorandum of understanding with EMR requiring the company to allocate $6.7 million toward fire suppression upgrades, reimbursements to the city fire department for damages incurred during the February fire and funding for community initiatives. The deal represented roughly 8.7% of the $77.1 million in tax subsidies EMR received from the state of New Jersey between 2019 and 2024. 

Carstarphen celebrated the arrangement and said that it “provides meaningful compensation” to neighborhood residents and “helps to safeguard against the threat of fire.” City Council approved the deal over passionate opposition from residents and community activists, shortly after a small fire broke out at one of EMR’s facilities.

“I can assure our residents that EMR will be held to these commitments, and we can all agree that we need to eliminate fires from this site,” Carstarphen said during the announcement.

The agreement was sealed with little buy-in from community members. When City Council was discussing the resolution authorizing the agreement with EMR, attendees held signs emblazoned with images of flames that read “Shame” and “Stop the Burn!” Nearly a dozen people stepped up to the microphone to oppose the agreement. Biles and Allen were among them.

“One thing that has not been brought up at all is about the health of the residents,” Allen told the council. She said she had asked for medical screenings to be provided to residents at a prior community meeting following the February 2025 fire, but the request had never been addressed. 

“I don't want to even speak on the EMR thing about ‘Oh, if they're still here,’ this is, they need to be gone,” Allen said.

Biles said the memorandum of understanding, or MOU, should include a provision offering buyouts to residents living near EMR’s facilities.  

“I'm ready to leave,” Biles said. “It's time to go, if they're not going.” 

But despite community concerns, each present Camden city council member, including Vice President Arthur Barclay, who represents the neighborhood, responded “yes” to the deal.

The MOU that the council approved promised $3.25 million over five years in grant payments to nonprofits for community initiatives in Camden. As of publishing this story, no grant money has yet been disbursed. Balzano said in mid-May he hoped the first payments would go out by August or September. 

Biles wants the company to compensate residents directly for costs incurred during and after fires, such as the costs of cleaning homes and running air purifiers, but the deal prohibits payments to individuals. 

“The people in the community, it’s not really for us,” Biles said. “It doesn't seem to really be benefiting us.

A fire suppression system that ‘didn’t work perfectly’

EMR operates nine facilities in New Jersey, including five in Camden’s Waterfront South neighborhood. The company buys, disassembles, sorts and shreds scrap metal, including household appliances, automobiles and material from other industrial businesses. EMR employs 535 people in Camden, according to the company, and of those employees, 191 live in the city.

EMR’s facilities in Camden are located blocks away from homes, a childcare center,  a homeless shelter, an opioid use disorder treatment center, and an elementary school.  

Balzano invited journalists from WHYY News and The Margin to tour the facility on May 15. When asked to respond to residents who characterize EMR as a "bad neighbor,” he agreed. 

“I feel that we let them down. I'm not going to sit here and make excuses for not being able to see what was coming. Batteries are new to us. I didn't realize how combustible they are. I think we've tried to get in front of it now as much as we can. Unfortunately, it took time to kind of come up with a solution.” 

On the tour of the shredder facility, which has the capacity to process up to hundreds of tons of scrap metal each hour, Balzano directed employees to activate a new sprinkler system installed around a 20-foot-tall pile of crumpled cars and mangled construction debris.    

Four water cannons, mounted on thin metal towers and on the body of a crane, swept back and forth over the massive pile of junk, dousing it with heavy streams of water. Balzano explained that the cannons can be guided by heat sensors that monitor the pile for hot spots that could spark fires. 

“If the thermal imaging cameras detect heat at anything over 225 degrees [Fahrenheit], it automatically turns them on,” Balzano said. “It turns the nozzle directly to the [heat] source and then fires on it.”

The new fire suppression system was one of the requirements under the company’s agreement with the city. EMR also expanded the water line serving the facility and increased the number of employees inspecting incoming material for fire risks, from two to six. 

“Just putting more and more people, more and more eyes there … to try to get to the point where we’re on it a little bit faster,” Balzano said. 

Balzano had given a similar demonstration of the fire suppression system to city and state elected officials earlier in the week. After the tour, Carstarphen said in a statement that he and members of City Council were confident the system would “improve safety” and “help restore residents’ faith that the appropriate steps are being taken.

“The system was designed in coordination with the Camden Fire Department to ensure a fire of that scale will never happen again,” Carstarphen wrote, referring to the four-alarm fire in February 2025. “The leadership at EMR made firm commitments to the city when entering into the MOU agreement. Since that time, I feel everyone involved has delivered on those commitments. The $6.7 million pledged is substantial but just as important is rebuilding trust and confidence with the community.”

But days after that statement, a two-alarm fire broke out at the shredder site. While it didn’t reach the scale of the February 2025 blaze, it was large enough and required the city’s nine fire companies, representing around three dozen firefighters, to respond. The fire burned for hours before crews brought it under control. Camden County detected hazardous levels of fine particulate matter just south of homes in Waterfront South. 

Camden Fire Chief Jesse Flax said EMR’s fire suppression system did help tamp down the blaze, though it didn’t work perfectly. One water cannon initially failed to operate, he said. 

“Once they got it on, it kind of contained everything to that general area. We weren't going to have any fire spread,” Flax told reporters. “Once we were able to get everything in place, we were able to extinguish the fire a little bit more rapidly.”

Flax framed the malfunction as a first-fire learning curve. “You're going to get some kinks and some bugs that we got to deal with,” he said. “But when it did activate, what did activate did help.” 

Flax added that the system allowed city firefighters to extinguish the blaze without the help of neighboring fire departments.  

At a protest by EMR employees against city leaders’ calls for EMR to shut down days after the May fire, Balzano said the fire suppression system worked as designed. “In the beginning, when we signed the MOU, we were very clear with the mayor that this would not stop fires,” Balzano said. “This would help contain them and keep them from being out of control. It worked exactly the way it was supposed to work.”

EMR employs nearly 200 Camden residents, some of whom make $25 to $40 an hour plus benefits, and the workers want EMR to stay open. Roughly a hundred EMR employees, many wearing blue T-shirts bearing the logo of the Teamsters Local 676 union, marched from outside the shredder site to Camden City Hall days after the May fire. 

“They should work out ways to keep this going,” said Alex Sosa, a Teamsters member who works as a mechanic keeping EMR’s scrap metal shredder running. “We deal with the junk, we deal with the trash.

In a letter to Carstarphen the morning of the rally, Balzano defended the company’s record, citing its commitment of millions of dollars to install what he described as a “state-of-the-art” fire suppression system at the city’s request, as well as “extensive” operational changes.

“All of these steps were taken in good faith reliance on the framework the City and EMR developed together,” Balzano wrote.

He acknowledged that the city faced “real public pressure” after the May 29 fire, but argued their agreement remained the “right path forward” and said EMR was willing to work with regulators, community leaders, labor representatives and first responders on further improvements.

“Our strong preference is to address these matters collaboratively rather than through adversarial channels,” Balzano wrote.

But the prior evening, Camden City Council Vice President Arthur Barclay called the agreement into question. 

“I'm almost certain that deal’s probably over now,” Barclay told residents at a community meeting. He called it a “gentleman's handshake,” and said he now doubts EMR will follow through on its commitments. “It wasn't a legally binding document, so they're probably going to move forward and just not do whatever.” 

EMR USA General Counsel, Michael Gross, rejected Barclay’s characterization. The MOU, he said, is a “fully executed, legally binding contract,” and said the company plans to “honor every commitment in this agreement like it already has.

Air quality and health concerns

Six residents living near EMR’s facilities described health symptoms during and immediately following the fires, and several described ongoing concerns about their long-term exposure to smoke and air pollution. 

Members of four households within 3,000 feet of EMR sites said that after the fires, they smelled smoke or a similar odor inside their homes, and five residents described coughing or having difficulty breathing during or shortly after fires. 

Kristin Schrum, a mother of two young children who lives in Waterfront South, remembers going to work at a school in the neighborhood during a fire at EMR’s shredder site in 2021. She said she drove the roughly two blocks she would usually walk from her home to work because of the fire, then struggled to make it from her car into the school. 

 “It was so smoky, I couldn't stop coughing,” Schrum said. “I was almost throwing up. Like couldn't even make it into the building without having to stop and cough and gag and almost get sick multiple times.”

Air quality and environmental health experts told The Margin and WHYY News that the fires likely release not only fine particles that can cause lung and heart issues, but also toxic heavy metals and potentially other carcinogenic air pollutants. During the four-alarm fire in February 2025, a community PurpleAir monitor located at the end of Biles’ and Allen’s block detected a spike in fine particle pollution into the hazardous range, according to an analysis by Ode for The Margin and WHYY News. An EPA monitor located at the sewage treatment plant less than 1,500 feet southeast of EMR’s shredder measured particulate pollution in the unhealthy range and a spike in benzene, a carcinogen, during the fire, Ode found.

The below map provides a layout of surrounding air quality monitors located near the source of the 2025 fire, including the severity of their readings for harmful particulate matter in the air and simulated movement of the wind at the time of the fire. The chart on the right shows the surge of harmful particulate matter in the air before, during, and after the fire.

Staying indoors offers “some protection” from air pollution, but older or poorly maintained homes tend to let more pollution in, said Robert Laumbach, an occupational and environmental respiratory disease expert at Rutgers University. Odors lingering inside homes indicate that pollutants may have seeped indoors, said Jennifer Richmond-Bryant, a professor at NC State University who studies human exposure to air pollutants. Those pollutants likely include polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are carcinogenic, which can cling to surfaces, including walls and tables, and then expose inhabitants through inhalation or ingestion. 

The smoke also likely contains airborne particles of toxic heavy metals, including lead, cadmium, chromium and mercury, which can accumulate in the body over time, said Kabindra Shakya, an environmental scientist at Villanova University. After a fire ends, noxious gases dissipate into the atmosphere, but heavy metal particles can settle into residents’ yards, Shakya said, where they can be tracked into homes on shoes and continue to expose people long after the smoke clears. 

Christina Allen was pregnant with her now 5-year-old son, Jehlani, during a fire at EMR’s shredder in January 2021. From inside the home she shared with her mother, she could smell what she described as “plastic burning.” 

Scientists have found that exposure to air pollution, including the tiny particles present in smoke, during pregnancy increases the risk of complications, including preeclampsia and gestational hypertension, and has been linked to low birth weight. One 2023 study found that exposure to particulate pollution in utero and early life was associated with decreased lung function later on in childhood.

Allen said Jehlani has not been diagnosed with any respiratory conditions, but he is often congested, seems to have “narrow airways,” and shows signs of sleep apnea. She often stays up late monitoring his breathing while he sleeps.  

It’s one of the reasons Allen has asked that health screenings be provided to residents after fires.

Firefighters who have responded to EMR’s fires have their own health concerns. The biggest worry for Pete Perez, the president of the Camden Firefighters IAFF Local 788, is potential carcinogen exposure, a risk firefighters typically face at higher rates than the general public. It’s also one that doesn’t end when the fire does, as they must navigate lingering smoke and thoroughly clean their gear. Perez, who was at the February 2025 fire as the union president, confirmed the findings of a public records request indicating that two firefighters sought medical attention in the days that followed.

Seven residents described lingering psychological effects. Allen said her sense of smell now feels “heightened,” and that the scent of anything burning triggers memories of the EMR fires.

Stalled regulation and piling litigation

Since the January 2021 fire, Aliyia Jones, a Camden native and Waterfront South resident, had been in and out of the emergency room and medical appointments for asthma and shortness of breath. She moved back to Camden after the Paulsboro train derailment. “I thought I was coming to Camden for relief,” she said. 

The February 2025 fire was Jones’ breaking point. “I couldn't sleep at night. I was always on guard, walking around, making sure there’s not a fire,” she said. 

Weeks later, she started therapy for the first time and was diagnosed with PTSD and panic disorder. In April, she quit her job as a direct support professional worker assisting adults with disabilities. 

“I couldn't concentrate. I was making mistakes on the clock,” she said.

In March, Jones sued EMR, seeking damages for lifelong anxiety, lost wages, depression, and stress. The lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice in early May, after a judge agreed with EMR’s defense counsel that Jones had not provided sufficient evidence that the company caused her distress. Earlier this month, she filed a motion to reinstate the case, which is scheduled to be decided July 2. 

Jones had also brought her complaints directly to officials at the NJDEP, the agency responsible for enforcing and implementing federal and state environmental law and issuing permits for industrial facilities, about what it had been like to live near EMR. 

Living next to that has been like living next to hell. Literally.

In response to Jones’ testimony, then-NJDEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette said, "There's no question that you are owed better than that.”

In January 2026, the NJDEP and the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General also sued EMR, alleging that at least a dozen “major fires” over the past five years had resulted from unsafe conditions at EMR’s facilities and that the company had failed to take “appropriate steps” to fix them.

Lawyers for EMR asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. A Camden-based environmental nonprofit, the Center for Environmental Transformation, had previously sued the NJDEP and EMR in an attempt to compel regulators to inspect EMR’s facilities more often and require them to remove scrap piles more frequently.

The company also argued that the “vast majority” of the relief the state is seeking had already been implemented through the MOU and that the NJDEP lacked authority under state law to regulate fire risk or prevention. 

Following the May 29 fire, NJOAG released a statement saying “the latest fire only further confirms why EMR’s Camden facilities should not continue operating without the greater accountability and oversight needed to keep the community safe,” and that it would “continue our work in court to stop these dangerous fires once and for all.”

A key effort to increase oversight has been slow to advance. A bill that would reclassify scrap metal facilities like EMR’s as recyclers was introduced in the state legislature in June 2025 but has yet to pass in this session. The bill would require scrap metal recyclers to limit the size of shredder residue piles, mandate fire suppression systems and employee training, and require battery screening policies. 

One of the bill’s sponsors, State Assemblyman Bill Moen, whose district includes Camden, framed the measure as a necessary response to the proliferation of lithium-ion batteries in consumer products. “We need to basically follow suit and level up in how we are then classifying that waste,” he said in March.

The Recycled Materials Association, a trade group for recyclers that counts EMR as a member, opposes the bill. Frank Brill, a lobbyist representing ReMA, argued that it would burden small scrap metal businesses with additional bureaucracy.

“The only problem has come with these lithium-ion battery fires,” Brill said. “Subjecting [facilities] to annual fees and reviews and inspections and anything else that DEP wants to come up with … that are just going to be more trouble for this industry.”

A different bill requiring specific fire safety measures at scrap metal facilities, including remotely operated fire suppression systems at large scrap metal facilities, advanced through both chambers of the legislature this month and is awaiting a final legislative vote before it can head to the governor’s desk. EMR had expressed support for the bill earlier this spring, before it was amended to lower the allowable height for material piles.

The company was the top spender on lobbying in New Jersey within the environmental protection sector in 2025, according to state records.

Throughout these battles, EMR and its allies have consistently pointed to lithium-ion batteries as the cause of the fires. EMR and ReMA say there is currently no technology that allows scrapyards to automatically detect these batteries when they’re hidden inside scrap. An analysis by The Margin and WHYY News of three fire investigative reports on the barge fire May 23, 2022, the fire February 21, 2025 and the fire October 17, 2025, concluded the probable cause of ignition was undetermined. 

“It's not just our industry that is challenged by lithium-ion batteries. They're in everything,” said David Wagger, ReMA’s chief scientist. “Our members do their best because, quite frankly, it's an existential threat. No one wants to have not only their reputation ruined, but their facility become damaged and perhaps burn down.” 

A bill introduced to Congress last fall by U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross, who represents Camden, would create a tax credit to partially reimburse recycling companies for the cost of battery detectors, impose a tax on battery manufacturers and create a lithium battery recycling program, which would provide grants to facilities that collect and recycle lithium batteries. 

“Local jobs are important, but the community also needs to be safe,” Norcross said in a written statement.

‘If I had the money, I would move’

Felicia Biles loves the Waterfront South neighborhood of Camden, where she has lived for nearly four decades. She quilts with a group that meets monthly at a nearby arts nonprofit, grows vegetables and herbs at a community garden and attends plays at the South Camden Theatre Company, all within walking distance of her home. Biles said the people are friendly, and her grandson, Jehlani, plays with kids who live nearby. 

“This neighborhood is beautiful,” she said.

Despite all of this, the fires at EMR’s facilities have made Biles want to move to a neighborhood where she feels safe. But she cannot afford it. 

“I'd rather my health take priority,” Biles said. “If I had the money, I would move.” Since the January 2021 fire, Jones has also been trying to move. “It’s a must that I relocate,” she said in May. 

While operations remain suspended at EMR’s shredder in Camden, residents like Allen and Biles, who want to see EMR shut down permanently, are in limbo. The city is set to reevaluate the suspension of the shredder facility’s junkyard license early next month. City business administrator Timothy Cunningham said during a City Council meeting that EMR could appeal the suspension, and that bills moving through the state legislature and the state’s lawsuit against EMR would be “influential factors” in the city’s decision.

At the City Council meeting earlier this month, Schrum, who has evacuated her home three times due to the fires, said her “level of fear” has decreased since the shredder was paused. When she hears the sound of fire trucks, she said she no longer needs to worry that they’re headed to EMR. 

“We have been waiting four or five years for this, and to have it finally, like, dangled in front of us, it needs to happen,” she said. “The license needs to be revoked permanently.”

A Timeline of Recent Events

A couple of weeks earlier, the county also helped the 65-year-old, who has been living off a fixed income from Social Security disability payments for more than a decade, replace her broken gas furnace with a new, cost-effective, and energy-efficient electric heat pump. It was an upgrade that Moorer would have been hard-pressed to make on her own. Her average monthly income is about $2,600, pooled from Social Security, a small pension from a previous job before her disability stopped her from working, and dog-sitting. She also rents out a room in her house to a family friend. The cost of replacing her old furnace could have topped $10,000.

For years, she had paid repairmen $50 here and there to keep the furnace running, despite being warned about how long those repairs would actually last. “I try to conserve what funds that I do have – I intend to live here for the rest of my life, so I need to be able to have some smart avenues in order to maintain it,” she said. As the cost of property taxes, insurance, and other basic living expenses continues to rise, her budget gets that much tighter.

In November, when Moorer’s furnace went out completely, she layered sweaters and ran space heaters in her den, where she naps with her two dogs, Kimi and Anna Stella, and the ones she dogsits, Izzy and Dozer. “The rest of the house was an icebox,” she said. When it got really cold, she even ran her electric oven just to heat up the house. In January, her electric bill from Puget Sound Energy was over $250. Her usage had skyrocketed, and her bill was more than three times its usual amount.

Despite her financial situation, Moorer wouldn’t have qualified for federal assistance programs aimed at reducing energy bills for low-income households. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) directly pays people’s utility bills, and the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) funds upgrades of old, energy-hogging HVAC systems with newer, cost-efficient models. The income cut-off for those programs is tied to the federal poverty line, which Moorer hovers just above.

Instead, thanks to assistance programs run by King County, where Seattle is located, and funded in part by Washington State, Moorer got the help she needed without having to choose between draining her savings or staying uncomfortably cold the rest of winter. The King County program, called Energize, helps households pay for energy-efficiency upgrades and connects residents to other funding sources, like the county’s housing repair program, to cover weatherization costs. Energize is part of a slew of energy assistance programs funded by the State of Washington’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA) – a statewide carbon cap-and-invest program, which incentivizes high-emissions businesses like fuel suppliers and utility companies to reduce their emissions – with the overarching goal of reducing state-wide carbon emissions by 95 percent by 2050.

The funds have been used to shore up climate change planning, clean energy projects, and other programs that reduce carbon emissions. Household energy consumption accounts for some 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually in the United States. The CCA offers funds to swap out gas heating systems for electric heat pumps to reduce energy consumption and make homes more efficient for low-income residents, addressing both economic and social inequities. 

According to a 2025 report from the state’s Department of Commerce, more than 270,000 low-income households in Washington are considered energy burdened, meaning that they pay more than 6 percent of their monthly income towards electricity bills. In some rural counties, nearly a quarter of the population is energy burdened. In rural Ferry County, in the state’s north east corner,  the number rises to 41 percent— the highest rate in Washington. About 15 percent of the county’s population is Indigenous, and the Colville Indian Reservation makes up a large swath of the county. 

When families and households can’t afford their energy bills, some simply turn off their heating and cooling; others might forgo necessities like food, medicine, or clothing to keep the lights on. Energy burdens are often cyclical. Lower-income households tend to live in homes or apartment buildings with inefficient appliances, walls and ceilings that lack insulation, and windows that let hot or cold air from outside seep in. For Moorer, running inefficient space heaters constantly meant it took even more energy to heat her home to a semi-comfortable temperature, which then cost more at the end of the month.

“We initially came at this from a direct emissions climate perspective,” said Terry Sullivan, King County’s climate and energy program manager. “But then increasingly with the climate justice perspective, [we’re] trying to make sure that homes are [prepared for] extreme temperatures.” The county has mapped urban heat islands, identifying which neighborhoods have more exposure to high temperatures during heatwaves, for example. “We use that as a scoring mechanism for most of our programs, since there’s such a high demand,” Sullivan said. King County is also directing resources to places that need upgrades the most, he added. This includes energy-efficient insulation to withstand cold spells or heat waves in the event the power goes out.

King County includes renters in its weatherization and assistance programs, a group often left out of federal programs if landlords don’t participate. A 2025 survey found that more than two-thirds of renters in the region making less than $50,000 struggled to pay their utility bills over the past year.

In 2024, Washington launched its own version of LIHEAP, the State Home Energy Assistance Program, with a $35 million budget from CCA funds. The income threshold is set at 80 percent of the area median income. That means regions can have different metrics that more closely reflect the local cost of living, said Brian Sarensen, the program manager at the Department of Commerce who oversees the State Home Energy Assistance Program as well as LIHEAP. In Seattle and the surrounding county, the income threshold for a family of four rises to $110,950; in areas with a lower cost of living, like Spokane in Eastern Washington, that number is $78,300. 

“There’s a little piece of the population where you make just enough that you don’t qualify for any [federal] services, but you’re not quite self-sufficient,” Sarensen said. “We want them to spend the money to heat their homes so that they can be safe and healthy, but at the same time, where does that money come from?” 

In its first year, the program has served over 20,000 households with bill assistance and furnace upgrades, and prevented utility disconnections for over 4,000 households. The average household reduced its energy burden by over 50 percent. “After 10 years, we see that a home has saved basically the same amount of money we’ve invested in it,” Sarensen said. 

As energy costs are predicted to rise across the country, energy assistance and weatherization programs will continue to be vital tools that help families afford higher bills and reduce overall energy use. An analysis of census data shows that nationally, 48.5 million households struggled to pay at least one monthly energy bill in 2024. Despite this, the Trump administration has signaled a desire to slash assistance programs such as LIHEAP and WAP that have a proven track record of making energy costs affordable for millions of Americans.

Moorer is already seeing the benefits: In February, a couple of weeks after her heat pump was installed, her electric bill was already $100 lower, and her average daily electricity usage dropped from 45 kilowatt-hours in January to 30 kilowatt-hours in February. The heat pump also provides her with central air conditioning for the first time. During the 2021 heatwave that broiled Seattle with temperatures over 100 degrees, Moorer remembers running a window AC unit all day and night, and it eventually leaked all over the floor of her living room.

As climate change will cause more frequent heatwaves, Washingtonians without air conditioning— nearly half the state’s population, according to federal data— are also at risk of prolonged exposure to heat and a plethora of negative health effects from kidney failure to stroke, and in extreme circumstances, even death. A 2019 report from the state’s Department of Health estimated that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, average temperatures during a “normal” year by midcentury will be hotter than 20th-century records.

In Central Washington, where the weather isn’t as mild as in coastal cities like Seattle, the need is particularly pronounced. “The bills are so damn high right now, in the summer, it’s the extreme heat where you need an AC running 24-7,” says Oskar Zambrano, a Yakima-based community organizer with Washington Conservation Action. 

Over the past few years, the city has had to set up more cooling centers at community centers on 100-degree days for people who don’t have AC. “Like during the pandemic and other times that there has been an urgent need, the funding [for energy assistance] dries up,” he said. “There’s a higher intake of people needing these services than funds available, and as the economy worsens, we can see that happening.”

As the Trump administration targets and surveils undocumented immigrants with increasingly violent tactics, state programs can still provide vital resources to undocumented or mixed-status households. Federal programs require social security numbers and verification of immigration status. In Washington, additional information can be collected to ensure that payments and benefits aren’t duplicated for the same household. “We just have to make sure you’re a resident of Washington State, and that you have an active utility account,” Sarensen said. “Nobody’s going to freeze to death, and nobody’s going to have heatstroke if we can help it and we still have funds available.” 

Even so, in Yakima, where a large Latino community resides, undocumented and mixed-status families are hesitant to put themselves in any sort of spotlight, Zambrano said. “Sometimes, signing up for these programs is in-person,” he said. “We’ve seen a decrease in turnout for our events and activities because people are afraid to be out and about.”

The energy sector’s growing crisis

Historically, Washington state has benefited from low energy prices, thanks to abundant, cheap hydroelectric generation. According to the Energy Information Administration’s most recent data, the average cost per kilowatt hour of energy in the residential sector was 13.33 cents in Washington, compared to a national average of 17.24 cents. But between December 2024 and December 2025, the state’s average price per kilowatt hour had in fact climbed by 12 percent.

The causes of these rising costs, across the nation, are complex, said Elena Krieger, the senior director of research and policy at Just Solutions, an organization focused on equitable climate policy. “In the West, we’re dealing with issues related to wildfires, insurance costs and damages being paid out, and grid hardening investments,” she said. “In the Southeast, they’re dealing with hurricanes, and there are bill increases related to the damage and recovery from those.” Components of the nation’s power grid, for example, are aging and need to be replaced. For example, the Department of Energy estimated in 2023 that 70 percent of transmission lines are nearing the end of their 50 to 80-year lifespans.

Additionally, as the tech industry builds out massive, energy-intensive data centers to fuel the growth of artificial intelligence models, energy consumption is projected to further skyrocket. That will require new, costly infrastructure, if not new power plants as well. If the industry doesn’t shoulder those costs, which could exceed $1 trillion according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, they could be passed on to utility customers writ large.

“We’re also seeing that there are power plants that were going to retire are staying online, because of projected demand growth,” Krieger said. At the federal level, Trump and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claim the plants are necessary for reliability, a decision Krieger says keeps high-emissions and particularly expensive plants online. As costs rise for consumers, those closest to these dirty power plants will also continue to breathe polluted air and suffer the health impacts. As of January, Wright had intervened to block the planned closure of at least five coal plants in Indiana, Colorado, and Michigan, as well as one in Washington.  Research suggests that the move could increase utility customers’ costs — and the administration has announced it will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into financially struggling coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and North Carolina. 

The coal plant in Washington, the last in the region, is set to transition to natural gas in accordance with the Clean Energy Transformation Act, a state law passed in 2019 that bans utilities from providing coal power starting in 2026. In its efforts to keep the plant running, the Department of Energy cited emergency conditions from increased demand. The state’s attorney general fired back, calling the Department of Energy’s order illegal and clumsy; as lawsuits are pending, the state legislature passed a bill that will penalize the plant, owned by a Canadian company called TransAlta, if it continues to burn coal. 

Against this political backdrop, energy efficiency programs serve another dual benefit. “These efficiency measures can bring down household costs at each individual house, and collectively that can reduce peak demand, and reduce the need for peaking power plants and other expensive resources that are used to meet those needs,” Krieger said.

At the local level, advocates like Zambrano are also wary that utilities will use compliance with the Clean Energy Transformation Act as an excuse to pass off the cost of decarbonization to customers. PacifiCorp, which operates one of the three investor-owned utilities in Washington, is required to meet an 80 percent clean-energy goal by 2030, said Julian Santos, a climate and clean energy advocate with Washington Conservation Action.

“We are four years away from the first big milestone,” Santos said. “They have a long way to go.” The company’s implementation plan suggests it is currently below 40 percent clean energy and would need to double its renewable energy sources by the end of 2029. During a public comment period on the company’s clean energy plan, environmental advocates argued that attempting to ramp up major infrastructure upgrades in just a few years could make the process more costly than necessary. Last May, the state’s Utilities and Transportation Commission, which regulates power companies, rejected PacifiCorp’s plan, citing its lack of detail and measurable goals to achieve renewable energy targets.

Further complicating matters, in late February, PacifiCorp announced it will sell its Washington service area, which includes Yakima, to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion. It’s not immediately clear what comes next, Santos said.  “We’re concerned about what that could mean for people in Yakima who are already facing rising rates.”

In a statement, the company said it is “actively engaged” in acquiring additional clean energy sources and does not anticipate service disruptions during the acquisition process. “PacifiCorp is conscious of affordability concerns and will do what it can to mitigate customer cost pressures driven by Washington’s policies,” a spokesperson said

Trump’s Energy Assistance Takedown

After taking office for his second term, President Trump proposed eliminating LIHEAP entirely. In a 2025 budget document, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget called LIHEAP "unnecessary,” and pointed to a government audit from 2010, which found possible evidence of fraud valued at roughly two percent of the program’s budget, in just seven states. The 2025 proposal seeks to instead support low-income individuals through “energy dominance, lower prices, and an America First economic platform.” The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s a move that Trump repeatedly tried to make in his first term, as well. “We’ve managed to overcome it every time,” said Shaylee Stokes, who directs The Energy Project at the Washington State Community Action Partnership. Advocates worked to convince their congressional representatives that the funding was, and still is, vital. Community action agencies work with local clients and contractors to distribute federal energy assistance funding. In Washington, these organizations collectively serve 100,000 households annually.

The White House’s position doesn’t reflect the fact that LIHEAP, in particular, has typically enjoyed broad, bipartisan support from lawmakers as a long-running, cost-effective, successful program. WAP also has a proven track record of keeping people safer in their own homes when their bills are paid, and of reducing costs and energy-related climate emissions. For every dollar spent on WAP, which has operated since the Ford administration, communities receive numerous health and safety benefits. That could include better health outcomes from reduced exposure to heat and indoor air pollution as windows are sealed up, as well as the removal of mold and mildew when homes are weatherized.

Over the past decade, LIHEAP has typically received over $3 billion annually. Under the Biden administration, LIHEAP received major funding boosts, jumping to $8 billion in 2021. WAP received an additional $3.5 billion dollars as well. In February, Trump signed off on a spending bill renewing the program with a $4 billion budget, a $20 million increase from the previous year.

However, federal programs have never met the true need. According to a 2021 report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 16 states have their own state-funded bill assistance and weatherization programs. These programs allow states to expand the benefits of weatherization and bill assistance to more residents.

RMI, an energy and climate policy think tank, estimates that it would take $9.3 billion in annual assistance to end energy poverty and ensure that households never pay more than 4 percent of their income on energy bills — less than 0.25 percent of the federal government’s spending in 2024.

Stokes said that the administration’s rhetoric is far from the reality that community action agencies see every day. Money from LIHEAP and other assistance programs runs out quickly because of the high level of need, she said. “We (did) extra advocacy last year, and we’re expecting to have to do that every year of the Trump administration to make sure that our legislators are hearing about how important (this funding) is,” she said. Ultimately, Stokes said she doesn’t expect the Trump administration to fund LIHEAP in the 2027 budget without pressure.

Without federal funds, the state would fall further short of meeting the full needs of residents facing energy burdens, at an estimated annual cost of $275,000,000 as of May 2025. Washington received $55 million in federal LIHEAP funds in the current fiscal year. Meanwhile, the state is facing its own budget crisis and may need to cut billions of dollars in spending over the next few years.

The Trump administration also attempted to freeze or terminate energy-efficiency grants announced in Biden’s signature bills, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Sullivan, King County’s climate and energy programs manager, said that departments are still waiting to see if the programs for home energy retrofits and customer rebates for energy-efficiency appliances will be funded at about $80 million each.

The government shutdown in 2025, along with mass layoffs of federal employees, created uncertainty about the status of funds that local programs were banking on. “It created a lot of chaos and uncertainty in our networks,” Stokes said. “You would hear one thing at 10 AM and the exact opposite at 4 PM.” The entire LIHEAP staff was fired in April 2025; at least one staff member was rehired when no one else in the government knew how to disburse the correct amount of remaining funds already appropriated to states.

“It’s a wreck. The loss of institutional knowledge and the increase in administrative burden due to these shake ups has not made things more efficient or saved anybody money,” Stokes said. Instead, local program administrators have had to spend more of their own time and resources to fight budget cuts and keep programs running, and provide vital assistance to families. After the 2025 shutdown ended, Washington received 90 percent of its annual LIHEAP funding, said Jeff DeLuca, the executive director of Washington State Community Action Partnership.

Moorer’s Peace of Mind

Energy assistance programs are also vital because they enable lower-income households to access resources and benefits that would otherwise be concentrated at the top. A 2024 study found that between 2006 and 2021, Americans collectively received over $47 billion in tax credits for energy-efficiency and clean energy upgrades, including rooftop solar, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. About 60 percent of those benefits went to households in the top 20 percent of income.

“This is sort of what you see with capitalism in general — the rich get richer, and that happens in the energy system, too,” said Justin Schott, the director of the Energy Equity Project. He pointed to a case study in the Detroit area, which found that LED lightbulbs, a simple efficiency upgrade, were harder to come by at stores in lower-income neighborhoods. Switching to these bulbs from incandescent bulbs cuts energy usage by 90 percent, but requires an upfront investment.

Larger, systemic inequities are baked into the system, down to the bills that consumers receive. “Everybody pays the same surcharge per kilowatt hour,” Schott said. That means, effectively, energy inefficient households are penalized for using more energy. If those households are energy burdened, that also means they can’t afford thousands of dollars in upfront investments to reap the benefits of a tax credit. “The fact is, low-income households have been subsidizing the wealthy’s access to energy efficiency and clean energy for a very long time.”

Moorer’s high bills from Puget Sound Energy, for example, were affected by a 12 percent rate hike that the utility implemented in January. The utility will use most of the new revenue for clean energy and reliability investments, according to filings with the state’s Utility and Transportation Committee. About one percent of the increased revenue will be diverted to bill assistance programs. Because Moorer used so much extra energy to run space heaters when her furnace broke, she’s paying more into those investments than a household that could have afforded to fix the problem immediately. 

Krieger of Just Solutions says the disparity is akin to regressive tax, like a sales tax. “(Low-income households) pay much more of their income, compared to wealthier households, because their incomes are lower and because they often don’t have access to efficiency measures that would enable them to use less energy for the same set of services.”

A 2024 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that nationally, communities of color that would have benefited the most from lower energy bills were the least likely to use heat pumps. Further, a 2025 study from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that nearly 1 in 5 homes that qualify for weatherization assistance are deferred from the program because significant, costly repairs are needed first. That could include replacing leaking roofs, damaged floorboards, or hazardous, outdated electrical panels.

At the state legislature this year, advocates successfully pushed for legislation to enact a dedicated fund for bill assistance. (The bill, passed on March 12, still needs to be signed by the governor.) “One of our goals is that a state-run program will provide sustained and predictable assistance, not just one-time bill credits,” said Aqsa Mengal, the climate and clean energy policy lead at Front and Centered, an environmental justice advocacy group. It could also reduce burdensome applications for people who need help, for example, allowing Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program recipients to automatically enroll, and the agencies that serve them, by creating one umbrella of funding instead of a patchwork of grants and programs, she said. 

“This has been a multi-year effort on behalf of energy and low-income advocates,” Mengal said. “We are hopeful that the governor will sign the bill.” 

While Washington already mandates that electric utility companies provide bill assistance programs to low-income households, the state Department of Commerce’s 2025 report found that participation rates varied widely. Across Washington’s 39 counties, 32 had enrollment rates below 25 percent. The report also found that nearly all programs failed to align with the state’s mandate, as different electric utilities, some investor-owned, some consumer-owned, doled out different amounts of assistance to households in similar financial situations. Some utilities, for example, required proof of a disability or senior status, in addition to income.

In Yakima, Santos said that means many residents who need assistance fall by the wayside. Utilities are required to provide assistance to customers who meet the state’s definition of low-income, at 80 percent of the area median income. The Department of Commerce estimates nearly 12,000 low-income households in Yakima County are energy burdened, yet PacifiCorp reported providing bill assistance to just over 7,500 customers in the 2025 fiscal year across its service area, which includes portions of two other counties. 

This is despite the state requiring utilities to develop “customer benefit indicators” that track the needs of vulnerable communities in their service area. “What we want now is to see those numbers move in the right direction, to set goals to reduce energy burdens and improve weatherization,” Santos said. “If they just continue tracking these numbers, that’s not going to accomplish anything.” In a statement, the company said that it “follows all state requirements to provide assistance to customers who need it.” The company also provided internal data showing that as of March 2026, it had enrolled more than 9,500 customers in bill assistance. 

In the meantime, advocates are also uneasy that the Climate Commitment Act’s funds could be siphoned off to address other affordability issues. At the start of the legislative session, Gov. Bob Ferguson proposed using $569 million from Climate Commitment Act revenue to maintain the state’s working families’ tax credit. The governor’s proposal was not included in the final budget that passed, according to the Washington State Budget and Policy Center. For now, that marks another victory for environmental justice advocates. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s a slippery slope, [the tax credit] isn’t directly related to climate mitigation by any means,” Stokes said. “There are plenty of initiatives that the CCA can fund that are approaching environmental justice and energy equity.”

In Renton, once the dust settles from all the contractors working on her house, Moorer looks forward to finally getting rid of the bulky space heaters and the AC window unit in her living room. A stain on her carpet from the AC leak will serve as a reminder of how uncomfortable her house could get before the county installed her new heat pump. But she’s thinking of fixing that up on her own.  “Now I’m sitting nice and cozy, not all bundled up,” she said. “The peace of mind that I get, I can’t thank [the county] enough.

***

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

I woke up on Sunday, September 29, 2024, with a headache that was unusual for me, but I took Tylenol and pushed through. It was a church Sunday, and I had plans for my daughter, Nicole Green, and my grandson to join me at my church, an hour away.

After the service, during the long drive back home, my daughter received an alert on her phone around 11:30 a.m. about a fire nearby. We mistakenly thought the risk was in our town of Covington, so we took Exit 82 in Conyers. Little did we know that this was where toxic flames ignited that morning. 

We drove right through a danger zone.  

A few months before my headache started, BioLab, a plant in Conyers known for manufacturing pool and spa water chemicals, established an around-the-clock fire watch protocol in response to strong odors detected in on-site storage. According to a May 2025 investigation by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), the so-called permanent fire watch was responsible for “identifying and managing hazards, detecting early signs of product decomposition or fire hazards, notifying site leadership of any observed leaks or other water intrusions, and contacting the third-party sprinkler company if a sprinkler head was leaking.”  

However, the state and BioLab then began preparing for a different kind of emergency. Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 26, 2024, around 300 miles away in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, the deadliest storm in the contiguous U.S. since Katrina. BioLab closed down following our governor’s state of emergency declaration in preparation for the hurricane. The fire watch continued to work, using buckets to capture rainwater from the leaking roof, as approximately 10 inches of rain descended on Conyers between Sept. 26 and 27. As Helene continued north into Appalachia, she left a breeze that lingered after the rain stopped. But a new disturbance would soon descend upon us. 

At about 5 a.m. on Sept. 29, 2024, a member of the fire watch team at BioLab heard a loud popping sound and initially believed it to be the nearby ice machine. Upon investigation, the employee found that some chemicals had gotten wet, which likely caused the popping noise. 

The BioLab plant stored trichloroisocyanuric acid and sodium dichloroisocyanurate, two chlorine-based disinfectants. When these chemicals come into contact with water, they produce nitrogen trichloride, or in simpler terms, “an explosion hazard,” according to the CSB investigation. In the month of the fire, BioLab’s inventory had grown to more than double what the company told local officials it would store, with about 13.9 million pounds of chemicals. The company stored these chemicals in “super sacks,” thousands of pounds stacked on top of one another, some of which were stored outside the plant’s firewall. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) previously fined BioLab $61,473 in April 2024 for improperly storing the chemicals that triggered the fire.

Pollution from the BioLab Fire

The following map visualizes the dispersion of chemical pollution following the BioLab fire over several days following the incident, coupled with annual household income data for the surrounding affected areas.

By approximately 5:10 a.m., a member of the fire watch called 911 as smoke began to fill the warehouse. News reports later confirmed that on this initial 911 call, the employee mentioned a sprinkler head had burst inside the facility. Around 6 a.m., local emergency services issued shelter-in-place and evacuation orders, going door-to-door to neighbors adjacent to the warehouse. Hours later, a second, more intense fire broke out, sending plumes of black and multicolored smoke into the air, as “small explosions” shot chemicals out of the building. Rockdale County Fire Rescue personnel said it sounded like the gun range. The fire destroyed the warehouse, trapping chemicals that personnel were unable to remove ahead of the second fire.  

At the time, I lived nine miles from the BioLab plant; my daughter and grandson were 11 miles away. I kept a close eye on 11Alive News and reassured my roommate and her visiting granddaughter that it was safe to be outside in the post-hurricane breeze. However, local officials had evacuated about 17,000 people and implemented a shelter-in-place advisory for the metro Atlanta area as the toxic smoke moved through. 

The day after the fire, I drove my roommate’s granddaughter to the Atlanta bus terminal to return home to celebrate her mother's birthday. To ensure everything went smoothly, I decided to leave 30 minutes earlier than planned. On the drive, we encountered a roadblock at Exit 84 to I-20, forcing us to take a detour instead of taking the main highway through Conyers. We navigated to Highway 155 North and drove through what I assumed to be thick fog, drastically limiting visibility to about five feet.

Returning from the bus terminal, I started coughing, my eyes burned, and the headache I had hoped would go away returned with a vengeance. Later that evening, I experienced stomach cramps, too. I informed my roommate of my intent to visit urgent care if my symptoms didn't improve by morning. While heading to bed, I noticed a slight chlorine smell in the house, which was puzzling since I hadn’t done any cleaning.

By Oct. 1, my headache had worsened, and a powerful bleach odor permeated the entire house. My eyes burned intensely, my cough worsened, and my chest felt constricted. At this point, I was not just concerned; I was furious. 

That same day, around 10:30 a.m., I visited the urgent care center. Without health insurance, I initially managed all my doctor’s visits out of pocket. There, the doctor administered a nebulizer respiratory treatment and a steroid injection. She prescribed a regimen: 10 mg steroids for a week, 800 mg ibuprofen three times a day for five days, eye irritation relief drops, an albuterol inhaler, medication for a sinus infection, and antibiotics.

As I glanced at the material my doctor handed to me, the phrase “Today’s Diagnosis Includes” caught my eye. Along with the other diagnoses, it stated, “Exposure to biological agent.” I had suspected as much, but seeing it in writing crystallized the reality of the situation. Reading my diagnosis stirred a whirlwind of emotions—fear, anxiety, and yes, anger. Standing outside the building, my heart racing. I took a moment to collect myself, got into my car, and, while driving, allowed myself to feel what needed to be felt. I cried. 

Although I considered leaving the area temporarily, I didn’t have the funds for a hotel stay. However, I had a Kairos prison ministry weekend scheduled for Oct. 3 in Hartwell, Georgia, about 80 miles away. The hotel was taken care of, and I was determined to attend. I hoped that this would provide me with some much-needed relief, even if I couldn’t be much help; at least I could breathe some fresh air. 

I checked into a hotel, borrowing my daughter’s nebulizing machine for her asthma to assist with my breathing. 

On Oct. 6, around 7 p.m., I returned home and noticed a resurgence of symptoms—chest pain, coughing, burning eyes, a persistent headache, and now itching. I made myself a bowl of soup and settled on the sofa with my late mom’s blanket for comfort, but I started itching. I chose to go to bed early, but the itching continued throughout the night. 

Within the next 48 hours, I realized that a residue had settled on the sofa, bed, walls, and floors. I immediately got to work, thoroughly cleaning and dusting all surfaces and washing all exposed linens, comforters, towels, and clothes—an effort that took up most of my day. I saw dead bugs in the windowsill, which made me think to collect as much evidence as possible. I collected the dead bugs and air conditioning filters. I took pictures of my garden and filmed a short video.

After cleaning the house, I felt extremely weak and struggled to catch my breath during basic tasks like showering and eating. For the next five days, using the remaining medications I had been prescribed, I tried to endure without going back to the doctor. I had little to no appetite and only ate enough to take my extra medications.

On the morning of Oct. 11, 2024, I returned to urgent care, where the doctor provided me with two more nebulizer treatments and administered another steroid shot. She prescribed a higher dose of steroids to take home, an additional inhaler, and more nebulizer medications. The doctor also recommended that I purchase a nebulizer machine and mentioned that we would take an X-ray of my lungs at my next appointment. I invested in an air purifier, though in hindsight, I should have gone straight to the ER, but I was worried about my finances and couldn’t fathom the cost of that hospital bill.  

Like many people, I faced my share of challenges in life. Last year, I relocated to Covington in January, had a car accident in February, and lost my mom in April, all while navigating a divorce. Coupled with my emerging health issues, it was all a lot to handle. 

Meanwhile, I found a shared community among those who were also trying to catch their breath, quite literally, in the wake of the BioLab catastrophe. I’ve interviewed at least nine people and attended multiple related community meetings to capture what we learned and lost in the shadow of that plume that erupted in our backyards just over a year ago.

“We want BioLab shut down…” 

In the days and weeks following the BioLab fire, many of us in the surrounding area sought answers. I joined a Rockdale County Resident Facebook page and came across a recording of the state House and Senate Rockdale County legislative delegation meeting held on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024.

The Rockdale County Soil and Water Conservation District supervisor, Kenny Johnson, insisted that all Rockdale County residents undergo blood testing and that Georgia’s congressional representatives pursue a federal criminal investigation into BioLab. Soon after his remarks, Johnson stepped out into the hallway and collapsed. The Associated Press reported that Rep. Viola Davis (D-Stone Mountain) administered CPR until medical officials rushed Johnson to Grady Memorial Hospital, where he died later that day. 

Walter Bannister, a resident of Conyers and founder of The Citizens of Rockdale, spoke at the same meeting just before Johnson delivered his remarks. Citing his disaster recovery experience with the defense coordinating element for FEMA groups 2 and 3, he said he believed the governor should have issued a state of emergency. 

“We want BioLab shut down and moved out of Rockdale County,” he added, drawing applause from attendees.

Last year wasn't the first time the BioLab warehouse caught fire; it’s happened at least three times in the last two decades. BioLab’s lawyers continue to battle lawsuits, including one on behalf of Rockdale County and a class-action lawsuit, both of which are still in litigation. In a Sept. 2025 ruling, a federal judge dismissed parts of Rockdale County’s lawsuit seeking reimbursement for public services such as firefighters and for monitoring air and water quality, and dismissed claims of violating the Clean Air Act without prejudice, meaning the state can refile those in another case. In the class-action suit, a federal judge agreed with BioLab’s motion to dismiss allegations of “strict liability” for any and all damages arising from storing potentially hazardous chemicals. The Georgia Supreme Court will weigh in on the legal grounds of the medical monitoring fund. The class-action suit seeks to compensate members for treatment and screenings “necessitated by their exposure to toxic chemicals.” In May 2025, BioLab announced it had completed remediation of the Conyers facility and wouldn’t restart its operations there.

The way forward wasn’t as simple for the rest of us. 

Bannister lives a few miles from BioLab, or “ground zero,” as he calls it. For nearly three weeks following the fire, nightly shelter-in-place warnings continued for the communities in a two-mile radius of the plant. He likened the smoke that engulfed the community to the 1980 horror film “The Fog.” The silence and stillness were particularly eerie. The birds and the insects that normally chirped or stung were gone. He told me the grille of his 2022 Toyota Tundra had corroded, making the car appear to be decades old. The oak trees in his yard and vegetables in the garden looked like they’d been through a fiercely cold winter. The trees were green one day and dead the next, he said.

His initial symptoms were similar to those of others I’ve interviewed, watery eyes and frustration with the persistent smell of chlorine. He and his wife bought bottled water to wash their faces after being outside. “Every time you’d go outside, your skin would literally burn,” he told me over the phone in October. “It almost [felt] like somebody putting a butane torch to your face—you can actually feel the heat coming from it.”  

Every time you’d go outside, your skin would literally burn,” he told me over the phone in October. “It almost [felt] like somebody putting a butane torch to your face—you can actually feel the heat coming from it."

Bannister shut the HVAC off, taped the windows, and sent his family to Ocala, Florida, to get away from the “chemical, acid smoke smell” that still seeped into the house. His wife returned when yet another storm, Hurricane Milton, was spinning toward Florida. But the Bannisters’ kids stayed behind. “The kids are like, ‘We know the hurricane is only going to be like a day, and it’s going to knock down some trees, and it’s going [to] rain…but y’all [are] fighting invisible wounds up there—we’re not going back up there.’” Walter was proud that they didn’t want to put themselves in harm’s way. 

I could relate to Bannister’s desire to keep his children safe. With my breathing trouble, I’ve been empathizing with my daughter, Nicole, who’s dealt with asthma symptoms for years. Feeling a tightness and pain in your chest because your airways are inflamed is something you can’t fully understand unless you experience it.

Nicole worked retail in Conyers, about four miles from BioLab. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, she wanted to figure out what she needed to do to feel better—she needed me, her mama, as she later told me. But, she had to return to work in the days following the fire, so she brought her nebulizer with her to try to manage the increasing asthma attacks. “The smell was in the clothes, and that did nothing but make my asthma worse,” she said. 

She stopped going into work for about four days to find relief. When she returned with a doctor’s note, management let her go. My daughter has two children, then ages 11 and 21, and she needed to support them. She didn’t have her own car, so she rented vehicles to pick up groceries for Instacart. More than a year after the fire, she says her asthma still feels worse than it did before the BioLab fire.   

“I just feel like everyone was treated unfair[ly] healthwise, whether you got respiratory problems before and it worsened, or you got respiratory problems when it happened,” she said. “Where’s the empathy, where’s the care?"

Chemical Incidents in the Southeast United States

The following map depicts chemical explosions, fires, and leaks that have occured between 2021-2025. Additional details are available for each individual incident.

Data is provided by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters.
 

The Opposite Effect

After several months of visiting urgent care, I mentioned to my doctor that I would get sick every time I went out to pick up groceries, shop for clothes, or handle other errands. She told me, "I need you to stop going out." I kept repeating her words to myself on the way home, feeling helpless. At that point, the only option I saw was to leave the area entirely.

While searching for housing in neighboring counties, my symptoms worsened just before Christmas—I thought I might die. I had to look for a house, pack mine up, then unpack a whole house, all while I was deathly sick. I felt so weak I couldn't even sit up long enough to make a bowl of soup. After a trip to urgent care and taking more medication, I would start feeling better after about a week, only to experience weakness, exhaustion, stomach pain, and difficulty breathing again. I purchased a health care plan at the beginning of this year, which I could barely afford. If Congress lets the Affordable Care Act subsidies lapse, I’ll be uninsured again. Lately, I’ve been seeing a pulmonologist—it’s been a relentless cycle of doctor's appointments, X-rays, CT scans, and, most recently, an MRI.

I’m trying to focus on the bright spots. 

There are people like Cheryl Garcia of Conyers, who was also preparing to go to church the Sunday of the fire, but paused when she saw news reports. She had a metallic taste in her mouth, smelled chlorine in her home, and her husband complained that his eyes, throat, and nose were burning, and his chest felt tight after being outside. Garcia, who is a retired nurse practitioner, developed vocal cord dysphonia and underwent eight weeks of speech therapy twice a week. She and her husband had all the vents cleaned, the crawl space in the basement encapsulated, and their roof replaced. And they pray—a lot. She’s also fighting for accountability from local officials and industry.

“I have pretty much forced myself onto the local emergency planning committee, which was not active before BioLab, and I made a lot of noise about that,” she said. “They are now meeting monthly. And as a citizen, I am there every month to hold them accountable, and hopefully that will prevent something like this from happening again.” 

There is a disaster waiting to happen in every community on the margins, from the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to the petrochemical plant explosion in Roseland, Louisiana, to the ammunition factory explosion in Tennessee, to the recent ammonia leak near Yazoo City, Mississippi, where a plume of yellow smoke spread through the air. 

It's easy to become isolated—many of us were literally encouraged to stay home and isolate. In many ways, we are still emerging from the shadow of that plume.

However, it is having the opposite effect, and I hope communities are becoming aware of how much we need each other. It’s part of why, this September, almost a year to date from the fire, I completed Henry County’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training to learn disaster response skills, search and rescue techniques, and disaster medical operations. Next, I’ll learn CPR. In the event of the next emergency, I will not merely seek assistance from others but serve as a proactive resource to aid my community.

***

Alfonso Figueroa and Anel Juarez drove 100 miles from their cobalt-blue manufactured home in Winchester Heights, Arizona, to a hospital in Tucson, where Anel’s OB-GYN had scheduled an appointment to induce her labor.

Countless times, Alfonso made the two-hour drive with his wife for prenatal care. But on this ride, Anel, who was having contractions, felt every pothole on the dirt roads of her community. At least it was under 100 degrees that day.

Just after midnight on September 4, 36-year-old Anel gave birth to their third child, Alaia Isabela. The next day, the couple drove their newborn home, navigating those bumpy roads. Anel supported her baby’s head in the car seat.

“I feel like she gets shaken up a lot because of the movement of the car, because of the road,” Anel said in Spanish.

Alfonso and Anel moved to Winchester Heights from Mexico 16 years ago. Before that, he worked a back-breaking job at a factory for next to nothing. Working on a farm in the U.S. allows Alfonso, 38, to earn more in a couple of days than he did in a week back in Mexico, while Anel stays home with the kids.

He loves his job and is currently caring for 108,000 pistachio trees near Wilcox. When Alfonso returns home to Winchester Heights and looks around, he sees his community in disrepair: “My place back in Oaxaca seemed better than here. I thought this was an abandoned town,” he said in Spanish.

Rows of manufactured homes and trailers, some more sophisticated than others, line the six parallel streets that form Winchester Heights. The dirt roads connect to a soccer field. Nearby, a tienda sells beer and snacks, and roses bloom outside the community center and a small playground. 

For most residents, Spanish is their mother tongue. Instead of Winchester Heights, some call it Perras Flacas, or Skinny Dogs, a nickname for the community's many stray dogs, including pit bulls, said Alfonso, who won’t let his older children, Ashley, 9, and Alfonso (Jr.), 12, play far from home. 

Alfonso and Anel have worked hard to create a home, investing time and money to improve it for their growing family. Their house has a well-kept lawn and fruit trees form a neat line along the front fence. Inside, they hang out on spotless leather couches in front of a large flat-screen TV. 

No matter how much they invest in their home, they alone can’t change the community’s lack of infrastructure. Winchester Heights—a tiny dot on the map of southern Arizona— is a colonia, roughly translated as “neighborhood” in Spanish. It’s home to several hundred people living about 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of its residents are farmworkers on nearby pistachio and tomato farms. Some have lived here for decades with their families, while others are temporary workers. 

There are at least 2,000 colonias dusted along the southwestern border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, many of them unincorporated like Winchester Heights.

Most of these communities were established by workers who came into the U.S. during waves of labor migration. Families settled close to the industries where they were employed, sometimes in mountain canyons or in the middle of a desert. Today, around 1 million residents, most of them with Mexican roots, call colonias home.

Climate Risks Affecting Colonias in Southern Arizona 

In the eyes of the U.S. government, when a community is certified as a colonia, it has significant needs— little to no access to potable water and wastewater services, and substandard housing and poor infrastructure. Additionally, "regions with colonias have poverty rates 3 to 9 percentage points higher than other border regions," according to a 2024 federal government report. Getting resources and infrastructure improvements to colonias has always been challenging, and it is getting more difficult now with cuts across the government agencies that fund them. 

Nearly 60% of colonias in the country are at risk of losing their status and funding in the next few years, according to a 2024 report on rural development in colonias by the United States Government Accountability Office. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s outdated rules, the metropolitan statistical areas that colonias belong to cannot exceed 1 million people. Colonias in the Tucson metropolitan statistical area crossed this threshold in 2014.

In July 2025, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales introduced a bipartisan bill, aiming to protect colonias’ funding by increasing the maximum for the metropolitan statistical areas surrounding colonias from 1 million to 2 million people. The bill, the Ensuring Continued Access to Funding for Colonias Act (H.R. 4498), sits in the House Committee on Financial Services, awaiting further action.

Due to their geographical location, colonias are particularly vulnerable to climate change, with extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and flooding threatening their residents. And federal funding supports repairs to water systems, infrastructure upgrades, and housing. The combination of inadequate water access and poor infrastructure makes people sicker. In Arizona, most of its 58 colonias are in medically underserved areas, where the ratio of population-to-primary care physicians is greater than 5,000 to 1.

Residents of colonias are among the most vulnerable populations in our country, authors of the 2024 GAO report found.

The Margin and Arizona Luminaria visited eight colonias in Arizona, including some that lost their designation. Many of these communities rely on septic tanks or sewage lagoons and receive water from communal wells. Those outside of the well system store water in cisterns or tanks, which exposes it to contaminants. Many residents don’t believe the tap water is safe to drink, so they mostly use it for dishes and bathing. Interviews with 48 residents, local and state officials, nonprofits, researchers, and healthcare providers revealed that all are concerned that compounded stressors to which residents of colonias are exposed are leaving them in harm’s way.

A Legacy of Impermanence  

Arizona’s colonias first emerged in the late 19th century, following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which created a labor shortage in railroad construction and slowed mining and agriculture. To adapt, companies sought cheap labor from Mexico. Recruited Mexican workers settled in worker camps along the border. Some of these camps, including places like Clifton, two hours north of Winchester Heights, remain colonias today.

One reason these informal settlements endure is the state’s land-use policies. In the 20th century, especially the 1990s, Arizona saw a boom in “wildcat subdivisions,” where developers split large parcels into smaller lots without guaranteeing water access or other essential services. Angela Donelson, co-author of the book “Colonias in Arizona and New Mexico,” has spent part of her city planning career studying colonias and trying to improve conditions in poor rural communities.

“There's roads that are impassable. There's irregular lots, irregular streets, probably issues with electrical connections,” Donelson said. Those irregular homesteading and uneven development patterns are a signature of many wildcat subdivisions, and, in turn, colonias in Arizona.

Since the 1990s, the federal government has taken strides to improve living conditions in colonias. The 1990 Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act established a designated set-aside Community Development Block Grants from HUD and mandated the four states—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—to spend up to 10% of their community development funds on projects that benefited colonias. In 1997, Congress made the colonia set-aside funding permanent.

This money is competitive, and HUD allocates it to state agencies annually. In the latest funding cycle, according to the data from the Arizona Department of Housing—the agency administering the funds—the state received just over $2 million to spend on housing and water infrastructure improvement in four counties with colonias.  One of these counties was Cochise, which was awarded $119,372 for housing rehabilitation in up to five colonias, including Winchester Heights.

A Glimpse into Neighboring Colonias

Explore the following colonias to hear from residents and view images from each area.

“It’s never enough,” said Christine McLachlan, the director of Development Services in Cochise County. “Any money we could possibly get would instantly be absorbed. The need is great.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) also has targeted funding for colonias through rural development grants and loan programs for water, wastewater, and housing improvements. And colonias are eligible for the funding for “disadvantaged communities” under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Still, without the designated set-aside grants, it will be even harder for colonias to secure the funding needed to improve their living conditions. Colonias will have to compete against a much bigger pool of communities in need. 

“We have a lot of need, but so do other counties, and so it's tough,” McLachlan said.

For the amenities—or ad hoc solutions—colonias do have, residents largely have themselves to thank. In Winchester Heights, residents pulled wild mesquite trees through the dirt, carving out their own streets. In the case of fires, residents are often their own first responders. Alfonso Figueroa shared that he once had to bring a water truck from work to help put out a fire, as there are no fire hydrants in his colonia. Instead, neighbors run to help each other with their own hoses or buckets of water.

Hydrants aren’t the only thing Winchester Heights lacks. Stormwater drainage, streetlights, public access to water and sewer infrastructure, trash removal, health care and schools are nonexistent. Alfonso and Anel’s kids go to a small elementary school 20 minutes away. This unincorporated colonia has no formal governance structure, leaving residents to seek resources and funding on their own with little to no outside support. Coupled with working and raising families, making time to pursue those resources is an unrealistic expectation.

“We don’t know anything,” Alfonso Figueroa said about the funding options. “It makes me sad, because even though there are funds to help the community move forward, nothing gets done.”

This is not only Winchester Heights’ issue. Olga Morales-Pate, the CEO of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP), said there’s one common denominator in a lot of colonias: They're managed and operated by volunteers. 

“Most of them are small in size. They lack the financial capacity to afford a paid workforce… You don't have the staff with the right level of sophistication, the right level of training to navigate the regulatory requirements, the funding requirements,” she said. 

The lack of capacity translates into the lack of progress on the ground. In 2015, RCAP, a national network of nonprofits that work to improve living conditions and access to funding in colonias and other rural communities, published a report on the water and wastewater infrastructure needs in colonias. RCAP found that a third, or 604 colonias, housing over 134,000 residents, lacked adequate access to potable water and wastewater management. The 2021-2022 follow-up report showed that conditions in 63 colonias had deteriorated.

“ Having water in Arizona is kind of [a] privilege, but the quality may be terrible,” said Adriana Zuniga-Teran, an associate professor at the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona. Connecting colonias to a public water supply can be prohibitively expensive or logistically impossible due to their remoteness.   

“The horizontal infrastructure, the underground infrastructure–the water and the wastewater–will basically determine a community's ability to build the housing, the medical facilities, the school systems, the grocery stores–everything that makes a community sustainable,” said RCAP’s Morales-Pate. “And that is the one thing that is lacking in our communities.”

Colonias’ Capacity Crisis 

Set in a breathtaking canyon and cut in two by the San Francisco River, Clifton was founded in 1873 after copper ore was discovered in the area. The town is approximately 5 miles away from the Morenci mine, the largest copper producer in the U.S. The historic downtown is adorned with local shops, a museum, an old jail, and a century-old county courthouse. Yet, many of the houses that line Clifton’s canyon roads are crumbling. Paint peels off walls, windows are broken or covered with foil to reflect heat, and some people reside in other people’s backyards. 

Less than half a century ago, Clifton was thriving. Here, in Greenlee County, the residents are whiter and older than those in the Cochise County colonias, and many used to work in the mines. It had schools, an auto shop, and department stores, including a J.C. Penney. Frank Monjaras, 72, used to roam the outdoors as a teenager after his father had taught him desert survival skills and how to shoot a .22-caliber rifle. “My days were spent at the river, running around, riding a bike all day long,” said Monjaras. “I would go out, grab my rifle, box of the .22 [caliber] shells, a blanket, two canteens, can of soup, and hit the mountains up around here, what they call Clifton Peak, Mulligan's Peak, and upriver. I'd be gone all weekend,” reminisced Monjaras

Today in Clifton, hundreds of older residents depend on free meals at the senior center and food pantries. Carolina Cortez, a community health worker with Southeast Arizona Health Education Center (SEAHEC) distributed goods at a food drive in Clifton in September 2025. She rose with the sun to make an hour-long drive, and when she arrived 15 minutes before opening, a line of cars was already waiting. A little over two hours after the opening, the pantry ran out of food. That day, they were able to provide groceries to 108 people, and turned away 32 vehicles. Many of the seniors who come to the food drives retired from the mines.

Monjaras was in his 30s in 1983, when everything changed. That July, the Morenci miners began a year-long strike against the owner, Phelps Dodge Corporation, demanding fair wages. Eventually, they were defeated, and many lost their jobs. In October that same year, the “Great Flood” devastated Clifton, with the San Francisco River rushing through its streets, covering roughly 90,000 cubic feet per second. Following the storm, Frank and his wife Margaret resettled to their house in North Clifton, where they live now.

Over four decades later, Clifton never fully recovered. Businesses left, schools and stores closed, roads cracked, and the houses aged with their owners. Unlike other colonias, Clifton has a government, yet the colonia still doesn't have the capacity to go after competitive grants, a town administrator told The Margin and Arizona Luminaria.

The housing conditions in Clifton upset the Monjaras family, but they don’t surprise them. Their own home needs a paint job and new siding, but they can’t afford it. “It's the money, you know,” Monjaras said. “My wife gets Social Security. I get Social Security. We have to pay our bills, food, you know—take care of ourselves, and what we have left has to stretch out till the next monthly payment.”

Besides, Frank can’t do much fixing on his own. Ten years ago, he got a bad knee infection. As a veteran, the nearest Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center is roughly 41 miles away in Safford. After three years of going back and forth, he developed gangrene. Ultimately, he had to go to Tucson, about 170 miles away, for an amputation. 

Early one afternoon this September, the Monjaras sat in their living room, Margaret, 73, on the couch next to a basket of black and red yarn—the Morenci school colors. A few feet away, Frank engaged in conversation from his wheelchair. They stayed close to their swamp cooler, an energy-efficient cooling unit that infuses moisture into the air. The cooler blew, but didn’t do much else.

“Swamp coolers don't work very well during the summertime. When it's hot, it is hot, and my house will get really hot,” Margaret Monjaras said. Steady air conditioning on a fixed income is a luxury for the Monjaras, but on some days it’s the only way to survive the heat, which reached 111 degrees in mid-August, 2025. “So, we try to do the best we can. In our bedrooms, we have little window air conditioners, which are great. We close the door, turn that on, and we’re nice and cool,” Frank Monjaras added.

The southern border region, where all of Arizona’s colonias are, has more consecutive days with temperatures above 90 degrees than the rest of the country.  Being able to stay cool is a matter of survival. “You're choosing between somewhere this money could go and cooling your space. Which, depending on the time of year, may be a life and death situation,” said Nathan Lothrop, associate director of the Building Resilience, Innovation, Sustainability, and Assistance Center for the Environment and an assistant research professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona.

Heat-related deaths in Arizona have increased by 350% from 2020 to 2024. According to state data, 990 people died of heat in 2023. In the first nine months of 2024, 742 people died from heat-related causes, according to the Arizona Public Health Association's resident epidemiologist, Allan Williams.

On July 20, 2023, a farmworker in his mid-20s and father of two from Yuma County collapsed in the field in the morning, and died before 10 a.m. during the 11 days of temperatures at and above 110 degrees. “No one should be dying, but the fact that someone died at 8:00 a.m. from heatstroke, and who was a young man, it doesn't fit the stereotypes of who is being impacted by heat in the past,” said SEAHEC’s executive director Brenda Sánchez. 

Heat is exacerbating the multidecade drought in the American Southwest known as the “megadrought.” It is depleting rivers, groundwater, and aquifers, thus further compromising water availability and quality for all, but particularly for those relying on water wells, like the residents in Arizona’s colonias and other remote rural communities.

“Even if someone had a heatstroke, if someone was dehydrated… they didn't miss work. They went to work sick because they had to go to work,” said Sánchez. “They don't have sick time; they need to be able to put food on their table. I don't like to use the word ‘resilience’ because I don't think it's resilience. It's life or death for them to be able to, to just survive,” she said.   

When seasonal monsoons or heavy rains come, rain pounds the baked desert ground. Water remains on the surface instead of being absorbed, causing flash floods. If a community doesn’t have adequate drainage, it floods.

The eastern part of Winchester Heights is flood-prone. “When a strong storm hits, all the homes and streets fill with water,” said Jose Rodriguez, 43, Alfonso Figueroa's co-worker and neighbor, speaking in Spanish. Flooding makes dirt roads dangerous. “Those floods have caused accidents, too… Fort Grant Road is where many accidents happen,” he said. 

In Pirtleville, a former colonia in Cochise County that wasn’t included in the Arizona Department of Housing’s 2024 list of designated colonias, water stays for days after a storm and breeds mosquitoes and flies. “It smells really bad,” said Elizabeth Vertrees, 44, who had water in front of her house for a week after the last significant rain. She said the back roads were flooded and she had to go “all the way around” to drive her daughter to school. 

Research shows that historically, people in colonias have been sicker than the rest of the country. According to a 2014 EPA-USDA report, border counties with colonias had significantly higher rates of Hepatitis A, along with water and foodborne illness, compared to the rest of the U.S. In August 2025, according to Cochise County officials, West Nile virus, a disease spread by mosquitoes breeding in standing water, was detected through vector traps near Pirtleville.

“A Colonia Means Something”

When a colonia is decertified, it not only loses critical access to federal set-aside funding, but other grants also become more challenging to obtain. Without the designation, former colonias compete with all localities applying for HUD’s community development funding.

Colonias must continuously demonstrate they meet the criteria HUD established 35 years ago. Naco, a historical frontier community of 800 to 1,000 people in Cochise County, was certified as a colonia in 1995. In 2024, the Board of the Naco Sanitary District, the de facto leaders of this unincorporated community, discovered that Naco had technically lost its status in 2008. 

According to the Arizona Department of Housing, the HUD Office of the Inspector General discovered that due to HUD's own lacking guidelines, Arizona had incorrectly certified most of its border communities as colonias, and as a result received and spent millions of federal dollars on communities that did not meet criteria under the 1990 Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act. HUD officials disputed the findings but agreed to address certain issues identified in the inspector's audit. All Arizona colonias had to apply to recertify within a two-year window, but Naco did not. The Sanitary District Board hopes to get the status back.

“A colonia means something. It has genuine political and financial implications to it. And thus, there's this sort of constant tension with identifying and labeling something as a colonia,” said Lucas Belury, a geographer and University of Arizona Ph.D. candidate researching colonias. 

However, not all colonias are reckoning with the same challenges. Elgin, a scenic colonia in Santa Cruz County, is studded with vineyards, distilleries, and ranches. And Patagonia, a colonia with an arts center, plant nursery, two grocery stores and community members advocating for environmental monitoring and resources. San Simon is another example. The community’s original draw, a railroad track, runs through the northside of its three-quarters of a square mile. With two churches, paved roads, a brick firehouse, and two stores, San Simon’s amenities far outnumber Winchester Heights’ with less than two-thirds the population. Three shiny white tanks flank the San Simon Water District office of board president, Robert “Chuck” Fickett, 76.

In 1985, Fickett took it upon himself to form a water district and update the failing water infrastructure. “Things were deteriorating. There [were] leaks around town,” Fickett said. Recently, after the old well faltered, the water district obtained funds from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and purchased a new well, which they plan to connect in early November 2025.

Despite San Simon’s efforts, it still has issues to address. Kathy Clark, who rents a trailer there, is still reeling after losing her home in the 2024 wildfire in another colonia, Bowie. “We had a fire that destroyed everything, and we moved over here,” Clark said. There were no fire hydrants near her home in Bowie, she said. San Simon has none, either.

Like Winchester Heights, San Simon is roughly an hour from the nearest hospital, but here, when people seek medical care, they go see Frances Grill, a family nurse practitioner at a Walker Family Medicine clinic. The clinic was founded in 2003 by Grill and Heather Lentz, now an EMT, and is located within the walls of San Simon High School, complete with two custom-built private exam rooms and a partitioned waiting area.

“We started it because we live here and we found that people really would use it if it was local, but they didn’t want to go far away,” Grill said.

In four hours on a given Tuesday, Grill estimated she would see around 25 patients. She notices the difference access has made. “I think they’ve gotten healthier, actually, because we’re here. … Some of these old ranchers who would never go to a doctor now come here,” she said. Some of Grill’s patients, even those now living in cities like Tucson and Willcox, still drive all the way to San Simon to see her.

When Winchester Heights residents fall ill, they wait for the next mobile clinic to arrive and hope it’s nothing serious. Aida Garcia, a SEAHEC-trained health worker, or promotora in Spanish, and community organizer, worries about the health of her community members, most of whom are seasonal workers.

“Families have to choose: go to the doctor or feed their kids. Sometimes people endure illness because there’s no money and the work is temporary,” she said in Spanish.

Aida has lived in Winchester Heights for 25 years. As a promotora and president of the Winchester Heights Community Center, she is an unofficial community leader who runs the food bank, health care outreach, and maintains the community center on her own.

At 4 p.m. on Friday, September 12, cars lined up in front of the Winchester Heights Community Center for the monthly food drive. Garcia and eight volunteers helped people load their vehicles with supplies, including a few melons, cartons of milk, cereal, and pasta. Forty minutes into the food drive, the wind picked up and lifted the tent sheltering the food off the ground. The volunteers rushed to hold it down. A storm was coming, but cars kept pulling up.

Alfonso returned from work in his pickup truck. During every storm, he worries his home could be destroyed: the roof could blow off or the trailer could tip over. He and his wife spent the last nine years making their slice of Winchester Heights their own. Colonias remain one of the few places where people like Alfonso and Anel can afford to own a home.

“Thank God the house is already ours,” Anel said. 

The couple and their growing family said they will remain as long as there’s water in the wells. But they hope for the kind of improvements that would make their young children’s lives better: like paved roads where thorns and rocks won’t puncture bike tires. 

“We hope someone looks at this community and sees hardworking people—and improves the streets, lighting, everything. So our kids grow up in a clean, healthy, beautiful community,” Alfonso said.

***

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

Summers pushed Brooks Jr. 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."

I have a limit if I’m indoors, [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. 

These are entirely preventable deaths. The majority of these deaths are happening inside people's homes, and this really underscores the importance of how we are helping people to get air conditioning where they don't have any, and to pay for running their air conditioning units where they do, but maybe can't afford to.”

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.

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.  

Extreme heat will almost certainly be the deadliest form of climate disaster we have, but often passes unnoticed … and the city is not doing anywhere near enough to get ready for it.

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. 

Lacking enough documents was the top reason for all the boroughs, except the Bronx, which had missing medical documentation as the highest reason for denial both years. In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

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."

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who sponsored legislation to make cooling a mandatory requirement for landlords to provide, said this of The Margin’s findings: “It’s clear that HEAP is not a reliable program for tenants to access a cooling device — that’s why we are mandating that landlords provide devices to all tenants who need one.”

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.” In a response to The Margin’s data findings, DSS said, “HEAP staff simply apply the eligibility criteria set by the state to determine whether someone should receive the benefit.”

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.

In response to The Margin’s analysis of DSS application data, the agency said applicants are notified of incomplete or missing documents and have 10 business days to submit them. If these documents aren’t received in that window, then the application is denied.   

Pointing to the medical documentation requirement, DSS said: “We also accept self-attestation if documentation from a health professional is unavailable.”

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.

Do you pay your electricity bills so you can get air conditioning and stay in your home? Or do you pay for your medicine? Do you now have to force a patient to make a decision?

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. 

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.

“We are actively working with our colleagues in Albany to expand utility assistance for low income tenants to ensure cooling costs are manageable,” Restler said.

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.

Restler says that landlords are already required to make certain electrical and efficiency upgrades to comply with Local Law 97, legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions from New York City buildings. He adds that the timing for the new cooling law to go into effect provides building owners with “ample time to make necessary upgrades to accommodate additional electrical load,” he said in a comment on The Margin’s investigation.

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."

***

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

After a full day cleaning a local high school in May 2026, Ana hustles through her last tasks so she can arrive early at the local produce market. Ever since September 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene hit the small mountain town where she’s lived for more than 20 years, Ana has relied on the free weekly market, housed in a defunct church, to feed her family. As she enters the sanctuary on that spring day, sunlight filters through stained glass, and at the bottom of one window a pomegranate glows. Ana leaves carrying bags full of vegetables and a loaf of bread.

The high school that Ana cleans became a relief center after the storm. Across the street, all the houses on two separate cul-de-sacs were destroyed. Nearly two years later, Swannanoa, North Carolina, continues to navigate Helene’s aftermath. The storm demolished the mobile home that Ana shared with her husband and then-teenage children. They made it out unscathed, wearing pajamas and the small blanket Ana’s kids grabbed, losing everything else. “El cascarón,” a shell, was all that was left of the home, she said.

“In that moment, our world caved in,” Ana said in Spanish.

There’s a richness in her voice, delicate and deliberate, as her eyes, rimmed with blue eyeliner, fill with tears that gently spill over. 

Ana witnessed her community wash away that week. Mobile homes raced down a river of stormwater like “barquitos,” little boats, she said.

Outside the market, operated by the nonprofit Bounty & Soul, she gestures toward U.S. Highway 70, the road that had transformed into an unrecognizable flood during that fateful week. It cuts through the rural town of Swannanoa as its main thoroughfare, flanked by the eponymous river on one side and Interstate 40 on the other. 

Ana and her husband, hometown sweethearts from Mexico, were among the first immigrant families to establish roots in their pocket of Swannanoa more than two decades ago. In addition to her work as a school custodian, Ana runs her own event decorating business, working extra nights and almost every weekend on weddings, quinceañeras, and other celebrations in her community. Her husband works as a house painter. 

In the aftermath of Helene, the family spent 53 days without potable water,and Ana’s husband was without paid work for a full year. The family moved into their renovated mobile home on the same lot in June 2025. But for them and their fellow immigrant community in these mountains, the economic and emotional impacts of the storm linger profoundly. 

Their mobile home, where they started and raised a family, is one of more than 100 mobile homes parked on the same circular drive. Plots of land are small — about 30 by 80 feet — and neighbors live in compact proximity to each other. Each home is unique, distinguished by an array of colorful flowers and lush cacti that grow along their perimeters. Cats claim different porches, rushing indoors to peek through colorful patterned window curtains. It’s a neighborhood full of long-established immigrant families, mostly Latino, with a few non-immigrant neighbors in the mix.

The park sits near the river. As floodwaters rose, nearly every home in the neighborhood was flooded or severely damaged. Ana’s home sat at the bottom of the hill, and it was completely destroyed.

The map below shows NCEM floodplain extents across different storm scenarios, along with the buildings at risk within each area. Hurricane Helene is classified as a 1,000-year storm event.

North Carolina is home to an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants, according to 2024 data from the Center for Migration Studies and the University of Minnesota. Because many of these community members don’t self-report their legal status, the data remains a rough estimation. The Latino population makes up 6% of Swannanoa’s population, or just over 1,000 people of approximately 17,000 total, as of 2023. 

Tight-knit neighborhoods of immigrants, mainly from Latin America with the majority from Mexico, are scattered across North Carolina’s mountain region. Many of which take the shape of rural mobile home parks. 

Buncombe County data shows that Helene hit single-family and manufactured housing (like mobile homes) the hardest. Combined, these dwellings make up the majority of housing in the town of Swannanoa. According to the county’s property assessor, there are 19,000 mobile homes in Buncombe County. 11,000 of which are fixed in place while the rest are a combination of single- and double-wide manufactured homes not on permanent foundations and other fixtures ranging from airplanes to campers and boats. Most of these homes are owner-occupied, while 28% are inhabited by renters. Swannanoa includes at least 940 mobile homes, which made up 16% of the town’s total occupied housing in 2023.

For many, mobile homes are a pathway to homeownership for working-class people, especially immigrants, who can purchase them with cash and avoid the rental market. In the face of a federally declared climate disaster, mobile homeowners qualify for FEMA aid if they are also U.S. citizens. Undocumented homeowners, however, do not qualify for any type of FEMA financial assistance. 

North Carolina’s undocumented immigrants bear one of the largest burdens of loss and displacement post-Helene. In interviews with The Margin, immigrants in mobile home parks relayed numerous difficulties, including barriers to FEMA funding, targeting from xenophobic vigilantes, the threat of eviction and an increased federal ICE presence in small-town immigrant enclaves that previously went under the radar. 

While the ground under many homes has long since dried, these hardships persist for many immigrants like Ana almost two years after the storm. 

“I feel like I’m living in a different place,” says Ana.

How FEMA shuts immigrants out of recovery

Commotion woke Hermila Contreras in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina. Contreras’ mobile home sits on the same street where Ana lives, except at the top of the hill. No one knocked on her door (like a firefighter did at Ana’s) to order them to evacuate. So Contreras decided to wait out the storm as water rushed down the hill.

She and her teenage daughter were crouched inside a bedroom when a large tree toppled and crashed through the roof. Rain fell through a gaping hole directly into the kitchen, living room, and the back bedroom as Contreras tried to save important belongings from getting soaked. She looked out the window to see the water rise and rise, engulfing her car. The rain persisted for days. More trees fell, and mobile homes eventually crumbled into the stream of water. Roads became impassable. The family lost power for four months. 

Mobile homes are referred to as “manufactured housing” in federal data terms. Purchasing a double-wide mobile or manufactured home in Swannanoa, N.C., can cost up to $75,000. Additional costs of up to $50,000 can be incurred for moving the structure, preparing a new site, and installation.

Mobile homeowners at parks pay rent for the plot of land where their homes sit. Contreras said her rent is $600 a month, which was due just four days after the storm, on Oct. 1. Even when they own their homes, residents of mobile home parks can get evicted. North Carolina law requires that landlords provide at least 60 days' notice. 

Contreras said she applied for a FEMA offer of $750 three times; The Margin verified that the agency denied her the last time, in November 2025, because her application lacked specific documents including identification and receipts of purchases lost to the storm, including items she’s owned for several years.

Originally from Mexico, Contreras did not yet have legal permanent residency or a driver’s license when she purchased her mobile home 22 years ago and parked it at the Swannanoa park. For this reason, the home was technically in her oldest daughter’s name when Helene hit, though Contreras had paid it off.

Purchasing a mobile home requires a driver’s license, something that does not necessarily apply to standard homeownership. Undocumented immigrants qualify for a driver’s license in only 19 U.S. states, and North Carolina is not one of them. A common workaround is to purchase these homes using a relative or friend’s name, which can complicate applications for FEMA aid.

Contreras obtained permanent residence in the U.S. in 2017. But even a retroactive transfer of the deed in her name after the natural disaster would not qualify her for FEMA assistance. She thinks this discrepancy in paperwork disqualified her for much of the aid she applied for in the early stage of recovery. She even tried to receive aid from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization, which also told her she did not have the proper documents.

A 2021 report by expert advisors to FEMA cited equity issues with several disaster-relief application processes. The FEMA National Advisory Council ultimately recommended that “alternative forms of documented ownership should also be accepted for instances involving loss of a mobile home.” That recommendation has not been taken.

Like many mixed-status families, Ana said she applied for and received FEMA financial aid through one of her adult, U.S. citizen children. FEMA awarded her family $25,000, meeting only a fraction of their need. Ana estimates total costs for the new home reached $60,000. Her husband didn’t work for a year to oversee the entire project, and did as much as he could himself. They received additional support, such as construction supplies from CORE, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world, now with a team in Swannanoa led by Antonio Garcia, a Salvadoran who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16. Garcia said CORE helped reconstruct 25 mobile homes in Ana’s neighborhood.

As recovery began in the wake of Helene, the end of the month and its various due dates loomed. On Sept. 30, 2024, Contreras said various volunteers who were helping out all day in her neighborhood convened with the on-site park manager, a Spanish-speaking Latino, and a few residents. It wasn’t a planned meeting, but “we took the opportunity to ask about the rent,” she says. That’s when they were told it was still due the very next day.

Through her community and established “confianza,” Contreras connected with community organizer Dulce Mirian Porras-Rosas, who had been advocating for rent forgiveness with a mobile home park in nearby Candler, to no avail. Porras-Rosas told The Margin that she doesn’t personally know of any mobile home park landlord who forgave rent or offered an extension post-Helene.

For almost two years, Contreras has been living with flood damage and a hole in her roof that neighbors helped cover with tarp. Contreras was out of work for months—ironically, her job is in construction. Today, visible signs of black mold have appeared along the ceiling, which has been temporarily patched. 

Fortunately, Porras-Rosas connected Contreras to resources, which eventually led to a successful application with Renew NC, the state’s revamped 2025 home recovery program. Contreras expects a new mobile home by December.

Evacuations and evictions 

Porras-Rosas, who lives in a mobile home in Asheville, has spent years in community activism throughout the Carolina mountain region. She co-founded the Asheville group Semilla de Vida, an organization that began as a way to teach and promote food justice. When the storm hit, the group took action. In a mostly immigrant neighborhood, they distributed generators, water, food, and tools. Organizers also raised and distributed $9,000 in immediate rental and relocation assistance following Helene, money collected from neighbors and friends.

The hurricane not only changed the ecological panorama of the region, but also the economic and social dynamics. Many people had to relocate after having been woven into the fabric of this community.

Buncombe County never implemented a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures despite persistent advocacy from community leaders and housing advocates. In March 2025, a group of state senators introduced Senate Bill 395, the Disaster Relief Eviction Moratorium Act, in the North Carolina Legislature. The bill stalled after going to committee and has not come up for a vote. 

While the federal government can administer programs to prevent evictions through HUD policies and, in some instances, federal aid, the eviction process itself is largely governed by state and local policy. Moreover, there is no federal mandate to disclose eviction data.

“Finding more detailed data on other characteristics, like country of origin, income, or immigration status, can be almost impossible,” said Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager for The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. This means the actual scale of Helene's displacement of North Carolina's immigrant communities is impossible to track, since these communities typically don't qualify for federal disaster assistance.

When demographic information is documented in eviction court records, a court clerk typically enters it manually or a tenant self-reports, making the data neither systematic nor reliable. Even outside of climate disasters, Black and Latina women are more likely to be evicted than their male counterparts. For Latina women specifically, the risk of eviction is approximately 9% higher than it is for Latino men. 

“On top of that,” said Garnham, “we know that there are a large number of people who experience evictions informally and avoid going to court. Local experts and anecdotal experiences point in the same direction that undocumented tenants tend to be part of this group, and it’s extremely difficult to quantify their experiences.”

Burdened with back rent and the looming possibility of eviction, many Swannanoa renters and mobile homeowners sought help from Swannanoa Communities Together, the organization founded by a group of local women in Helene’s wake.

“What we have witnessed here in Swannanoa, starting in the immediate aftermath of the storm, is people who were displaced by the storm, who were living in their cars or tents or RVs, or sometimes if they could get a motel,” said Beth Trigg, co-founder of Swannanoa Communities Together.

To date, Trigg said they have provided almost $1.1 million in financial assistance to almost 1,000 households from October 2024 to May 2026. 

Paulina, who chose to only use her first name, is one of two bilingual Latina leaders at Swannanoa Communities Together. Before the storm, she and her family rented a large swath of land in Swannanoa. At first, only a couple of mobile homes occupied the land. One belonged to Paulina, where she lived with her family, and the other was occupied by the landowner. 

Over the next decade, Paulina slowly purchased more mobile homes to rent out to community members, while she managed leasing the land. By 2024, she collected rent from six households, the majority Latino, some including her family members.

In the early morning of Sept. 27, 2024, at the first sign of danger, Paulina began knocking on her tenants’ doors, every single one.

“We woke up the last family at 2 a.m.,” she said, in Spanish, of the last home they alerted. Within an hour, the two families evacuated to a nearby hotel together. Paulina recalls the electricity going out at 4 a.m, and that by the time the sun came up, everything had flooded. Paulina’s home and all of the mobile homes up on the hill where she lived had been destroyed.

Two weeks later, bouncing from shelter to shelter, Paulina and her team at Swannanoa Communities Together began receiving calls from people desperate to find help paying rent. It dawned on her that, as a landlord, she never collected rent. Neither did the landowner from whom she leased the rental plots.

“There was absolutely nothing left,” she said in Spanish. “How are you going to charge rent?”

When North Carolina mobile home parks evict residents, a landlord or management company can eventually obtain a writ of possession, which could result in the landlord possessing  the property until the debt is paid.  

“If you get evicted from a mobile home park, you will have to choose from the least bad of three options,” said Garnham of The Eviction Lab. “Abandon your property outright, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or try to move it to another location.”

According to an analysis of county court records by NC Eviction Watchdog, a project of the North Carolina Tenants Union, at least 391 evictions for mobile homes were filed in western North Carolina since Helene.

Another tricky reality for mobile homeowners is forced displacement due to the sale of the mobile home park land, often to developers. Dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a federal eviction moratorium, some park owners selling their property would give residents a few months to find a new place for their homes. This type of upheaval continues today for hundreds of families in mobile home parks across the state.

In March 2025, three state senators proposed Senate Bill 518, the Mobile Home Park Act, to better protect mobile homeowners. The bill was referred to committee, but did not come up for a vote. As a housing reform bill, it would provide stronger protection for tenants and require park owners to register with the North Carolina Human Rights Commission. Owners would have to comply with health and safety rules while adhering to new standards that limit rent increases.

‘The house of my dreams is gone’

Monica, a fast food worker, and her husband, who works landscaping jobs, felt excited when they found a beautiful home that they could afford in 2014. For 10 years, the homeowners grew their family on a quiet, friendly street. Five children grew up there, where they played on the swing set in the backyard, hanging piñatas from a large oak tree on their birthdays. The brick house boasts a secluded courtyard entrance leading into a cabin-like interior that, before the storm, warmed the home in natural wood paneled walls, floors, and ceilings. 

Today, the home has been gutted down to the wooden studs. After Helene, people cut the electricity and stripped the copper. The now-naked interior is a sight the family thought they would never see. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred battered and flooded the home. Monica and her family lost all of their belongings. They worked to prevent similar disasters in the future by raising all of their power outlets by six inches. FEMA flood insurance, which the undocumented couple secured after Fred through one of their children who is a citizen, was also running out, with only two months left of coverage. Following Helene, Monica said they did not qualify for further FEMA aid, like the buyout,  due to previous assistance they’d received.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program purchases flood-damaged properties from homeowners for up to 75% of the costs, with the remaining portion typically being funded by state or local governments. Properties are assessed at pre-disaster market value and are restricted by limits to future development in flood-prone areas. However, an undocumented immigrant homeowner cannot apply for this type of buyout.

The family needs funds to raise their home off the ground, Monica said, an expensive effort they cannot afford on their own. And they are still paying a mortgage on a home they cannot live in.

Monica walks out of the house, stepping over a wooden door that she does not recognize, splayed out in the yard, “carried by the water” from a stranger’s home. She rounds the corner to find her Knock Out roses in full bloom, creating a luminous reflection in a large puddle of water on the street.      

The house of my dreams is gone.

                                      ***

The storm hit the same year that President Donald Trump was elected for a second term. 

Historically, undocumented immigrants have been wary of federal disaster relief because FEMA is housed under the Dept. of Homeland Security, which includes both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. After any natural disaster in the U.S., it is common for Border Patrol agents to be deployed to assist in recovery. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Margin that agents were on the ground in western North Carolina after Helene. 

“For us [as immigrants] it’s a double whammy,” said Porras-Rosas in Spanish. “We’re living in really complicated times. It’s immoral, this corner they have us backed into. And it’s unnecessary.”

Reports of militia groups in the immediate aftermath of Helene became a snapshot in international media of the compounding crises of disaster recovery, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Locally, they amplified fear, especially in immigrant communities. These militias seemed to track far-right criticism toward federal aid. 

In 2021, the Biden administration designated places for disaster or emergency response as “protected areas,” where immigration agents would not engage in enforcement actions. However, in January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded that policy, the clearest indication that disaster victims might potentially become enforcement targets. ICE can use what it calls “common sense enforcement” in sensitive locations where those operations were previously prohibited. This previously required a judicial warrant but advocates warned that now enforcement can happen without one, instead only needing an administrative order by the agency

Reports of intimidation continue. In a video obtained by The Margin, a traffic cone with a U.S. Border Patrol ballcap was placed outside of a predominantly Latino mobile home park in Buncombe County in May. CBP told The Margin that they were not in Buncombe County in May 2026. 

It’s an image that feels symbolic. In June of this year, North Carolina passed a law, known as "North Carolina Border Protection Act,” that requires the state highway patrol and the Department of Public Safety to collaborate with ICE, which killed two more people in the U.S. in July. Neither person was who the agency was looking for. The legislation also effectively ends any sanctuary policies in the state. The bill passed after the state House of Representatives overrode Governor Stein’s veto. 

On July 26, sheriffs in Caldwell County, 65 miles east of Buncombe County confirmed collaboration with ICE and the U.S. Forest Service at a checkpoint at Wilson Creek park. The federal immigration enforcement operation resulted in the ICE arrest of 13 people.

Housing on the horizon

There are parts of Swannanoa that feel forgotten. Down the road from Ana and Contreras’ mobile home park, several residential cul-de-sacs are dotted with houses that remain desolate. Large X’s are graffitied on the garage doors and remaining siding. Homes are surrounded by overgrown brush and wildflowers.

Along U.S. Highway 70, a bright yellow sign stapled to a telephone pole beckons for the post office to return in thick black handwriting: “USPS WHERE ARE YOU.” Blocks of empty parking lots are surrounded by locked fences. A lot off the highway was home to the original Athens Pizza, operated by the same family for more than two decades. The business was renamed Athens Grille and has since moved into a smaller gas station alcove. Another lot housed the ACE Hardware, formerly a well-equipped store for construction workers, landscapers and homeowners, now void of any sign that a building once stood there.

If you drive too fast, perched beside the parking lot of a former beauty salon, you might miss a makeshift roadside marquee exclaiming “WE CAN DO IT! SI SE PUEDE.” Upon opening the door to the inconspicuous building, people are met with cozy couches and armchairs, big smiles, and lively chatter in Spanish and English. 

Swannanoa Communities Together transformed the space as their hub, with the intention of being a comfortable and communal haven for people seeking resources. A small food pantry in the back offers fresh produce and packaged foods, along with baby formula, diapers, and general toiletries. The bathroom is stocked with free menstrual products and pregnancy tests. 

Trigg helped found the multi-racial and multilingual organization with other women who had already been working in the community. Many have backgrounds organizing around the myriad issues in local policy, while others are specifically trained through economic justice models.

Other community members shouldered new roles in service of their neighbors. They are translators and interpreters, drivers and case managers who checked on families and helped neighbors navigate assistance systems. With local government agencies and nonprofits offering little Spanish-language information during immediate recovery operations, bilingual volunteers became translators and conduits for recovery information.

“Many stepped forward because they knew official information might not reach everyone or that some families might feel afraid or uncertain about asking for help,” said Carmen Ybarra, director of systems and engagement at Swannanoa Communities Together, via email.

One thing that instantly became clear to these advocates post-Helene is that current aid models limit access through eligibility requirements. As residents of Swannanoa Valley, the team knew that not everyone could show proof of a formal income, provide a Social Security number, present a credit history, or pass a criminal background check. Swannanoa Communities Together, thus, offers assistance to anyone who walks through the door. Folks get help paying bills, rent (even back rent) and more.

But the number one priority continues to be housing. And the long-term sustainability of future affordable housing plans presented by local governments makes Trigg and her cohort wary.

“We can help people by ensuring that they have a roof over their head for emergencies, but the actual transition from that to housing stability is really challenging and takes a long time, even with support from us, because of the lack of low-barrier affordable rental housing,” said Trigg. From 2019 to 2023, the median gross rent increased 58%, from $908 per month to $1,438 for a three-bedroom unit. 

Buncombe County is considering public feedback until August 15, for what’s dubbed the Swannanoa Small Area Plan, its proposal for the town’s future as part of the county’s 2043 Comprehensive Plan. A steering committee that Trigg served on met this year to assess the terms. Initial plans focused heavily on tourism and building out areas in Swannanoa that have already begun to transform. One strip includes a coffee shop, a now-closed brewery, and a food store.

Separate from the official steering committee, the women of Swannanoa Communities Together said they submitted a list of recommendations to the county with suggested revisions to the plan and solutions. The group included a five-year moratorium on short-term rentals like Airbnb, and an emphasis on affordable housing. 

On June 15 in a public session, the county agreed to explore a moratorium on short-term rentals. The motion received almost unanimous support from the steering committee.

Ybarra’s mission is to continue bringing Latino residents and other residents of color into the conversations around recovery and its decision-making process. Her work prioritizes “access, trust, dignity, and making complicated systems understandable.”

“Swannanoa’s recovery should not be judged only by repaired buildings, new development, or rising property values. It should be judged by whether the people who were here before Helene are still able to call it home,” Ybarra said.

***

After a full day cleaning a local high school in May 2026, Ana hustles through her last tasks so she can arrive early at the local produce market. Ever since September 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene hit the small mountain town where she’s lived for more than 20 years, Ana has relied on the free weekly market, housed in a defunct church, to feed her family. As she enters the sanctuary on that spring day, sunlight filters through stained glass, and at the bottom of one window a pomegranate glows. Ana leaves carrying bags full of vegetables and a loaf of bread.

The high school that Ana cleans became a relief center after the storm. Across the street, all the houses on two separate cul-de-sacs were destroyed. Nearly two years later, Swannanoa, North Carolina, continues to navigate Helene’s aftermath. The storm demolished the mobile home that Ana shared with her husband and then-teenage children. They made it out unscathed, wearing pajamas and the small blanket Ana’s kids grabbed, losing everything else. “El cascarón,” a shell, was all that was left of the home, she said.

“In that moment, our world caved in,” Ana said in Spanish.

There’s a richness in her voice, delicate and deliberate, as her eyes, rimmed with blue eyeliner, fill with tears that gently spill over. 

Ana witnessed her community wash away that week. Mobile homes raced down a river of stormwater like “barquitos,” little boats, she said.

Outside the market, operated by the nonprofit Bounty & Soul, she gestures toward U.S. Highway 70, the road that had transformed into an unrecognizable flood during that fateful week. It cuts through the rural town of Swannanoa as its main thoroughfare, flanked by the eponymous river on one side and Interstate 40 on the other. 

Ana and her husband, hometown sweethearts from Mexico, were among the first immigrant families to establish roots in their pocket of Swannanoa more than two decades ago. In addition to her work as a school custodian, Ana runs her own event decorating business, working extra nights and almost every weekend on weddings, quinceañeras, and other celebrations in her community. Her husband works as a house painter. 

In the aftermath of Helene, the family spent 53 days without potable water,and Ana’s husband was without paid work for a full year. The family moved into their renovated mobile home on the same lot in June 2025. But for them and their fellow immigrant community in these mountains, the economic and emotional impacts of the storm linger profoundly. 

Their mobile home, where they started and raised a family, is one of more than 100 mobile homes parked on the same circular drive. Plots of land are small — about 30 by 80 feet — and neighbors live in compact proximity to each other. Each home is unique, distinguished by an array of colorful flowers and lush cacti that grow along their perimeters. Cats claim different porches, rushing indoors to peek through colorful patterned window curtains. It’s a neighborhood full of long-established immigrant families, mostly Latino, with a few non-immigrant neighbors in the mix.

The park sits near the river. As floodwaters rose, nearly every home in the neighborhood was flooded or severely damaged. Ana’s home sat at the bottom of the hill, and it was completely destroyed.

The map below shows NCEM floodplain extents across different storm scenarios, along with the buildings at risk within each area. Hurricane Helene is classified as a 1,000-year storm event.

North Carolina is home to an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants, according to 2024 data from the Center for Migration Studies and the University of Minnesota. Because many of these community members don’t self-report their legal status, the data remains a rough estimation. The Latino population makes up 6% of Swannanoa’s population, or just over 1,000 people of approximately 17,000 total, as of 2023. 

Tight-knit neighborhoods of immigrants, mainly from Latin America with the majority from Mexico, are scattered across North Carolina’s mountain region. Many of which take the shape of rural mobile home parks. 

Buncombe County data shows that Helene hit single-family and manufactured housing (like mobile homes) the hardest. Combined, these dwellings make up the majority of housing in the town of Swannanoa. According to the county’s property assessor, there are 19,000 mobile homes in Buncombe County. 11,000 of which are fixed in place while the rest are a combination of single- and double-wide manufactured homes not on permanent foundations and other fixtures ranging from airplanes to campers and boats. Most of these homes are owner-occupied, while 28% are inhabited by renters. Swannanoa includes at least 940 mobile homes, which made up 16% of the town’s total occupied housing in 2023.

For many, mobile homes are a pathway to homeownership for working-class people, especially immigrants, who can purchase them with cash and avoid the rental market. In the face of a federally declared climate disaster, mobile homeowners qualify for FEMA aid if they are also U.S. citizens. Undocumented homeowners, however, do not qualify for any type of FEMA financial assistance. 

North Carolina’s undocumented immigrants bear one of the largest burdens of loss and displacement post-Helene. In interviews with The Margin, immigrants in mobile home parks relayed numerous difficulties, including barriers to FEMA funding, targeting from xenophobic vigilantes, the threat of eviction and an increased federal ICE presence in small-town immigrant enclaves that previously went under the radar. 

While the ground under many homes has long since dried, these hardships persist for many immigrants like Ana almost two years after the storm. 

“I feel like I’m living in a different place,” says Ana.

How FEMA shuts immigrants out of recovery

Commotion woke Hermila Contreras in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina. Contreras’ mobile home sits on the same street where Ana lives, except at the top of the hill. No one knocked on her door (like a firefighter did at Ana’s) to order them to evacuate. So Contreras decided to wait out the storm as water rushed down the hill.

She and her teenage daughter were crouched inside a bedroom when a large tree toppled and crashed through the roof. Rain fell through a gaping hole directly into the kitchen, living room, and the back bedroom as Contreras tried to save important belongings from getting soaked. She looked out the window to see the water rise and rise, engulfing her car. The rain persisted for days. More trees fell, and mobile homes eventually crumbled into the stream of water. Roads became impassable. The family lost power for four months. 

Mobile homes are referred to as “manufactured housing” in federal data terms. Purchasing a double-wide mobile or manufactured home in Swannanoa, N.C., can cost up to $75,000. Additional costs of up to $50,000 can be incurred for moving the structure, preparing a new site, and installation.

Mobile homeowners at parks pay rent for the plot of land where their homes sit. Contreras said her rent is $600 a month, which was due just four days after the storm, on Oct. 1. Even when they own their homes, residents of mobile home parks can get evicted. North Carolina law requires that landlords provide at least 60 days' notice. 

Contreras said she applied for a FEMA offer of $750 three times; The Margin verified that the agency denied her the last time, in November 2025, because her application lacked specific documents including identification and receipts of purchases lost to the storm, including items she’s owned for several years.

Originally from Mexico, Contreras did not yet have legal permanent residency or a driver’s license when she purchased her mobile home 22 years ago and parked it at the Swannanoa park. For this reason, the home was technically in her oldest daughter’s name when Helene hit, though Contreras had paid it off.

Purchasing a mobile home requires a driver’s license, something that does not necessarily apply to standard homeownership. Undocumented immigrants qualify for a driver’s license in only 19 U.S. states, and North Carolina is not one of them. A common workaround is to purchase these homes using a relative or friend’s name, which can complicate applications for FEMA aid.

Contreras obtained permanent residence in the U.S. in 2017. But even a retroactive transfer of the deed in her name after the natural disaster would not qualify her for FEMA assistance. She thinks this discrepancy in paperwork disqualified her for much of the aid she applied for in the early stage of recovery. She even tried to receive aid from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization, which also told her she did not have the proper documents.

A 2021 report by expert advisors to FEMA cited equity issues with several disaster-relief application processes. The FEMA National Advisory Council ultimately recommended that “alternative forms of documented ownership should also be accepted for instances involving loss of a mobile home.” That recommendation has not been taken.

Like many mixed-status families, Ana said she applied for and received FEMA financial aid through one of her adult, U.S. citizen children. FEMA awarded her family $25,000, meeting only a fraction of their need. Ana estimates total costs for the new home reached $60,000. Her husband didn’t work for a year to oversee the entire project, and did as much as he could himself. They received additional support, such as construction supplies from CORE, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world, now with a team in Swannanoa led by Antonio Garcia, a Salvadoran who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16. Garcia said CORE helped reconstruct 25 mobile homes in Ana’s neighborhood.

As recovery began in the wake of Helene, the end of the month and its various due dates loomed. On Sept. 30, 2024, Contreras said various volunteers who were helping out all day in her neighborhood convened with the on-site park manager, a Spanish-speaking Latino, and a few residents. It wasn’t a planned meeting, but “we took the opportunity to ask about the rent,” she says. That’s when they were told it was still due the very next day.

Through her community and established “confianza,” Contreras connected with community organizer Dulce Mirian Porras-Rosas, who had been advocating for rent forgiveness with a mobile home park in nearby Candler, to no avail. Porras-Rosas told The Margin that she doesn’t personally know of any mobile home park landlord who forgave rent or offered an extension post-Helene.

For almost two years, Contreras has been living with flood damage and a hole in her roof that neighbors helped cover with tarp. Contreras was out of work for months—ironically, her job is in construction. Today, visible signs of black mold have appeared along the ceiling, which has been temporarily patched. 

Fortunately, Porras-Rosas connected Contreras to resources, which eventually led to a successful application with Renew NC, the state’s revamped 2025 home recovery program. Contreras expects a new mobile home by December.

Evacuations and evictions 

Porras-Rosas, who lives in a mobile home in Asheville, has spent years in community activism throughout the Carolina mountain region. She co-founded the Asheville group Semilla de Vida, an organization that began as a way to teach and promote food justice. When the storm hit, the group took action. In a mostly immigrant neighborhood, they distributed generators, water, food, and tools. Organizers also raised and distributed $9,000 in immediate rental and relocation assistance following Helene, money collected from neighbors and friends.

The hurricane not only changed the ecological panorama of the region, but also the economic and social dynamics. Many people had to relocate after having been woven into the fabric of this community.

Buncombe County never implemented a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures despite persistent advocacy from community leaders and housing advocates. In March 2025, a group of state senators introduced Senate Bill 395, the Disaster Relief Eviction Moratorium Act, in the North Carolina Legislature. The bill stalled after going to committee and has not come up for a vote. 

While the federal government can administer programs to prevent evictions through HUD policies and, in some instances, federal aid, the eviction process itself is largely governed by state and local policy. Moreover, there is no federal mandate to disclose eviction data.

“Finding more detailed data on other characteristics, like country of origin, income, or immigration status, can be almost impossible,” said Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager for The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. This means the actual scale of Helene's displacement of North Carolina's immigrant communities is impossible to track, since these communities typically don't qualify for federal disaster assistance.

When demographic information is documented in eviction court records, a court clerk typically enters it manually or a tenant self-reports, making the data neither systematic nor reliable. Even outside of climate disasters, Black and Latina women are more likely to be evicted than their male counterparts. For Latina women specifically, the risk of eviction is approximately 9% higher than it is for Latino men. 

“On top of that,” said Garnham, “we know that there are a large number of people who experience evictions informally and avoid going to court. Local experts and anecdotal experiences point in the same direction that undocumented tenants tend to be part of this group, and it’s extremely difficult to quantify their experiences.”

Burdened with back rent and the looming possibility of eviction, many Swannanoa renters and mobile homeowners sought help from Swannanoa Communities Together, the organization founded by a group of local women in Helene’s wake.

“What we have witnessed here in Swannanoa, starting in the immediate aftermath of the storm, is people who were displaced by the storm, who were living in their cars or tents or RVs, or sometimes if they could get a motel,” said Beth Trigg, co-founder of Swannanoa Communities Together.

To date, Trigg said they have provided almost $1.1 million in financial assistance to almost 1,000 households from October 2024 to May 2026. 

Paulina, who chose to only use her first name, is one of two bilingual Latina leaders at Swannanoa Communities Together. Before the storm, she and her family rented a large swath of land in Swannanoa. At first, only a couple of mobile homes occupied the land. One belonged to Paulina, where she lived with her family, and the other was occupied by the landowner. 

Over the next decade, Paulina slowly purchased more mobile homes to rent out to community members, while she managed leasing the land. By 2024, she collected rent from six households, the majority Latino, some including her family members.

In the early morning of Sept. 27, 2024, at the first sign of danger, Paulina began knocking on her tenants’ doors, every single one.

“We woke up the last family at 2 a.m.,” she said, in Spanish, of the last home they alerted. Within an hour, the two families evacuated to a nearby hotel together. Paulina recalls the electricity going out at 4 a.m, and that by the time the sun came up, everything had flooded. Paulina’s home and all of the mobile homes up on the hill where she lived had been destroyed.

Two weeks later, bouncing from shelter to shelter, Paulina and her team at Swannanoa Communities Together began receiving calls from people desperate to find help paying rent. It dawned on her that, as a landlord, she never collected rent. Neither did the landowner from whom she leased the rental plots.

“There was absolutely nothing left,” she said in Spanish. “How are you going to charge rent?”

When North Carolina mobile home parks evict residents, a landlord or management company can eventually obtain a writ of possession, which could result in the landlord possessing  the property until the debt is paid.  

“If you get evicted from a mobile home park, you will have to choose from the least bad of three options,” said Garnham of The Eviction Lab. “Abandon your property outright, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or try to move it to another location.”

According to an analysis of county court records by NC Eviction Watchdog, a project of the North Carolina Tenants Union, at least 391 evictions for mobile homes were filed in western North Carolina since Helene.

Another tricky reality for mobile homeowners is forced displacement due to the sale of the mobile home park land, often to developers. Dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a federal eviction moratorium, some park owners selling their property would give residents a few months to find a new place for their homes. This type of upheaval continues today for hundreds of families in mobile home parks across the state.

In March 2025, three state senators proposed Senate Bill 518, the Mobile Home Park Act, to better protect mobile homeowners. The bill was referred to committee, but did not come up for a vote. As a housing reform bill, it would provide stronger protection for tenants and require park owners to register with the North Carolina Human Rights Commission. Owners would have to comply with health and safety rules while adhering to new standards that limit rent increases.

‘The house of my dreams is gone’

Monica, a fast food worker, and her husband, who works landscaping jobs, felt excited when they found a beautiful home that they could afford in 2014. For 10 years, the homeowners grew their family on a quiet, friendly street. Five children grew up there, where they played on the swing set in the backyard, hanging piñatas from a large oak tree on their birthdays. The brick house boasts a secluded courtyard entrance leading into a cabin-like interior that, before the storm, warmed the home in natural wood paneled walls, floors, and ceilings. 

Today, the home has been gutted down to the wooden studs. After Helene, people cut the electricity and stripped the copper. The now-naked interior is a sight the family thought they would never see. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred battered and flooded the home. Monica and her family lost all of their belongings. They worked to prevent similar disasters in the future by raising all of their power outlets by six inches. FEMA flood insurance, which the undocumented couple secured after Fred through one of their children who is a citizen, was also running out, with only two months left of coverage. Following Helene, Monica said they did not qualify for further FEMA aid, like the buyout,  due to previous assistance they’d received.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program purchases flood-damaged properties from homeowners for up to 75% of the costs, with the remaining portion typically being funded by state or local governments. Properties are assessed at pre-disaster market value and are restricted by limits to future development in flood-prone areas. However, an undocumented immigrant homeowner cannot apply for this type of buyout.

The family needs funds to raise their home off the ground, Monica said, an expensive effort they cannot afford on their own. And they are still paying a mortgage on a home they cannot live in.

Monica walks out of the house, stepping over a wooden door that she does not recognize, splayed out in the yard, “carried by the water” from a stranger’s home. She rounds the corner to find her Knock Out roses in full bloom, creating a luminous reflection in a large puddle of water on the street.      

The house of my dreams is gone.

                                      ***

The storm hit the same year that President Donald Trump was elected for a second term. 

Historically, undocumented immigrants have been wary of federal disaster relief because FEMA is housed under the Dept. of Homeland Security, which includes both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. After any natural disaster in the U.S., it is common for Border Patrol agents to be deployed to assist in recovery. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Margin that agents were on the ground in western North Carolina after Helene. 

“For us [as immigrants] it’s a double whammy,” said Porras-Rosas in Spanish. “We’re living in really complicated times. It’s immoral, this corner they have us backed into. And it’s unnecessary.”

Reports of militia groups in the immediate aftermath of Helene became a snapshot in international media of the compounding crises of disaster recovery, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Locally, they amplified fear, especially in immigrant communities. These militias seemed to track far-right criticism toward federal aid. 

In 2021, the Biden administration designated places for disaster or emergency response as “protected areas,” where immigration agents would not engage in enforcement actions. However, in January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded that policy, the clearest indication that disaster victims might potentially become enforcement targets. ICE can use what it calls “common sense enforcement” in sensitive locations where those operations were previously prohibited. This previously required a judicial warrant but advocates warned that now enforcement can happen without one, instead only needing an administrative order by the agency

Reports of intimidation continue. In a video obtained by The Margin, a traffic cone with a U.S. Border Patrol ballcap was placed outside of a predominantly Latino mobile home park in Buncombe County in May. CBP told The Margin that they were not in Buncombe County in May 2026. 

It’s an image that feels symbolic. In June of this year, North Carolina passed a law, known as "North Carolina Border Protection Act,” that requires the state highway patrol and the Department of Public Safety to collaborate with ICE, which killed two more people in the U.S. in July. Neither person was who the agency was looking for. The legislation also effectively ends any sanctuary policies in the state. The bill passed after the state House of Representatives overrode Governor Stein’s veto. 

On July 26, sheriffs in Caldwell County, 65 miles east of Buncombe County confirmed collaboration with ICE and the U.S. Forest Service at a checkpoint at Wilson Creek park. The federal immigration enforcement operation resulted in the ICE arrest of 13 people.

Housing on the horizon

There are parts of Swannanoa that feel forgotten. Down the road from Ana and Contreras’ mobile home park, several residential cul-de-sacs are dotted with houses that remain desolate. Large X’s are graffitied on the garage doors and remaining siding. Homes are surrounded by overgrown brush and wildflowers.

Along U.S. Highway 70, a bright yellow sign stapled to a telephone pole beckons for the post office to return in thick black handwriting: “USPS WHERE ARE YOU.” Blocks of empty parking lots are surrounded by locked fences. A lot off the highway was home to the original Athens Pizza, operated by the same family for more than two decades. The business was renamed Athens Grille and has since moved into a smaller gas station alcove. Another lot housed the ACE Hardware, formerly a well-equipped store for construction workers, landscapers and homeowners, now void of any sign that a building once stood there.

If you drive too fast, perched beside the parking lot of a former beauty salon, you might miss a makeshift roadside marquee exclaiming “WE CAN DO IT! SI SE PUEDE.” Upon opening the door to the inconspicuous building, people are met with cozy couches and armchairs, big smiles, and lively chatter in Spanish and English. 

Swannanoa Communities Together transformed the space as their hub, with the intention of being a comfortable and communal haven for people seeking resources. A small food pantry in the back offers fresh produce and packaged foods, along with baby formula, diapers, and general toiletries. The bathroom is stocked with free menstrual products and pregnancy tests. 

Trigg helped found the multi-racial and multilingual organization with other women who had already been working in the community. Many have backgrounds organizing around the myriad issues in local policy, while others are specifically trained through economic justice models.

Other community members shouldered new roles in service of their neighbors. They are translators and interpreters, drivers and case managers who checked on families and helped neighbors navigate assistance systems. With local government agencies and nonprofits offering little Spanish-language information during immediate recovery operations, bilingual volunteers became translators and conduits for recovery information.

“Many stepped forward because they knew official information might not reach everyone or that some families might feel afraid or uncertain about asking for help,” said Carmen Ybarra, director of systems and engagement at Swannanoa Communities Together, via email.

One thing that instantly became clear to these advocates post-Helene is that current aid models limit access through eligibility requirements. As residents of Swannanoa Valley, the team knew that not everyone could show proof of a formal income, provide a Social Security number, present a credit history, or pass a criminal background check. Swannanoa Communities Together, thus, offers assistance to anyone who walks through the door. Folks get help paying bills, rent (even back rent) and more.

But the number one priority continues to be housing. And the long-term sustainability of future affordable housing plans presented by local governments makes Trigg and her cohort wary.

“We can help people by ensuring that they have a roof over their head for emergencies, but the actual transition from that to housing stability is really challenging and takes a long time, even with support from us, because of the lack of low-barrier affordable rental housing,” said Trigg. From 2019 to 2023, the median gross rent increased 58%, from $908 per month to $1,438 for a three-bedroom unit. 

Buncombe County is considering public feedback until August 15, for what’s dubbed the Swannanoa Small Area Plan, its proposal for the town’s future as part of the county’s 2043 Comprehensive Plan. A steering committee that Trigg served on met this year to assess the terms. Initial plans focused heavily on tourism and building out areas in Swannanoa that have already begun to transform. One strip includes a coffee shop, a now-closed brewery, and a food store.

Separate from the official steering committee, the women of Swannanoa Communities Together said they submitted a list of recommendations to the county with suggested revisions to the plan and solutions. The group included a five-year moratorium on short-term rentals like Airbnb, and an emphasis on affordable housing. 

On June 15 in a public session, the county agreed to explore a moratorium on short-term rentals. The motion received almost unanimous support from the steering committee.

Ybarra’s mission is to continue bringing Latino residents and other residents of color into the conversations around recovery and its decision-making process. Her work prioritizes “access, trust, dignity, and making complicated systems understandable.”

“Swannanoa’s recovery should not be judged only by repaired buildings, new development, or rising property values. It should be judged by whether the people who were here before Helene are still able to call it home,” Ybarra said.

***

After a full day cleaning a local high school in May 2026, Ana hustles through her last tasks so she can arrive early at the local produce market. Ever since September 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene hit the small mountain town where she’s lived for more than 20 years, Ana has relied on the free weekly market, housed in a defunct church, to feed her family. As she enters the sanctuary on that spring day, sunlight filters through stained glass, and at the bottom of one window a pomegranate glows. Ana leaves carrying bags full of vegetables and a loaf of bread.

The high school that Ana cleans became a relief center after the storm. Across the street, all the houses on two separate cul-de-sacs were destroyed. Nearly two years later, Swannanoa, North Carolina, continues to navigate Helene’s aftermath. The storm demolished the mobile home that Ana shared with her husband and then-teenage children. They made it out unscathed, wearing pajamas and the small blanket Ana’s kids grabbed, losing everything else. “El cascarón,” a shell, was all that was left of the home, she said.

“In that moment, our world caved in,” Ana said in Spanish.

There’s a richness in her voice, delicate and deliberate, as her eyes, rimmed with blue eyeliner, fill with tears that gently spill over. 

Ana witnessed her community wash away that week. Mobile homes raced down a river of stormwater like “barquitos,” little boats, she said.

Outside the market, operated by the nonprofit Bounty & Soul, she gestures toward U.S. Highway 70, the road that had transformed into an unrecognizable flood during that fateful week. It cuts through the rural town of Swannanoa as its main thoroughfare, flanked by the eponymous river on one side and Interstate 40 on the other. 

Ana and her husband, hometown sweethearts from Mexico, were among the first immigrant families to establish roots in their pocket of Swannanoa more than two decades ago. In addition to her work as a school custodian, Ana runs her own event decorating business, working extra nights and almost every weekend on weddings, quinceañeras, and other celebrations in her community. Her husband works as a house painter. 

In the aftermath of Helene, the family spent 53 days without potable water,and Ana’s husband was without paid work for a full year. The family moved into their renovated mobile home on the same lot in June 2025. But for them and their fellow immigrant community in these mountains, the economic and emotional impacts of the storm linger profoundly. 

Their mobile home, where they started and raised a family, is one of more than 100 mobile homes parked on the same circular drive. Plots of land are small — about 30 by 80 feet — and neighbors live in compact proximity to each other. Each home is unique, distinguished by an array of colorful flowers and lush cacti that grow along their perimeters. Cats claim different porches, rushing indoors to peek through colorful patterned window curtains. It’s a neighborhood full of long-established immigrant families, mostly Latino, with a few non-immigrant neighbors in the mix.

The park sits near the river. As floodwaters rose, nearly every home in the neighborhood was flooded or severely damaged. Ana’s home sat at the bottom of the hill, and it was completely destroyed.

The map below shows NCEM floodplain extents across different storm scenarios, along with the buildings at risk within each area. Hurricane Helene is classified as a 1,000-year storm event.

North Carolina is home to an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants, according to 2024 data from the Center for Migration Studies and the University of Minnesota. Because many of these community members don’t self-report their legal status, the data remains a rough estimation. The Latino population makes up 6% of Swannanoa’s population, or just over 1,000 people of approximately 17,000 total, as of 2023. 

Tight-knit neighborhoods of immigrants, mainly from Latin America with the majority from Mexico, are scattered across North Carolina’s mountain region. Many of which take the shape of rural mobile home parks. 

Buncombe County data shows that Helene hit single-family and manufactured housing (like mobile homes) the hardest. Combined, these dwellings make up the majority of housing in the town of Swannanoa. According to the county’s property assessor, there are 19,000 mobile homes in Buncombe County. 11,000 of which are fixed in place while the rest are a combination of single- and double-wide manufactured homes not on permanent foundations and other fixtures ranging from airplanes to campers and boats. Most of these homes are owner-occupied, while 28% are inhabited by renters. Swannanoa includes at least 940 mobile homes, which made up 16% of the town’s total occupied housing in 2023.

For many, mobile homes are a pathway to homeownership for working-class people, especially immigrants, who can purchase them with cash and avoid the rental market. In the face of a federally declared climate disaster, mobile homeowners qualify for FEMA aid if they are also U.S. citizens. Undocumented homeowners, however, do not qualify for any type of FEMA financial assistance. 

North Carolina’s undocumented immigrants bear one of the largest burdens of loss and displacement post-Helene. In interviews with The Margin, immigrants in mobile home parks relayed numerous difficulties, including barriers to FEMA funding, targeting from xenophobic vigilantes, the threat of eviction and an increased federal ICE presence in small-town immigrant enclaves that previously went under the radar. 

While the ground under many homes has long since dried, these hardships persist for many immigrants like Ana almost two years after the storm. 

“I feel like I’m living in a different place,” says Ana.

How FEMA shuts immigrants out of recovery

Commotion woke Hermila Contreras in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina. Contreras’ mobile home sits on the same street where Ana lives, except at the top of the hill. No one knocked on her door (like a firefighter did at Ana’s) to order them to evacuate. So Contreras decided to wait out the storm as water rushed down the hill.

She and her teenage daughter were crouched inside a bedroom when a large tree toppled and crashed through the roof. Rain fell through a gaping hole directly into the kitchen, living room, and the back bedroom as Contreras tried to save important belongings from getting soaked. She looked out the window to see the water rise and rise, engulfing her car. The rain persisted for days. More trees fell, and mobile homes eventually crumbled into the stream of water. Roads became impassable. The family lost power for four months. 

Mobile homes are referred to as “manufactured housing” in federal data terms. Purchasing a double-wide mobile or manufactured home in Swannanoa, N.C., can cost up to $75,000. Additional costs of up to $50,000 can be incurred for moving the structure, preparing a new site, and installation.

Mobile homeowners at parks pay rent for the plot of land where their homes sit. Contreras said her rent is $600 a month, which was due just four days after the storm, on Oct. 1. Even when they own their homes, residents of mobile home parks can get evicted. North Carolina law requires that landlords provide at least 60 days' notice. 

Contreras said she applied for a FEMA offer of $750 three times; The Margin verified that the agency denied her the last time, in November 2025, because her application lacked specific documents including identification and receipts of purchases lost to the storm, including items she’s owned for several years.

Originally from Mexico, Contreras did not yet have legal permanent residency or a driver’s license when she purchased her mobile home 22 years ago and parked it at the Swannanoa park. For this reason, the home was technically in her oldest daughter’s name when Helene hit, though Contreras had paid it off.

Purchasing a mobile home requires a driver’s license, something that does not necessarily apply to standard homeownership. Undocumented immigrants qualify for a driver’s license in only 19 U.S. states, and North Carolina is not one of them. A common workaround is to purchase these homes using a relative or friend’s name, which can complicate applications for FEMA aid.

Contreras obtained permanent residence in the U.S. in 2017. But even a retroactive transfer of the deed in her name after the natural disaster would not qualify her for FEMA assistance. She thinks this discrepancy in paperwork disqualified her for much of the aid she applied for in the early stage of recovery. She even tried to receive aid from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization, which also told her she did not have the proper documents.

A 2021 report by expert advisors to FEMA cited equity issues with several disaster-relief application processes. The FEMA National Advisory Council ultimately recommended that “alternative forms of documented ownership should also be accepted for instances involving loss of a mobile home.” That recommendation has not been taken.

Like many mixed-status families, Ana said she applied for and received FEMA financial aid through one of her adult, U.S. citizen children. FEMA awarded her family $25,000, meeting only a fraction of their need. Ana estimates total costs for the new home reached $60,000. Her husband didn’t work for a year to oversee the entire project, and did as much as he could himself. They received additional support, such as construction supplies from CORE, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world, now with a team in Swannanoa led by Antonio Garcia, a Salvadoran who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16. Garcia said CORE helped reconstruct 25 mobile homes in Ana’s neighborhood.

As recovery began in the wake of Helene, the end of the month and its various due dates loomed. On Sept. 30, 2024, Contreras said various volunteers who were helping out all day in her neighborhood convened with the on-site park manager, a Spanish-speaking Latino, and a few residents. It wasn’t a planned meeting, but “we took the opportunity to ask about the rent,” she says. That’s when they were told it was still due the very next day.

Through her community and established “confianza,” Contreras connected with community organizer Dulce Mirian Porras-Rosas, who had been advocating for rent forgiveness with a mobile home park in nearby Candler, to no avail. Porras-Rosas told The Margin that she doesn’t personally know of any mobile home park landlord who forgave rent or offered an extension post-Helene.

For almost two years, Contreras has been living with flood damage and a hole in her roof that neighbors helped cover with tarp. Contreras was out of work for months—ironically, her job is in construction. Today, visible signs of black mold have appeared along the ceiling, which has been temporarily patched. 

Fortunately, Porras-Rosas connected Contreras to resources, which eventually led to a successful application with Renew NC, the state’s revamped 2025 home recovery program. Contreras expects a new mobile home by December.

Evacuations and evictions 

Porras-Rosas, who lives in a mobile home in Asheville, has spent years in community activism throughout the Carolina mountain region. She co-founded the Asheville group Semilla de Vida, an organization that began as a way to teach and promote food justice. When the storm hit, the group took action. In a mostly immigrant neighborhood, they distributed generators, water, food, and tools. Organizers also raised and distributed $9,000 in immediate rental and relocation assistance following Helene, money collected from neighbors and friends.

The hurricane not only changed the ecological panorama of the region, but also the economic and social dynamics. Many people had to relocate after having been woven into the fabric of this community.

Buncombe County never implemented a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures despite persistent advocacy from community leaders and housing advocates. In March 2025, a group of state senators introduced Senate Bill 395, the Disaster Relief Eviction Moratorium Act, in the North Carolina Legislature. The bill stalled after going to committee and has not come up for a vote. 

While the federal government can administer programs to prevent evictions through HUD policies and, in some instances, federal aid, the eviction process itself is largely governed by state and local policy. Moreover, there is no federal mandate to disclose eviction data.

“Finding more detailed data on other characteristics, like country of origin, income, or immigration status, can be almost impossible,” said Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager for The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. This means the actual scale of Helene's displacement of North Carolina's immigrant communities is impossible to track, since these communities typically don't qualify for federal disaster assistance.

When demographic information is documented in eviction court records, a court clerk typically enters it manually or a tenant self-reports, making the data neither systematic nor reliable. Even outside of climate disasters, Black and Latina women are more likely to be evicted than their male counterparts. For Latina women specifically, the risk of eviction is approximately 9% higher than it is for Latino men. 

“On top of that,” said Garnham, “we know that there are a large number of people who experience evictions informally and avoid going to court. Local experts and anecdotal experiences point in the same direction that undocumented tenants tend to be part of this group, and it’s extremely difficult to quantify their experiences.”

Burdened with back rent and the looming possibility of eviction, many Swannanoa renters and mobile homeowners sought help from Swannanoa Communities Together, the organization founded by a group of local women in Helene’s wake.

“What we have witnessed here in Swannanoa, starting in the immediate aftermath of the storm, is people who were displaced by the storm, who were living in their cars or tents or RVs, or sometimes if they could get a motel,” said Beth Trigg, co-founder of Swannanoa Communities Together.

To date, Trigg said they have provided almost $1.1 million in financial assistance to almost 1,000 households from October 2024 to May 2026. 

Paulina, who chose to only use her first name, is one of two bilingual Latina leaders at Swannanoa Communities Together. Before the storm, she and her family rented a large swath of land in Swannanoa. At first, only a couple of mobile homes occupied the land. One belonged to Paulina, where she lived with her family, and the other was occupied by the landowner. 

Over the next decade, Paulina slowly purchased more mobile homes to rent out to community members, while she managed leasing the land. By 2024, she collected rent from six households, the majority Latino, some including her family members.

In the early morning of Sept. 27, 2024, at the first sign of danger, Paulina began knocking on her tenants’ doors, every single one.

“We woke up the last family at 2 a.m.,” she said, in Spanish, of the last home they alerted. Within an hour, the two families evacuated to a nearby hotel together. Paulina recalls the electricity going out at 4 a.m, and that by the time the sun came up, everything had flooded. Paulina’s home and all of the mobile homes up on the hill where she lived had been destroyed.

Two weeks later, bouncing from shelter to shelter, Paulina and her team at Swannanoa Communities Together began receiving calls from people desperate to find help paying rent. It dawned on her that, as a landlord, she never collected rent. Neither did the landowner from whom she leased the rental plots.

“There was absolutely nothing left,” she said in Spanish. “How are you going to charge rent?”

When North Carolina mobile home parks evict residents, a landlord or management company can eventually obtain a writ of possession, which could result in the landlord possessing  the property until the debt is paid.  

“If you get evicted from a mobile home park, you will have to choose from the least bad of three options,” said Garnham of The Eviction Lab. “Abandon your property outright, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or try to move it to another location.”

According to an analysis of county court records by NC Eviction Watchdog, a project of the North Carolina Tenants Union, at least 391 evictions for mobile homes were filed in western North Carolina since Helene.

Another tricky reality for mobile homeowners is forced displacement due to the sale of the mobile home park land, often to developers. Dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a federal eviction moratorium, some park owners selling their property would give residents a few months to find a new place for their homes. This type of upheaval continues today for hundreds of families in mobile home parks across the state.

In March 2025, three state senators proposed Senate Bill 518, the Mobile Home Park Act, to better protect mobile homeowners. The bill was referred to committee, but did not come up for a vote. As a housing reform bill, it would provide stronger protection for tenants and require park owners to register with the North Carolina Human Rights Commission. Owners would have to comply with health and safety rules while adhering to new standards that limit rent increases.

‘The house of my dreams is gone’

Monica, a fast food worker, and her husband, who works landscaping jobs, felt excited when they found a beautiful home that they could afford in 2014. For 10 years, the homeowners grew their family on a quiet, friendly street. Five children grew up there, where they played on the swing set in the backyard, hanging piñatas from a large oak tree on their birthdays. The brick house boasts a secluded courtyard entrance leading into a cabin-like interior that, before the storm, warmed the home in natural wood paneled walls, floors, and ceilings. 

Today, the home has been gutted down to the wooden studs. After Helene, people cut the electricity and stripped the copper. The now-naked interior is a sight the family thought they would never see. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred battered and flooded the home. Monica and her family lost all of their belongings. They worked to prevent similar disasters in the future by raising all of their power outlets by six inches. FEMA flood insurance, which the undocumented couple secured after Fred through one of their children who is a citizen, was also running out, with only two months left of coverage. Following Helene, Monica said they did not qualify for further FEMA aid, like the buyout,  due to previous assistance they’d received.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program purchases flood-damaged properties from homeowners for up to 75% of the costs, with the remaining portion typically being funded by state or local governments. Properties are assessed at pre-disaster market value and are restricted by limits to future development in flood-prone areas. However, an undocumented immigrant homeowner cannot apply for this type of buyout.

The family needs funds to raise their home off the ground, Monica said, an expensive effort they cannot afford on their own. And they are still paying a mortgage on a home they cannot live in.

Monica walks out of the house, stepping over a wooden door that she does not recognize, splayed out in the yard, “carried by the water” from a stranger’s home. She rounds the corner to find her Knock Out roses in full bloom, creating a luminous reflection in a large puddle of water on the street.      

The house of my dreams is gone.

                                      ***

The storm hit the same year that President Donald Trump was elected for a second term. 

Historically, undocumented immigrants have been wary of federal disaster relief because FEMA is housed under the Dept. of Homeland Security, which includes both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. After any natural disaster in the U.S., it is common for Border Patrol agents to be deployed to assist in recovery. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Margin that agents were on the ground in western North Carolina after Helene. 

“For us [as immigrants] it’s a double whammy,” said Porras-Rosas in Spanish. “We’re living in really complicated times. It’s immoral, this corner they have us backed into. And it’s unnecessary.”

Reports of militia groups in the immediate aftermath of Helene became a snapshot in international media of the compounding crises of disaster recovery, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Locally, they amplified fear, especially in immigrant communities. These militias seemed to track far-right criticism toward federal aid. 

In 2021, the Biden administration designated places for disaster or emergency response as “protected areas,” where immigration agents would not engage in enforcement actions. However, in January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded that policy, the clearest indication that disaster victims might potentially become enforcement targets. ICE can use what it calls “common sense enforcement” in sensitive locations where those operations were previously prohibited. This previously required a judicial warrant but advocates warned that now enforcement can happen without one, instead only needing an administrative order by the agency

Reports of intimidation continue. In a video obtained by The Margin, a traffic cone with a U.S. Border Patrol ballcap was placed outside of a predominantly Latino mobile home park in Buncombe County in May. CBP told The Margin that they were not in Buncombe County in May 2026. 

It’s an image that feels symbolic. In June of this year, North Carolina passed a law, known as "North Carolina Border Protection Act,” that requires the state highway patrol and the Department of Public Safety to collaborate with ICE, which killed two more people in the U.S. in July. Neither person was who the agency was looking for. The legislation also effectively ends any sanctuary policies in the state. The bill passed after the state House of Representatives overrode Governor Stein’s veto. 

On July 26, sheriffs in Caldwell County, 65 miles east of Buncombe County confirmed collaboration with ICE and the U.S. Forest Service at a checkpoint at Wilson Creek park. The federal immigration enforcement operation resulted in the ICE arrest of 13 people.

Housing on the horizon

There are parts of Swannanoa that feel forgotten. Down the road from Ana and Contreras’ mobile home park, several residential cul-de-sacs are dotted with houses that remain desolate. Large X’s are graffitied on the garage doors and remaining siding. Homes are surrounded by overgrown brush and wildflowers.

Along U.S. Highway 70, a bright yellow sign stapled to a telephone pole beckons for the post office to return in thick black handwriting: “USPS WHERE ARE YOU.” Blocks of empty parking lots are surrounded by locked fences. A lot off the highway was home to the original Athens Pizza, operated by the same family for more than two decades. The business was renamed Athens Grille and has since moved into a smaller gas station alcove. Another lot housed the ACE Hardware, formerly a well-equipped store for construction workers, landscapers and homeowners, now void of any sign that a building once stood there.

If you drive too fast, perched beside the parking lot of a former beauty salon, you might miss a makeshift roadside marquee exclaiming “WE CAN DO IT! SI SE PUEDE.” Upon opening the door to the inconspicuous building, people are met with cozy couches and armchairs, big smiles, and lively chatter in Spanish and English. 

Swannanoa Communities Together transformed the space as their hub, with the intention of being a comfortable and communal haven for people seeking resources. A small food pantry in the back offers fresh produce and packaged foods, along with baby formula, diapers, and general toiletries. The bathroom is stocked with free menstrual products and pregnancy tests. 

Trigg helped found the multi-racial and multilingual organization with other women who had already been working in the community. Many have backgrounds organizing around the myriad issues in local policy, while others are specifically trained through economic justice models.

Other community members shouldered new roles in service of their neighbors. They are translators and interpreters, drivers and case managers who checked on families and helped neighbors navigate assistance systems. With local government agencies and nonprofits offering little Spanish-language information during immediate recovery operations, bilingual volunteers became translators and conduits for recovery information.

“Many stepped forward because they knew official information might not reach everyone or that some families might feel afraid or uncertain about asking for help,” said Carmen Ybarra, director of systems and engagement at Swannanoa Communities Together, via email.

One thing that instantly became clear to these advocates post-Helene is that current aid models limit access through eligibility requirements. As residents of Swannanoa Valley, the team knew that not everyone could show proof of a formal income, provide a Social Security number, present a credit history, or pass a criminal background check. Swannanoa Communities Together, thus, offers assistance to anyone who walks through the door. Folks get help paying bills, rent (even back rent) and more.

But the number one priority continues to be housing. And the long-term sustainability of future affordable housing plans presented by local governments makes Trigg and her cohort wary.

“We can help people by ensuring that they have a roof over their head for emergencies, but the actual transition from that to housing stability is really challenging and takes a long time, even with support from us, because of the lack of low-barrier affordable rental housing,” said Trigg. From 2019 to 2023, the median gross rent increased 58%, from $908 per month to $1,438 for a three-bedroom unit. 

Buncombe County is considering public feedback until August 15, for what’s dubbed the Swannanoa Small Area Plan, its proposal for the town’s future as part of the county’s 2043 Comprehensive Plan. A steering committee that Trigg served on met this year to assess the terms. Initial plans focused heavily on tourism and building out areas in Swannanoa that have already begun to transform. One strip includes a coffee shop, a now-closed brewery, and a food store.

Separate from the official steering committee, the women of Swannanoa Communities Together said they submitted a list of recommendations to the county with suggested revisions to the plan and solutions. The group included a five-year moratorium on short-term rentals like Airbnb, and an emphasis on affordable housing. 

On June 15 in a public session, the county agreed to explore a moratorium on short-term rentals. The motion received almost unanimous support from the steering committee.

Ybarra’s mission is to continue bringing Latino residents and other residents of color into the conversations around recovery and its decision-making process. Her work prioritizes “access, trust, dignity, and making complicated systems understandable.”

“Swannanoa’s recovery should not be judged only by repaired buildings, new development, or rising property values. It should be judged by whether the people who were here before Helene are still able to call it home,” Ybarra said.

***

After a full day cleaning a local high school in May 2026, Ana hustles through her last tasks so she can arrive early at the local produce market. Ever since September 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene hit the small mountain town where she’s lived for more than 20 years, Ana has relied on the free weekly market, housed in a defunct church, to feed her family. As she enters the sanctuary on that spring day, sunlight filters through stained glass, and at the bottom of one window a pomegranate glows. Ana leaves carrying bags full of vegetables and a loaf of bread.

The high school that Ana cleans became a relief center after the storm. Across the street, all the houses on two separate cul-de-sacs were destroyed. Nearly two years later, Swannanoa, North Carolina, continues to navigate Helene’s aftermath. The storm demolished the mobile home that Ana shared with her husband and then-teenage children. They made it out unscathed, wearing pajamas and the small blanket Ana’s kids grabbed, losing everything else. “El cascarón,” a shell, was all that was left of the home, she said.

“In that moment, our world caved in,” Ana said in Spanish.

There’s a richness in her voice, delicate and deliberate, as her eyes, rimmed with blue eyeliner, fill with tears that gently spill over. 

Ana witnessed her community wash away that week. Mobile homes raced down a river of stormwater like “barquitos,” little boats, she said.

Outside the market, operated by the nonprofit Bounty & Soul, she gestures toward U.S. Highway 70, the road that had transformed into an unrecognizable flood during that fateful week. It cuts through the rural town of Swannanoa as its main thoroughfare, flanked by the eponymous river on one side and Interstate 40 on the other. 

Ana and her husband, hometown sweethearts from Mexico, were among the first immigrant families to establish roots in their pocket of Swannanoa more than two decades ago. In addition to her work as a school custodian, Ana runs her own event decorating business, working extra nights and almost every weekend on weddings, quinceañeras, and other celebrations in her community. Her husband works as a house painter. 

In the aftermath of Helene, the family spent 53 days without potable water,and Ana’s husband was without paid work for a full year. The family moved into their renovated mobile home on the same lot in June 2025. But for them and their fellow immigrant community in these mountains, the economic and emotional impacts of the storm linger profoundly. 

Their mobile home, where they started and raised a family, is one of more than 100 mobile homes parked on the same circular drive. Plots of land are small — about 30 by 80 feet — and neighbors live in compact proximity to each other. Each home is unique, distinguished by an array of colorful flowers and lush cacti that grow along their perimeters. Cats claim different porches, rushing indoors to peek through colorful patterned window curtains. It’s a neighborhood full of long-established immigrant families, mostly Latino, with a few non-immigrant neighbors in the mix.

The park sits near the river. As floodwaters rose, nearly every home in the neighborhood was flooded or severely damaged. Ana’s home sat at the bottom of the hill, and it was completely destroyed.

The map below shows NCEM floodplain extents across different storm scenarios, along with the buildings at risk within each area. Hurricane Helene is classified as a 1,000-year storm event.

North Carolina is home to an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants, according to 2024 data from the Center for Migration Studies and the University of Minnesota. Because many of these community members don’t self-report their legal status, the data remains a rough estimation. The Latino population makes up 6% of Swannanoa’s population, or just over 1,000 people of approximately 17,000 total, as of 2023. 

Tight-knit neighborhoods of immigrants, mainly from Latin America with the majority from Mexico, are scattered across North Carolina’s mountain region. Many of which take the shape of rural mobile home parks. 

Buncombe County data shows that Helene hit single-family and manufactured housing (like mobile homes) the hardest. Combined, these dwellings make up the majority of housing in the town of Swannanoa. According to the county’s property assessor, there are 19,000 mobile homes in Buncombe County. 11,000 of which are fixed in place while the rest are a combination of single- and double-wide manufactured homes not on permanent foundations and other fixtures ranging from airplanes to campers and boats. Most of these homes are owner-occupied, while 28% are inhabited by renters. Swannanoa includes at least 940 mobile homes, which made up 16% of the town’s total occupied housing in 2023.

For many, mobile homes are a pathway to homeownership for working-class people, especially immigrants, who can purchase them with cash and avoid the rental market. In the face of a federally declared climate disaster, mobile homeowners qualify for FEMA aid if they are also U.S. citizens. Undocumented homeowners, however, do not qualify for any type of FEMA financial assistance. 

North Carolina’s undocumented immigrants bear one of the largest burdens of loss and displacement post-Helene. In interviews with The Margin, immigrants in mobile home parks relayed numerous difficulties, including barriers to FEMA funding, targeting from xenophobic vigilantes, the threat of eviction and an increased federal ICE presence in small-town immigrant enclaves that previously went under the radar. 

While the ground under many homes has long since dried, these hardships persist for many immigrants like Ana almost two years after the storm. 

“I feel like I’m living in a different place,” says Ana.

How FEMA shuts immigrants out of recovery

Commotion woke Hermila Contreras in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina. Contreras’ mobile home sits on the same street where Ana lives, except at the top of the hill. No one knocked on her door (like a firefighter did at Ana’s) to order them to evacuate. So Contreras decided to wait out the storm as water rushed down the hill.

She and her teenage daughter were crouched inside a bedroom when a large tree toppled and crashed through the roof. Rain fell through a gaping hole directly into the kitchen, living room, and the back bedroom as Contreras tried to save important belongings from getting soaked. She looked out the window to see the water rise and rise, engulfing her car. The rain persisted for days. More trees fell, and mobile homes eventually crumbled into the stream of water. Roads became impassable. The family lost power for four months. 

Mobile homes are referred to as “manufactured housing” in federal data terms. Purchasing a double-wide mobile or manufactured home in Swannanoa, N.C., can cost up to $75,000. Additional costs of up to $50,000 can be incurred for moving the structure, preparing a new site, and installation.

Mobile homeowners at parks pay rent for the plot of land where their homes sit. Contreras said her rent is $600 a month, which was due just four days after the storm, on Oct. 1. Even when they own their homes, residents of mobile home parks can get evicted. North Carolina law requires that landlords provide at least 60 days' notice. 

Contreras said she applied for a FEMA offer of $750 three times; The Margin verified that the agency denied her the last time, in November 2025, because her application lacked specific documents including identification and receipts of purchases lost to the storm, including items she’s owned for several years.

Originally from Mexico, Contreras did not yet have legal permanent residency or a driver’s license when she purchased her mobile home 22 years ago and parked it at the Swannanoa park. For this reason, the home was technically in her oldest daughter’s name when Helene hit, though Contreras had paid it off.

Purchasing a mobile home requires a driver’s license, something that does not necessarily apply to standard homeownership. Undocumented immigrants qualify for a driver’s license in only 19 U.S. states, and North Carolina is not one of them. A common workaround is to purchase these homes using a relative or friend’s name, which can complicate applications for FEMA aid.

Contreras obtained permanent residence in the U.S. in 2017. But even a retroactive transfer of the deed in her name after the natural disaster would not qualify her for FEMA assistance. She thinks this discrepancy in paperwork disqualified her for much of the aid she applied for in the early stage of recovery. She even tried to receive aid from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization, which also told her she did not have the proper documents.

A 2021 report by expert advisors to FEMA cited equity issues with several disaster-relief application processes. The FEMA National Advisory Council ultimately recommended that “alternative forms of documented ownership should also be accepted for instances involving loss of a mobile home.” That recommendation has not been taken.

Like many mixed-status families, Ana said she applied for and received FEMA financial aid through one of her adult, U.S. citizen children. FEMA awarded her family $25,000, meeting only a fraction of their need. Ana estimates total costs for the new home reached $60,000. Her husband didn’t work for a year to oversee the entire project, and did as much as he could himself. They received additional support, such as construction supplies from CORE, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world, now with a team in Swannanoa led by Antonio Garcia, a Salvadoran who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16. Garcia said CORE helped reconstruct 25 mobile homes in Ana’s neighborhood.

As recovery began in the wake of Helene, the end of the month and its various due dates loomed. On Sept. 30, 2024, Contreras said various volunteers who were helping out all day in her neighborhood convened with the on-site park manager, a Spanish-speaking Latino, and a few residents. It wasn’t a planned meeting, but “we took the opportunity to ask about the rent,” she says. That’s when they were told it was still due the very next day.

Through her community and established “confianza,” Contreras connected with community organizer Dulce Mirian Porras-Rosas, who had been advocating for rent forgiveness with a mobile home park in nearby Candler, to no avail. Porras-Rosas told The Margin that she doesn’t personally know of any mobile home park landlord who forgave rent or offered an extension post-Helene.

For almost two years, Contreras has been living with flood damage and a hole in her roof that neighbors helped cover with tarp. Contreras was out of work for months—ironically, her job is in construction. Today, visible signs of black mold have appeared along the ceiling, which has been temporarily patched. 

Fortunately, Porras-Rosas connected Contreras to resources, which eventually led to a successful application with Renew NC, the state’s revamped 2025 home recovery program. Contreras expects a new mobile home by December.

Evacuations and evictions 

Porras-Rosas, who lives in a mobile home in Asheville, has spent years in community activism throughout the Carolina mountain region. She co-founded the Asheville group Semilla de Vida, an organization that began as a way to teach and promote food justice. When the storm hit, the group took action. In a mostly immigrant neighborhood, they distributed generators, water, food, and tools. Organizers also raised and distributed $9,000 in immediate rental and relocation assistance following Helene, money collected from neighbors and friends.

The hurricane not only changed the ecological panorama of the region, but also the economic and social dynamics. Many people had to relocate after having been woven into the fabric of this community.

Buncombe County never implemented a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures despite persistent advocacy from community leaders and housing advocates. In March 2025, a group of state senators introduced Senate Bill 395, the Disaster Relief Eviction Moratorium Act, in the North Carolina Legislature. The bill stalled after going to committee and has not come up for a vote. 

While the federal government can administer programs to prevent evictions through HUD policies and, in some instances, federal aid, the eviction process itself is largely governed by state and local policy. Moreover, there is no federal mandate to disclose eviction data.

“Finding more detailed data on other characteristics, like country of origin, income, or immigration status, can be almost impossible,” said Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager for The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. This means the actual scale of Helene's displacement of North Carolina's immigrant communities is impossible to track, since these communities typically don't qualify for federal disaster assistance.

When demographic information is documented in eviction court records, a court clerk typically enters it manually or a tenant self-reports, making the data neither systematic nor reliable. Even outside of climate disasters, Black and Latina women are more likely to be evicted than their male counterparts. For Latina women specifically, the risk of eviction is approximately 9% higher than it is for Latino men. 

“On top of that,” said Garnham, “we know that there are a large number of people who experience evictions informally and avoid going to court. Local experts and anecdotal experiences point in the same direction that undocumented tenants tend to be part of this group, and it’s extremely difficult to quantify their experiences.”

Burdened with back rent and the looming possibility of eviction, many Swannanoa renters and mobile homeowners sought help from Swannanoa Communities Together, the organization founded by a group of local women in Helene’s wake.

“What we have witnessed here in Swannanoa, starting in the immediate aftermath of the storm, is people who were displaced by the storm, who were living in their cars or tents or RVs, or sometimes if they could get a motel,” said Beth Trigg, co-founder of Swannanoa Communities Together.

To date, Trigg said they have provided almost $1.1 million in financial assistance to almost 1,000 households from October 2024 to May 2026. 

Paulina, who chose to only use her first name, is one of two bilingual Latina leaders at Swannanoa Communities Together. Before the storm, she and her family rented a large swath of land in Swannanoa. At first, only a couple of mobile homes occupied the land. One belonged to Paulina, where she lived with her family, and the other was occupied by the landowner. 

Over the next decade, Paulina slowly purchased more mobile homes to rent out to community members, while she managed leasing the land. By 2024, she collected rent from six households, the majority Latino, some including her family members.

In the early morning of Sept. 27, 2024, at the first sign of danger, Paulina began knocking on her tenants’ doors, every single one.

“We woke up the last family at 2 a.m.,” she said, in Spanish, of the last home they alerted. Within an hour, the two families evacuated to a nearby hotel together. Paulina recalls the electricity going out at 4 a.m, and that by the time the sun came up, everything had flooded. Paulina’s home and all of the mobile homes up on the hill where she lived had been destroyed.

Two weeks later, bouncing from shelter to shelter, Paulina and her team at Swannanoa Communities Together began receiving calls from people desperate to find help paying rent. It dawned on her that, as a landlord, she never collected rent. Neither did the landowner from whom she leased the rental plots.

“There was absolutely nothing left,” she said in Spanish. “How are you going to charge rent?”

When North Carolina mobile home parks evict residents, a landlord or management company can eventually obtain a writ of possession, which could result in the landlord possessing  the property until the debt is paid.  

“If you get evicted from a mobile home park, you will have to choose from the least bad of three options,” said Garnham of The Eviction Lab. “Abandon your property outright, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or try to move it to another location.”

According to an analysis of county court records by NC Eviction Watchdog, a project of the North Carolina Tenants Union, at least 391 evictions for mobile homes were filed in western North Carolina since Helene.

Another tricky reality for mobile homeowners is forced displacement due to the sale of the mobile home park land, often to developers. Dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a federal eviction moratorium, some park owners selling their property would give residents a few months to find a new place for their homes. This type of upheaval continues today for hundreds of families in mobile home parks across the state.

In March 2025, three state senators proposed Senate Bill 518, the Mobile Home Park Act, to better protect mobile homeowners. The bill was referred to committee, but did not come up for a vote. As a housing reform bill, it would provide stronger protection for tenants and require park owners to register with the North Carolina Human Rights Commission. Owners would have to comply with health and safety rules while adhering to new standards that limit rent increases.

‘The house of my dreams is gone’

Monica, a fast food worker, and her husband, who works landscaping jobs, felt excited when they found a beautiful home that they could afford in 2014. For 10 years, the homeowners grew their family on a quiet, friendly street. Five children grew up there, where they played on the swing set in the backyard, hanging piñatas from a large oak tree on their birthdays. The brick house boasts a secluded courtyard entrance leading into a cabin-like interior that, before the storm, warmed the home in natural wood paneled walls, floors, and ceilings. 

Today, the home has been gutted down to the wooden studs. After Helene, people cut the electricity and stripped the copper. The now-naked interior is a sight the family thought they would never see. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred battered and flooded the home. Monica and her family lost all of their belongings. They worked to prevent similar disasters in the future by raising all of their power outlets by six inches. FEMA flood insurance, which the undocumented couple secured after Fred through one of their children who is a citizen, was also running out, with only two months left of coverage. Following Helene, Monica said they did not qualify for further FEMA aid, like the buyout,  due to previous assistance they’d received.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program purchases flood-damaged properties from homeowners for up to 75% of the costs, with the remaining portion typically being funded by state or local governments. Properties are assessed at pre-disaster market value and are restricted by limits to future development in flood-prone areas. However, an undocumented immigrant homeowner cannot apply for this type of buyout.

The family needs funds to raise their home off the ground, Monica said, an expensive effort they cannot afford on their own. And they are still paying a mortgage on a home they cannot live in.

Monica walks out of the house, stepping over a wooden door that she does not recognize, splayed out in the yard, “carried by the water” from a stranger’s home. She rounds the corner to find her Knock Out roses in full bloom, creating a luminous reflection in a large puddle of water on the street.      

The house of my dreams is gone.

                                      ***

The storm hit the same year that President Donald Trump was elected for a second term. 

Historically, undocumented immigrants have been wary of federal disaster relief because FEMA is housed under the Dept. of Homeland Security, which includes both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. After any natural disaster in the U.S., it is common for Border Patrol agents to be deployed to assist in recovery. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Margin that agents were on the ground in western North Carolina after Helene. 

“For us [as immigrants] it’s a double whammy,” said Porras-Rosas in Spanish. “We’re living in really complicated times. It’s immoral, this corner they have us backed into. And it’s unnecessary.”

Reports of militia groups in the immediate aftermath of Helene became a snapshot in international media of the compounding crises of disaster recovery, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Locally, they amplified fear, especially in immigrant communities. These militias seemed to track far-right criticism toward federal aid. 

In 2021, the Biden administration designated places for disaster or emergency response as “protected areas,” where immigration agents would not engage in enforcement actions. However, in January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded that policy, the clearest indication that disaster victims might potentially become enforcement targets. ICE can use what it calls “common sense enforcement” in sensitive locations where those operations were previously prohibited. This previously required a judicial warrant but advocates warned that now enforcement can happen without one, instead only needing an administrative order by the agency

Reports of intimidation continue. In a video obtained by The Margin, a traffic cone with a U.S. Border Patrol ballcap was placed outside of a predominantly Latino mobile home park in Buncombe County in May. CBP told The Margin that they were not in Buncombe County in May 2026. 

It’s an image that feels symbolic. In June of this year, North Carolina passed a law, known as "North Carolina Border Protection Act,” that requires the state highway patrol and the Department of Public Safety to collaborate with ICE, which killed two more people in the U.S. in July. Neither person was who the agency was looking for. The legislation also effectively ends any sanctuary policies in the state. The bill passed after the state House of Representatives overrode Governor Stein’s veto. 

On July 26, sheriffs in Caldwell County, 65 miles east of Buncombe County confirmed collaboration with ICE and the U.S. Forest Service at a checkpoint at Wilson Creek park. The federal immigration enforcement operation resulted in the ICE arrest of 13 people.

Housing on the horizon

There are parts of Swannanoa that feel forgotten. Down the road from Ana and Contreras’ mobile home park, several residential cul-de-sacs are dotted with houses that remain desolate. Large X’s are graffitied on the garage doors and remaining siding. Homes are surrounded by overgrown brush and wildflowers.

Along U.S. Highway 70, a bright yellow sign stapled to a telephone pole beckons for the post office to return in thick black handwriting: “USPS WHERE ARE YOU.” Blocks of empty parking lots are surrounded by locked fences. A lot off the highway was home to the original Athens Pizza, operated by the same family for more than two decades. The business was renamed Athens Grille and has since moved into a smaller gas station alcove. Another lot housed the ACE Hardware, formerly a well-equipped store for construction workers, landscapers and homeowners, now void of any sign that a building once stood there.

If you drive too fast, perched beside the parking lot of a former beauty salon, you might miss a makeshift roadside marquee exclaiming “WE CAN DO IT! SI SE PUEDE.” Upon opening the door to the inconspicuous building, people are met with cozy couches and armchairs, big smiles, and lively chatter in Spanish and English. 

Swannanoa Communities Together transformed the space as their hub, with the intention of being a comfortable and communal haven for people seeking resources. A small food pantry in the back offers fresh produce and packaged foods, along with baby formula, diapers, and general toiletries. The bathroom is stocked with free menstrual products and pregnancy tests. 

Trigg helped found the multi-racial and multilingual organization with other women who had already been working in the community. Many have backgrounds organizing around the myriad issues in local policy, while others are specifically trained through economic justice models.

Other community members shouldered new roles in service of their neighbors. They are translators and interpreters, drivers and case managers who checked on families and helped neighbors navigate assistance systems. With local government agencies and nonprofits offering little Spanish-language information during immediate recovery operations, bilingual volunteers became translators and conduits for recovery information.

“Many stepped forward because they knew official information might not reach everyone or that some families might feel afraid or uncertain about asking for help,” said Carmen Ybarra, director of systems and engagement at Swannanoa Communities Together, via email.

One thing that instantly became clear to these advocates post-Helene is that current aid models limit access through eligibility requirements. As residents of Swannanoa Valley, the team knew that not everyone could show proof of a formal income, provide a Social Security number, present a credit history, or pass a criminal background check. Swannanoa Communities Together, thus, offers assistance to anyone who walks through the door. Folks get help paying bills, rent (even back rent) and more.

But the number one priority continues to be housing. And the long-term sustainability of future affordable housing plans presented by local governments makes Trigg and her cohort wary.

“We can help people by ensuring that they have a roof over their head for emergencies, but the actual transition from that to housing stability is really challenging and takes a long time, even with support from us, because of the lack of low-barrier affordable rental housing,” said Trigg. From 2019 to 2023, the median gross rent increased 58%, from $908 per month to $1,438 for a three-bedroom unit. 

Buncombe County is considering public feedback until August 15, for what’s dubbed the Swannanoa Small Area Plan, its proposal for the town’s future as part of the county’s 2043 Comprehensive Plan. A steering committee that Trigg served on met this year to assess the terms. Initial plans focused heavily on tourism and building out areas in Swannanoa that have already begun to transform. One strip includes a coffee shop, a now-closed brewery, and a food store.

Separate from the official steering committee, the women of Swannanoa Communities Together said they submitted a list of recommendations to the county with suggested revisions to the plan and solutions. The group included a five-year moratorium on short-term rentals like Airbnb, and an emphasis on affordable housing. 

On June 15 in a public session, the county agreed to explore a moratorium on short-term rentals. The motion received almost unanimous support from the steering committee.

Ybarra’s mission is to continue bringing Latino residents and other residents of color into the conversations around recovery and its decision-making process. Her work prioritizes “access, trust, dignity, and making complicated systems understandable.”

“Swannanoa’s recovery should not be judged only by repaired buildings, new development, or rising property values. It should be judged by whether the people who were here before Helene are still able to call it home,” Ybarra said.

***