North Carolina law requires landlords to provide heat. It says nothing about cooling.

That single gap in state law is the reason Charlotte renters can legally be left in apartments that reach 115 degrees on a 100-degree day, and their landlords are not in violation of anything.

Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, described the logic plainly to WUNC last August: "We didn't want people freezing to death in their houses, so we made heating standards. All we're asking for is what we already do for cold weather — we also do it for hot weather."

What Charlotte has found, repeatedly, is that it may not be able to do it at all. According to WUNC's reporting on North Carolina cooling standards, some legal scholars argue the state has already legislated on habitability comprehensively enough to preclude local governments from passing a cooling ordinance. Durham City Council member Chelsea Cook put it directly: "Not only have they not given us permission to legislate, but they have clearly retained this area as one governed by the state."

So Charlotte is trying to find a workaround to something the state may have already foreclosed. That process has been ongoing for two years. It is still ongoing.

What's Actually Happened So Far

In the summer of 2025, after an extreme heat advisory and a push from advocacy organization ActionNC, the city introduced what it called the Rental HVAC Investment Pilot Program. The program offers up to $5,000 per unit to help landlords install air conditioning in units that have never had it — with a cap of ten units per property owner.

To qualify, according to the program guidelines published by the City of Charlotte, a landlord must have owned the property for at least two years, the units must never have had permanent air conditioning, and there can be no unresolved code violations on the property.

Read that last requirement again. No unresolved code violations. The landlords most likely to have code violations are exactly the ones whose tenants are most likely to be living without air conditioning. The program as designed mostly reaches compliant landlords who simply never installed AC — not the worst actors in the worst properties.

WCNC reported in August 2025 that while Charlotte was exploring these measures, "advocates say these measures are insufficient." The city was simultaneously distributing window units through county and state programs and routing residents to cooling centers and libraries.

Council Member Dimple Ajmera told WCNC at the time: "We will need to collaborate with our private housing providers to implement this program, which is to install an HVAC system in exchange for some sort of affordability in return. That program is still being discussed at our housing and safety committee."

That was August 2025. The program still had no confirmed start date.

April 27, 2026: Referred to Committee. Again.

At the April 27th Charlotte City Council business meeting, Council Member Joy Mayo asked the mayor to refer a proposal to the Housing and Neighborhood Services Committee to explore amending the minimum housing code to mandate working air conditioning in all dwellings during summer months.

The mayor referred it. A September 2026 timeline was mentioned for a committee recommendation.

What Mayo said on the record is worth noting: the committee had already been directed in 2025 to evaluate whether the housing code could be amended to require AC. A year later, they are still evaluating. The April 27th referral is the second attempt to get the same conversation to produce a binding answer.

The minimum housing code itself has a recent and limited history. According to reporting from the Greater Charlotte Apartment Association, the code had not been updated since 2008 before a 2024 revision — more than a decade and a half without a meaningful update to the basic standards Charlotte landlords are required to meet. That revision added ventilation requirements, sealed fixtures, and increased daily fines for violations. It did not touch cooling.

What 115 Degrees Looks Like

WUNC documented the lived reality of this gap in August 2025, reporting on a Durham mother of five whose apartment reached 86 degrees after her AC broke. She paid $300 out of pocket to get it repaired — expensive for her budget, she said, but too hot for the kids. "When I stayed in another unit, they" — she was describing management — had been unresponsive.

That story is playing out in Charlotte, without the same documentation. WSOC reported in June 2025 on Shaneka Bardney, a Charlotte resident affected by extreme heat who had turned to Crisis Assistance Ministry to help with her energy bills just to keep her home cool. "I definitely feel like it should be mandated," she said.

Council Member Mayo said it plainly at the April 27th meeting: if it is 100 degrees outside, interior temperatures in homes without air conditioning can reach 115 degrees or higher. Window units, she said, are not the answer.

The city's own window unit distribution program and HVAC pilot are real. They are also insufficient. A full HVAC system costs between $7,000 and $22,000 to install, according to national cost data. The city's pilot covers up to $5,000 per unit. The gap is structural, not incidental.

The Data Center Problem Nobody Connected

Charlotte is currently under a voluntary water conservation advisory. The region is in an extreme drought.

Data centers — the same facilities at the center of the council's moratorium fight — use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day for cooling, according to WBTV's reporting on Council Member Ajmera's push for a moratorium. A 2.5-million-square-foot data center is already under construction in the University area. Another is proposed in east Charlotte. Both are in neighborhoods that are disproportionately lower-income and disproportionately Black.

The city is simultaneously debating whether to allow more data centers to draw from a drought-stressed water supply while running a pilot program that cannot guarantee every low-income renter has a working air conditioner.

The machines get cooled. The people wait.

Council Member Lana Mayfield sounded the alarm on data centers in 2023, according to reporting from WBTV, and said recently that the city has been slow-walking the issue for long enough that it now feels like an emergency. The same could be said for the AC mandate. Both have been discussed for years. Neither has produced a binding policy.

The Neighborhood Overlap

The communities where people are most likely to be living without air conditioning in Charlotte — west Charlotte, northeast Charlotte, the Billingsley corridor, east Charlotte — are the same communities at the center of the data center fight, the I-77 South displacement fight, and the housing trust fund geographic equity conversation.

North Carolina Health News reported in December 2024 on the specific burden in these communities: older homes with little or no insulation built before 1973 code standards, the highest uninsured rates in the county, the least access to primary care, and the least tree canopy — which functions as a natural cooling system. The heat burden is not evenly distributed. It lands hardest on the people the city already serves least.

ActionNC's political director Robert Dawkins told WSOC last summer: "People should be able to walk into their home, and if not the whole house being cool, but there should be at least a cool space."

That was June 2025. It is now May 2026. Summer starts in six weeks. The committee recommendation is expected in September.

What September Means

A September committee recommendation means a council vote sometime in the fall — at the earliest. That means another full summer without a mandate.

Even if the committee recommends an amendment and the council votes yes, the city faces the underlying legal question: does North Carolina law allow Charlotte to require AC in rental units at all? The city attorney has not publicly resolved that question. If the state has preempted local housing habitability standards, the entire exercise could produce an ordinance that is immediately challenged in court.

The city knows this. It has known it for two years. The workaround it chose — a voluntary pilot program with eligibility requirements that exclude the worst properties — has no deadline, no mandate, and no mechanism for reaching the renters who need it most.

Charlotte renters do not have a legal right to a cool home. They may not have one by the time this summer ends. The city is studying it.

The Hive Wire will continue reporting on housing conditions and tenant protections in Mecklenburg County. If you are a renter living without adequate cooling or a landlord who has participated in the city's HVAC pilot program, contact us at thehivewire.com.