Maryland County’s Landmark Air Conditioning Law Redefines Tenant Rights

Nearly five years ago, Victoria Price urged local lawmakers in Montgomery County, Maryland, to adopt a policy no other local government in the region had yet enacted: requiring landlords to provide tenants with cooling equipment during the summer months, just as they must provide heat in winter.

During public testimony in 2019, Price, then 69, recounted her nearly 14 years as a tenant in a building for older adults that was more than 50 years old. She said the cooling systems there regularly broke down, sometimes for extended periods. She described residents hospitalized for heat exhaustion, people fainting, and even a neighbor who died in part due to overheating in a unit that, according to Price, lacked working air conditioning.

Her testimony illustrated what can happen when vulnerable populations—older adults, young children, and those with medical conditions—do not have indoor cooling. It is a growing concern among lawmakers as climate change drives record-breaking temperatures in cities previously spared such heat.

Montgomery County passed the law in 2020, following support from Price and other local tenants’ advocates. Under the new policy, many landlords must provide air conditioning equipment from June 1 through Sept. 30 each year. The equipment must be capable of cooling the unit to at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Previously, the county had no maximum indoor temperature; it only required landlords to maintain AC in “working order” if it was already present.

The final mandate was scaled back from County Councilmember Tom Hucker’s original proposal, which would have required working AC equipment in May as well. The final bill also exempts detached single-family homes and certain historic properties. Still, the law marked a significant shift in how community members view cooling—not as a luxury but as a necessity, said Matt Losak, executive director of the Montgomery County Renters Alliance. “The purpose of it is not to make things more luxurious,” he said. “The purpose of it was to address the health hazard.”

With communities from New York City to Los Angeles County looking to follow Montgomery County’s lead, the county’s experience implementing the rule could offer lessons for local leaders nationwide.

A shaky beginning

Montgomery County has tens of thousands of multifamily rental units, and most already had air conditioning, according to county officials and real estate industry representatives. A 2020 estimate from the local Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors suggested the new law could affect 300 to 1,400 units. Still, the first summer after the rule took effect was “little shaky” as landlords who had not previously provided cooling equipment figured out how to install it, said Tamala Robinson, manager of code enforcement for the county’s Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

For landlords needing to install AC, the county offered electrification and weatherization funds to offset costs, said Nathan Bovelle, chief of community development at the county’s Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

“The pushback was larger than the after-effect ended up being, in my estimate,” said Earl Stoddard, the county’s assistant chief administrative officer. “There [were] no buildings that went out of business or any major things like that.”

County officials do not know how many tenants gained access to working AC thanks to the law; they have not tracked that metric. They assume property owners are largely complying because they have not heard otherwise. “If there were landlords who were struggling to make the changes, we would have heard about it through tenant complaints,” Stoddard said.

Losak said landlords seem more attentive to maintaining AC since the law went into effect. “We have not seen the kinds of unresponsiveness to complaints that we had seen in the past,” he wrote in an email. He credits the rule for prompting greater responsibility but added that increased responsiveness may partly stem from this summer’s extreme heat, which could pose serious health risks, especially for older adults.

Robinson explained the complaint process: When a tenant reports non-working AC, an inspector visits the same day to measure indoor temperature. If it exceeds 80°F, the county notifies the landlord and advises action within 24 hours, though landlords technically have up to five days to fix the issue. If repairs take longer, the county advises providing temporary AC units, which most landlords do. If AC remains broken after five days, the county issues a citation with a $500 fine, which a judge can double or reduce based on severity.

Complaints rarely reach the end of that process, Robinson said. The few landlords who have received citations resolved the issue before going to court.

Older buildings, more problems

Brian Anleu has seen both sides of the debate over requiring landlords to provide AC. He worked on the Montgomery County bill as a staffer for Hucker, the sponsoring council member. Now he represents the local real estate industry as vice president of government affairs for Maryland at the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington.

A significant barrier to providing adequate cooling, he says, is old buildings with poor HVAC systems. These structures from the 1960s and 1970s tend to be affordable and inhabited by “the least affluent, neediest populations in the county,” Anleu said.

Hucker’s office began working on the AC requirement due to continuous complaints from residents in several such older buildings, Anleu recalled. “Four years later, am I going to tell you that those buildings are always meeting the letter of the law? Probably not, because those are really old buildings with really old systems.”

In certain older HVAC systems, residents cannot simply adjust a thermostat for heat or AC when weather changes; the entire building must be switched seasonally, a process that can take up to a week, officials explained. “If you have periods where one week it's hot and one week it cools down, like it does very often in April and May, it can be very challenging,” Stoddard said.

This past April, Montgomery County saw days approaching 90-degree highs, sparking a wave of tenant complaints about non-functional AC, Bovelle recalled. Days later, temperatures dropped to the 40- to 50-degree range. If landlords had turned off heat during hot days, when weather cooled, “they would get complaints that it's too cold,” Bovelle said.

That catch-22 has led to lengthy discussions among county officials about helping landlords choose optimal times to switch HVAC systems, possibly using National Weather Service or other reliable weather data, Stoddard said.

Building owners could upgrade to modern HVAC systems, but that can be expensive, time-consuming, and invasive for residents, Bovelle said. Property owners typically pass costs to tenants through higher rents, Anleu added. Local building performance standards for energy use or greenhouse gas emissions, which Montgomery County has approved, create additional burdens on landlords asked to reduce energy use while upgrading cooling equipment, he said.

“We keep hearing … that there are billions of [federal] dollars out there to help fund these kinds of energy-efficiency improvements,” Anleu said, but funding must go through a winding bureaucratic process involving multiple agencies before reaching property owners.

‘Better than 10 people dying’

Robinson fields many calls from other jurisdictions about the law. A common question is why Montgomery County exempted detached single-family rentals. The intent was to keep those properties affordable, she said, but she advises other local governments to consider applying the law to all rental properties. “The health and safety of the residents should be no different … whether you’re living in a single-family townhome, a single-family detached dwelling or a multifamily unit,” Bovelle added.

Montgomery County also could have explored ways to include historic properties, some in low-income neighborhoods, such as working with a historical preservation society to allow structural changes, he said.

Jurisdictions that are less built out should try to “get it right from the start,” such as requiring new buildings to be energy-efficient and have AC, Stoddard advised. More built-up communities may face greater challenges in mandating cooling and other upgrades without raising rents, and governments may need to subsidize retrofits, he said.

Price, the tenant who advocated for the AC requirement in 2019, moved out of the building she testified about, she told Smart Cities Dive in June. But she remembers tricks she used to cool her 12th-floor apartment when it was too hot—closing blinds, running fans, wedging poster board in front of windows. Sometimes she fled to stay with her brother in a neighboring county.

Asked if she thinks Montgomery County’s AC requirement has made a difference, Price said yes. Even if the law helped only 100 people, she said, “that’s better than 10 people dying” from extreme heat.

“Why would somebody object to something like that?”