City’s heat law just too hot
It was an unusually warm day in San Francisco — sunny and 75 degrees — yet, I heard this knocking sound that seemed to be coming from the ceiling above my front door. That drumming in the pipes meant the heat was coming on.
I might not have believed my ears, but it was far from the first time this sort of thing has happened here. I live in a 100-square-foot room in a single-room-occupancy motel on the edge of the Tenderloin that is rife with habitability violations, but keeping the heat on is the only thing the landlord seems to think matters.
No matter what the weather is like outside, the central heat comes on here nearly every day and often stays on almost day and night, sometimes for up to 20 hours. It is usually off during the late morning and early afternoon — though there have been days when the heat continues burning around the clock. Sometimes, I wake up sweating and out of breath, my heart pounding, because of the excessive heat.
The landlord keeps the heat on because he thinks the law requires it. The city of San Francisco does have a heat ordinance, but the rule has been pushed too far by some tenants’ rights activists. The ordinance itself is part of the problem. The code mandates that units “be heated to at least 68°F,” according to a pamphlet released by the city’s Department of Building Inspection. “The requirement for heating goes beyond mere comfort — it is considered essential to maintaining the health of individual occupants and the health, safety and welfare of the public at large.”
I think the requirement actually goes beyond both health and comfort.
San Francisco needs to rethink its heating requirement. It needs to develop a better understanding of when heat is needed and then make that clear to residential property owners, landlords and tenants. And, it needs to set an upper limit rather than implying excessive heat is inherently superior to cool weather.
Heat is a right
Walking around my neighborhood, I see housing rights flyers taped to traffic and light poles all the time. They list common issues, like bedbugs and plumbing problems, but one is emphasized above the rest: “NO HEAT!!!” That is the only concern written in all caps. Requiring heat, if it actually got dangerously cold, would make sense, but the de facto rule has become that heat is required, period.
A former desk clerk in my building once told me about a tenant who would demand heat even when the temperature outside exceeded 80 degrees. “I know my rights!” she reportedly would insist. Apparently, she had mistakenly interpreted the city’s heat requirement to mean she could demand heating — no matter what. In some buildings, her desire to exercise her rights would not directly affect anyone else. If the units had individually controlled heaters, she could turn hers on if it was 100 degrees, without baking her neighbors. But, as that clerk tried to remind her, turning on the heat for her in our building would mean turning it on for everyone.
That did not change her mind. So, he would turn on the heat, believing he had no choice. On another hot day, I asked a different clerk if he could turn off the heat after it had already been on for quite some time. He agreed but told me that the manager had said he must turn it back on if someone asked for it.
The heat ordinance is supposedly necessary to help keep the city’s residents healthy. The brochure argues for the rule by saying, “When heating is not provided, people are more susceptible to catching colds, influenza and respiratory or other illnesses.” Most health professionals, however, agree that temperature itself does not cause increased occurrences of such illnesses.
When heat is unhealthy
In fact, people with respiratory conditions are at increased risk of suffering heat-related illnesses. Heat can aggravate symptoms in asthma sufferers, for example. Heat can also exacerbate multiple sclerosis symptoms, at least temporarily. Excessive heat can endanger people’s health by increasing the number of bugs present. My building, in particular, is infested with cockroaches and bedbugs, and there definitely seem to be more of both the more the heat is on.
Requiring a temperature of “at least 68 degrees” is problematic because it sets no upper limit, so technically, 67 degrees is unacceptable, but 110 would be perfectly fine. Also, turning on a heater will add much more than the few degrees needed to reach 68 from the typical outdoor temperatures already in the 60s. It already feels warmer inside the building than it does outside even during those brief times when the heat is off.
The Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco quotes the ordinance on its website and says it is “based upon an exterior temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit.” However, the temperature in San Francisco has dipped to 35 or below just a handful of times over the past 4½ years I have lived here. Most of the lows during that time were in the 50s or 60s.
In some places, the heating regulations are absolutely needed to keep people healthy. San Francisco, however, does not normally get cold enough to be one of those places. The Board of Supervisors needs to take a closer look at the relationship between temperature and health, and rewrite the city’s heat ordinance to protect residents from hot and cold temperatures alike.