Under Houston's current building code, a landlord can skip air conditioning entirely if the rental unit has window screens. Screens. In a city where summer afternoons hit triple digits and Harris County has logged more than 7,600 heat-related illness cases since 2019.

Council Member Alejandra Salinas introduced a "Right to Air Conditioning" ordinance on July 13 that would close that loophole. It goes before the Proposition A Committee on July 28. If the committee advances it and council votes by mid-August, as Salinas projects, landlords would get 90 days to comply.

Do the arithmetic. Mid-August plus 90 days is mid-November. A tenant sitting in a screenless apartment right now, sweating through the worst weeks of the year, would gain a legal right to cooling that her landlord cannot be fined for ignoring until the heat is mostly gone.

The Houston Apartment Association supports the measure. That tells you something. Most Houston landlords already provide AC. The ordinance sets a floor most of the industry already stands on. The fight, if one materializes at committee, comes from the landlords operating below it, the ones for whom screened windows have been good enough.

Nearly 23,000 homes in the Houston area lack any air conditioning. For those tenants, the ordinance would turn cooling from a landlord's goodwill into a legal obligation. But obligation is not refrigerated air. Between passage and compliance sits a whole summer's worth of heat, a landlord's willingness to spend the money, and an enforcement apparatus the city hasn't built yet.