It’s 10 a.m. and the temperature is already creeping past 80 degrees. Carissa Carswell is sitting in a waiting room at Crisis Assistance Ministry, enjoying the A/C blowing cool air from a vent in the wall.
She said her apartment’s air conditioning broke four days ago.
“It don't blow as much as it should. It gets dirty real fast, so it takes them a long time to come fix it once you put your service request in,” Carswell said. “It'd be hot in my apartment.”
Carswell came here for rent assistance, but she’s considering relocating with her three kids for the summer, or at least until the A/C is fixed.
“I'm thinking about going to my mom's house until they fix it for a little bit, where I know they'll be safe and be having cool air,” Carswell said.
Heat is a problem in Charlotte, one that the city recognizes, but is struggling to confront. In North Carolina, where landlords are not required to provide A/C, low-income communities bear the brunt of the health risks.
For Carswell, that means improvising.
“I had to go to Walmart and get like, two fans, because we got two separate rooms, and I had to get ice, just in case the fans ain't cool enough,” Carswell said. “So I get like, about four bags of ice every day.”
Thousands of Charlotte units likely don't have A/C
No one knows exactly how many Charlotte properties lack air conditioning. Robert Dawkins with Action NC did some calculations using properties built before 1970, when air conditioning became standard in housing.
“It was around 75,000 units that were still around, that were built before 1970 and on the conservative estimate of only saying if 10% of those don't have it, that still would be 7,500 units,” Dawkins said.
Dawkins and other advocates are pushing the city to mandate A/C in all rental properties. Earlier this year, they also called on the city to create a pilot program providing 400 A/C units for apartments that need them.
Local housing advocate Greg Jarrell co-authored the proposal, which was included in a document called "The People's Budget" he and others presented to the Charlotte City Council.
“Many of our under-resourced, over-extracted communities lacked the ability to cool their homes,” Jarrell said. “People really need to be able to walk inside their own houses and be comfortable.”
Instead, the City Council opted to develop its own program: the Small Landlord Retrofit Assistance Program. The initiative would help landlords pay to add air conditioning to their properties. Warren Wooten is the city’s assistant director of affordable housing.
“We thought it was a great opportunity to kind of combine the desire to do more with small landlords and this need around air conditioning into a pilot,” Wooten said.
But details are limited . The city hasn't determined where funding will come from, and staff haven't identified a date for the program to begin.
There’s a chance the program won’t be available until after the summer and Charlotte’s hottest days — and hottest months — have come and gone.
Jarrell says it’s a start, but he still has concerns.
“Rather than the kind of quick move clearly mandated, both morally and made sense as public policy, the city has kind of slow walked this one,” Jarrell said.
Without protections, residents remain at risk
The delay comes at the expense of older residents, people with disabilities and low-income communities who are the most vulnerable to the heat strokes, heart attacks, breathing problems and additional health threats caused by rising temperatures.
Back at Crisis Assistance Ministries, Carswell says she’s concerned for her family as the summer months heat up.
“It's survival,” Carswell said. “You can die like that. I ain't trying to be one of them or my children."
Carswell has a collection of paper fans at home — the ones you use at church, as she put it. She plans to use those fans and the neighborhood pool to keep her family cool as the days grow hotter.
In the meantime, Dawkins, Jarrell and other organizers will keep fighting for an A/C mandate. As they see it, if the city can require heat in the winter, they can require A/C in the summer.
“I understand the law,” Dawkins said. “But the point of the matter is that you've got to serve your people.”