Above photo: Organizers of the People’s Cooling Army, launched by the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance, speak at the Garfield Community Service Center on July 8. Lucas Frisancho.
Meet the Chicago tenant organizers installing repaired AC units in low-income renters’ homes.
And recruiting them to help form new tenant unions.
Perhaps the most basic demand of a tenant is that the living space they pay for is, in fact, livable. Yet as extreme heat becomes the norm, organizers claim that for many low-income Chicago renters, this basic condition is not being met.
An initiative called the People’s Cooling Army, launched by the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance, aims to provide and install free repaired air conditioning units for low-income tenants in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, Garfield Park and Hermosa.
“Tenants across the city have been left to bake in hot apartments,” organizers announced at a July 8 press conference. “Tenants across the city have been asked to live in apartments where they could not sleep, where they were always covered in sweat, where their children were unsafe.”
Through social media outreach and in-person, grassroots organizing, organizers source AC units and personally visit tenants to install them for free. The equipment is collected and stored over the winter, to be returned to the same tenants next summer. Last summer, the group gave out less than 20 units; this summer, they expect to give away more than 70.
The effort is part of the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance’s broader project to unionize the city’s low-income renters and shift landlord-tenant power dynamics.
“It’s a noble gesture to give away ACs, but we are in the pursuit of organizing tenants,” organizers say. With over 2,000 applications in one month and under 100 AC units available, organizers don’t just consider their ability to install units in an applicant’s home; they also consider their long-term ability to engage with the renter and their neighbors in tenant activism.
Founded in 2023, the People’s Cooling Army has been entirely powered by donations. All its operations are conducted by nine members with access to three cars. Though they had hoped to help supply AC units across all of Chicago, they’ve found expanding beyond three neighborhoods impossible while all nine members work full-time day jobs.
“When the program first exploded, we went all out,” organizers said. “We contacted people non-stop, we drove to the ends of the city to install ACs. This quickly proved infeasible.”
Despite its limited scale, their work expanding access to temperature control remains critical. Climate change has intensified temperature control access into a matter of life or death.
During a May 2022 heat wave, three senior Rogers Park renters were found unresponsive inside their senior living facility days after residents began complaining of “unbearable” temperatures: 68-year-old Janice Reed, 72-year-old Gwendolyne Osborne and 76-year-old Delores McNeely.
Autopsies later confirmed that all three women had died from excessive heat exposure. According to some residents, the building management had refused to switch off the heat in the building. According to Reed’s son, she had requested air conditioning days prior and was denied.
The effects of extreme heat are felt most acutely by marginalized communities, experts say.
“There is a geography to these disasters,” says DePaul University professor Winifred Curran, who researches sustainable urban development and gentrification. “It tends to be the same people who are disadvantaged in every other way are also targeted by climate change, and that is no accident.”
“Chicago, and any American city, is literally built on this foundation of inequality, especially racial inequality, and those inequalities build upon each other.”
Curran points to Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway as an example of these compounding inequalities. Cutting through the majority-Black South Side, the vast stretch of concrete has attracted high-rise public housing developments along its path. This dense concentration of concrete infrastructure has created an urban heat island, a zone where absorptive asphalt and concrete in the built environment artificially raise temperatures relative to surrounding areas.
Industrial zoning out of the North side and into low-income communities in the South and West sides plays a similar role in amplifying the danger of extreme heat, Curran says. “It concentrates the heat island effect in communities that have the least economic capacity to deal with it.”
In response to the tenant deaths in Rogers Park and the growing heat crisis, the Chicago City Council enacted new legislation. Under the 2022 Cooling Ordinance, when the city’s heat index surpasses 80ºF, all buildings federally designated as “housing for older persons” must provide air conditioning in all “indoor common gathering spaces.” Residential buildings over 80 feet in height or that have more than 100 units are also required to provide air conditioning in at least one common space.
For the People’s Cooling Army, the ordinance’s breadth and depth have proven inadequate.
“How many buildings does this apply to? The truth is, very few,” one organizer said. According to DePaul University’s Institute for Housing Studies, less than 30% of the rental supply in Chicago comprises buildings with more than 50 units. Presumably, even fewer buildings exceed 100 units and meet the ordinance’s threshold.
Even for those buildings that require air conditioning, tenant organizers says, the city’s demands are still insufficient. The focus on “common gathering spaces” rather than individual living spaces is extremely limiting.
“How can an entire building of tenants fit inside a laundry room, a lobby? And where are they to sleep, cook, or sit?” the organizers argued. “The cooling ordinance would not have prevented the deaths of Janice, Delores and Gwendolyn.”
Instead, the People’s Cooling Army makes a straightforward demand: Every tenant in Chicago should be provided with a thermostat and AC unit in their own living space. They reject that air conditioning should be contingent on the city’s heat index or that it should be provided only to communal spaces.
The root of the problem, organizers say, is not just that tenants lack air conditioning. The lack of tenant protection against extreme heat are a direct result of the inherent conflict between commercial landlords’ and tenants’ interests, organizers say.
“Landlords don’t provide AC because they want to get away with spending the least possible amount of money,” argued Ryan, a speaker at the press conference. And without collective power, vulnerable renters have little recourse in the face of such exploitative dynamics.
Founded in 2020 as the North Spaulding Renters Association, the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance was originally a small group of tenants residing in buildings managed by property management company M. Fishman & Co.
During a cold flash in the winter of 2023, the group filed a lawsuit against Fishman, alleging the company had failed to address utility outages which left a 30-unit building noncompliant with the Chicago Heat Ordinance’s minimum temperature requirements.
A year later, North Spaulding Renters Association organizers formed the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance, aiming to promote revolutionary political action beyond their own buildings.
To promote this power, the group aims to become a hub for emerging tenant unions across the city to communicate, plan collective action and access resources.
“We do not wish to exit this battle individually, one by one, by each buying a home,” they said. “We wish to end it collectively, as tenants, fighting side-by-side across the city.”