If you’ve spent any time outdoors lately, you know it’s hot out there. Unbearably so, in fact. July 22 was the planet’s hottest day on record, and 2024 is on track to be its hottest year, beating the previous record set in 2023. The weather feels like the warmest it’s ever been, too. In cities around the world, just walking a few blocks from one air-conditioned building to the next is enough to soak your shirt with sweat. In Japan, people have bought more than 100 million parasols to shield themselves against the burning sun. Climate change is making people truly miserable. But can you imagine how hellish life would be if you didn’t have air conditioning indoors, either? That’s the situation for thousands of American prisoners, some of whom have been literally baking to death in concrete-and-metal cells. But it’s worse than that. This is also how many U.S. landlords want their tenants to live, and they’re actively lobbying against any legislation that would force them to cool their properties to a livable temperature. The question of who will and won’t receive cooling is rapidly becoming a political battle—and it’s vital that the landlords lose. 

By now, it’s fairly well-known that rising summer temperatures are a deadly threat. According to data from the CDC, deaths from extreme heat in the United States have increased dramatically in the last few years, with 2,302 fatalities in 2023 compared to 1,722 the previous year—an increase of 33.7 percent. (Experts also believe these figures are “absolutely undercounted.”) Unsurprisingly, people who spend a lot of time outside—especially manual laborers and the homeless—are at the greatest risk. But extreme heat can be deadly indoors, too. There’s less data on this side of things, since many record-keeping authorities don’t make a distinction between indoor and outdoor heat deaths. In the handful of areas that do, though, the statistics are scary. In Maricopa County, Arizona (which includes the city of Phoenix), the Department of Public Health recorded 156 heat-related deaths indoors in 2023, a sizable portion of the total death toll of 645. In 85 percent of  cases where an air conditioner was present, it was broken; in 9 percent of all cases, there was no air conditioner on site at all. In New York City, the latest Heat-Related Mortality Report records an average of 350 deaths per year, and notes that “among those who died from heat stress, the place of death was most often an un-air-conditioned home.” Elsewhere in the country, there are anecdotal cases that echo that finding. This month, the Texas Tribune reported the story of a 68-year-old man who was “found dead on the couch in his Fort Worth home,” in which “the air conditioning was broken and the temperature inside the house was 91 degrees,” back in June 2023. (Stop to think about that, for a second. Imagine sitting down for what you think is a quick nap on a hot day, only to never wake again. It’s hideous.)

Why are so many people dying with broken air conditioners on their walls, or empty spaces where an AC unit should be? There could be a few reasons. For people who own their homes, it could be that they simply can’t afford to buy and/or repair a decent air conditioner—even the small ones are expensive, it turns out. Or they might have some physical handicap from illness or age that prevents them from hoisting a heavy metal box up a ladder. But for those of us who rent—and that’s 36 percent of Americans, by the last census—the answer is simple: landlords. They aren’t fixing their properties’ basic hardware, or bothering to provide it in the first place, and people are getting hurt. (This is especially a problem for low-income renters. In his 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, sociologist Matthew Desmond followed landlords and tenants in Milwaukee and documented how landlords profited from dilapidated and poorly-maintained properties, even choosing to evict tenants rather than maintain their properties when it would benefit their bottom line.) Like with most kinds of injustice in the U.S., there’s also a racial disparity. In its summary for 2024, the NYC Heat-Related Mortality Report points out that “Black New Yorkers are more likely to die from heat stress,” expiring at a rate roughly double that of their white counterparts. 

Friedrich Engels  had a term for deaths like these: social murder. As he put it in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England: 

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

The more things change, huh? Engels might have called his work The Condition of the Working Class in Maricopa County, and been no less accurate. Today, as in 1845, people are being “deprived of the necessaries of life” and dying because of it. Through a lethal combination of neglect, indifference, and greed, their landlords are murdering them. 

The law is usually on the landlords’ side, too. A new Reuters report finds that fewer than half of state governments require rental property owners to maintain their AC units, and none of the 50 states require them to actually provide air conditioning in the first place. “Nor,” journalist Gloria Dickie writes, “do rental housing regulations describe air-conditioning as an essential service like plumbing, heat and electricity.” This is astonishing, because the laws involved acknowledge that staying warm is a necessity of life, but don’t seem to recognize that the thermostat should have an upper limit, too. If you’re living somewhere like Houston or San Diego, an apartment without air conditioning is just as bad as one without heat in Alaska. Both situations, not just the cold one, should be illegal. 

Recently, there has been an effort at the municipal level to right these wrongs. Dickie points out that several U.S. cities have passed maximum-temperature laws in the last decade, requiring landlords to cool their properties to a somewhat livable degree. In New Orleans, where a “Healthy Homes” ordinance went into effect this January, the maximum is 80 degrees. Palm Springs, California, also has a maximum of 80 degrees, and in Dallas, Texas, the temperature has to be kept “at least 15 degrees cooler than the outside temperature, but in no event higher than 85°F in each habitable room.” It’s worth pointing out that these maximums are still too hot for comfort—the World Health Organization actually recommends that indoor temperatures be kept between 64 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit for the average household—but there is at least some recognition of air conditioning as a basic human right, and a legal recourse to stop landlords from just doing whatever they like. That’s the bare minimum anyone could hope for.

However, there’s no quality-of-life measure so basic and obvious that landlords won’t try to weasel out of providing it. At every turn, when a cooling law is proposed, landlords and their industry groups have used their political influence to try to prevent it. In Hot Springs, Arkansas, the city Board of Directors was recently considering a policy like Dallas’s, which would require a maximum temperature of at least 15 degrees below the one outdoors. But the proposal was quietly shelved after landlord groups lobbied the legislature, claiming without evidence that the expense of installing AC would force them to raise rents and “[make] affordable housing difficult if not impossible to provide.” (Sounds like a threat, doesn’t it?) Similarly, a bill that would have mandated air conditioning statewide in Texas never even reached the committee stage after the Texas Apartment Association voiced its opposition. In California, too, the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles and the California Apartment Association are gearing up to fight a proposed maximum-temperature law for the city. The executive director of the AAGLA, Daniel Yukelson, has argued—apparently with a straight face—that the law should be scrapped because window AC units could theoretically fall on people or be “kind of unsightly.” Now, it’s technically possible for a window-mounted air conditioner to plummet from the sky and knock someone out, Looney Tunes anvil-style, but it’s not exactly an impossible task to bolt them down securely, so this excuse doesn’t really hold water. Meanwhile, Yukelson’s line about the units being “kind of unsightly” is just foul. To him, apparently, a marginal change in the aesthetics of a building is more important than air cooling that could quite literally save someone’s life. That’s a perfect expression of the landlord mentality as a whole. 

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this fight over residential cooling is one of the starkest examples of class conflict in the United States today. It throws the basic antagonism between two economic classes—the contradiction, as Big Karl would say—into sharp relief. Tenants want the best possible living conditions at a price they can actually afford on their often-meager paychecks. Landlords want to expend as little money and effort as possible to provide barely adequate living conditions, while charging the highest rent they can possibly get away with. Only one side can get the outcome it wants. The landlords understand this better than anyone. They have organized themselves as a class, and have formed political units like the Texas Apartment Association to enforce their will through all the relevant channels. If renters are going to have a fighting chance, they need to do the same. 

Thankfully, there’s been some action on that front. One of the bright spots in the last few years of political news has been the rise of tenant organizing, with the Wall Street Journal reporting in 2022 that “hundreds of new tenant unions have been formed” since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Renters have been combining their forces and standing up to their landlords everywhere from North Carolina to New Mexico, and some of these new groups have already made impressive gains. In New Haven, Connecticut, the Blake Street Tenant Union forced their building’s management company to cancel 16 planned evictions, officially recognize their union, and come to the bargaining table. It’s the first time in Connecticut history that’s happened. In Bozeman, Montana, the local tenant union successfully lobbied for a ban on new rentals by Airbnb and similar companies, which notoriously drive rents up wherever they appear, and even got one of its members elected as deputy mayor. More recently, five major tenant unions (including those for Bozeman and the entire state of Connecticut) became the founding members of the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a national alliance of renters’ unions. It’s the first attempt at an organizing effort on the national level since the short-lived National Tenants Union, which formed in 1979 only to collapse a few years later. It’s exactly what the United States and its millions of renters need, and if it grows the way its organizers are hoping, could soon wield enough influence to push for an air-conditioning mandate nationwide. 

Maybe you don’t think you need a tenant union. Maybe your landlord treats you more or less humanely, and your air conditioning works well. But ask yourself: what guarantee do you have that your situation will continue to be comfortable? If your landlord decided to shut off your cooling tomorrow, and demanded an outrageous fee to turn it back on, what would stop them? It wouldn’t be the goodness in their hearts. If they thought it would add a single percentage point to their bottom lines, most landlords would happily make you swelter away in 100-degree heat with nothing. They’re already doing exactly that to people all over the country. If you want to be protected as temperatures continue to climb, you need an organization that can actually make demands, both of your landlord and the politicians who set housing policy. You need a lobbying apparatus to counter the one the landlords have already built to use against you. You need to have the threat of a rent strike, always ready in your back pocket. The alternative is to let a handful of wealthy property owners, who’ve already demonstrated that they don’t have your best interests in mind, dictate the terms of your life. Ultimately, either the class struggle heats up, or you do. Organize like your life depends on it!