As California swelters through a freakishly hot March – and as the dangers of climate change become ever more obvious, year after year – renters might ask: Why is my landlord required to provide heat but not air conditioning?
They’re right to wonder. A hotter future has long been predicted, even if rules on air conditioning remain stuck in the much cooler past.
In 2015, three UCLA scientists projected that the number of extreme-heat days per year – defined as 95 degrees or hotter – would triple in Southern California by 2050. Downtown Los Angeles averaged six such days before 2000; the report said it would see 22 by midcentury if the world didn’t get greenhouse gas emissions under control.
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According to data from the National Weather Service, downtown L.A. had eight days above 95 degrees in 2024 (the planet’s hottest year on record), including a brutal five-day streak in September when temperatures topped out at 112 degrees. In 2026, things seem to be accelerating: If this week’s miserable weather forecast holds, downtown will have notched four consecutive 95-degree-plus days by the weekend (of course, it’s much hotter in other parts of the 469-square-mile city). We’re just one day into spring, and the National Weather Service has already warned that “there is a high risk for dangerous heat illness for anyone, especially … those without air conditioning.”
In other words, an un-air conditioned home can be dangerous during stretches of extreme heat, which kills more Americans than any other weather event. Yet even though renters make up 44% of all households in the state, California has no law requiring landlords to provide air conditioning for tenants.
It’s not as if this oversight hasn’t occurred to state lawmakers. In recent years, the Legislature twice passed bills expressing support for a cooling standard, but each time they declined to actually enact one.
In 2022, then-Assemblymember Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) introduced a bill requiring state regulators to adopt minimum cooling standards for all new and existing rental units. Opposed by groups representing apartment owners and developers, the bill failed. Instead, the Legislature passed a separate bill that year directing the California Department of Housing and Community Development to come up with recommendations for cooling standards.
Mariel Garza
That report, published in 2025, recommended a maximum safe indoor temperature of 82 degrees for all rental units. A bill was introduced by state Sen. Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles) to adopt that standard, but only for new rental housing. The bill was amended, and the version that passed asserted that California should have a cooling standard but did not specify what it should be.
A state that touts its enlightenment on climate change just can’t seem to catch up to even Phoenix and Dallas, both of which have set firm standards that require cooling. In Phoenix, the max temperatures allowed are 82 for AC and 86 for swamp coolers. In Dallas, the single standard is a max of 85 degrees.
However, at least the city and county of Los Angeles are finally moving in the right direction.
In August, the county Board of Supervisors passed its own 82-degree standard. Enforcement begins in 2027; landlords who own fewer than 10 units will have until 2032 to comply. Though the ordinance applies only to the roughly 100,000 rental homes in unincorporated communities, many of the county’s 88 cities could adopt the regulation as they typically do for other building standards, said David Girion, a climate and energy policy advisor for L.A. City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield.
Josh Gohlke
In fact, last month the Los Angeles City Council unanimously passed a motion by Blumenfield and his colleagues Eunisses Hernandez and Adrin Nazarian directing the city to adopt the county’s ordinance for its roughly 1 million rental units. Girion told me that city staff are working out the details of programs to help landlords cover the cost of necessary upgrades and assessing the effect on the electric grid. He said the council could have a draft ordinance to pass by the end of the year.
That’s progress, but it does nothing for the people currently suffering in sweltering rental housing – the people whom state legislators have twice declined in the last five years to meaningfully help. When I put the question to Girion of where we’d be in this heatwave if the Legislature had passed a cooling requirement in 2022, he was blunt: “Oh, we’d be at implementation.”
That means renters would have air conditioning units, better insulation and windows and other measures in place to keep cool for the freak winter heatwave of March 2026. If the state can’t stand up to special interests and protect Californians, cities and counties must. That Los Angeles is making progress is good, but not good enough.
Mariel Garza
David L. Ulin
