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Dang, it’s cold! Here’s what to do if you don’t have heat in your apartment.
By
David Brand
Published Jan 21, 2025
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Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
By
David Brand
Published Jan 21, 2025
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It’s dangerously cold outside. The National Weather Service is projecting highs in the low 20s over the next several days. Tuesday night’s low will be at just 13 degrees. For millions of New Yorkers, that means it’s heat season — an eight-month span where the city requires landlords to keep their apartments warm.
Landlords are required to keep indoor temperatures at 68 degrees or higher between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., and at 62 degrees or higher at night, from October to May.
Here’s Gothamist’s explainer on what New Yorkers call “heat season” and what to do if you don’t have adequate heat in your apartment.
What if it’s cold in my apartment?
First off, let the landlord know by calling, emailing or texting to tell them it’s too cold in the apartment.
Rasheed Barnes owns a two-unit building in the Bronx's University Heights neighborhood. He said he communicates regularly with his tenants about the heat and responds quickly.
“If there’s a problem, they usually text me,” he said. “One had newborns so their need for heat is a little different.”
Not every landlord is as responsive or easy to reach. Large companies with big portfolios may not even let you speak with an actual person.
In those cases, it’s still a good idea to inform the landlord or management company and document the correspondence in case the heat outage becomes a chronic problem that requires legal intervention, said Adam Meyers, the head of litigation at the tenants’ rights group Communities Resist.
“It’s helpful to make a record of how you communicated,” Meyers said. “That puts the landlord on notice of the problem in case you’re eventually going to seek additional relief in court.”
Many tenants might feel uncomfortable notifying the owner if they owe rent money, fear retaliation or are concerned about their immigration status.
If that’s the case, or if the landlord doesn’t immediately respond or attempt to resolve the heat outage, tenants should call 311 or use the city’s online 311 portal to make a complaint.
What happens after I call 311?
Once you call 311, the complaint goes to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
The department will contact the building’s manager and then call you back to see if the problem got fixed.
If they can’t reach you, or you say it’s still too cold, an inspector will visit to check the heat, smoke detectors and other potential problems, like mold or mice.
According to the housing agency, New Yorkers made over 236,000 heat and hot water outage complaints during the last heat season, which runs from Oct. 1 to May 31 each year.
But the agency only had about 300 inspectors to handle those complaints, so calling 311 won’t lead to an immediate fix, said HPD Deputy Commissioner AnnMarie Santiago.
Santiago said the department investigates each claim, reads he temperature inside and issues fines as needed. It also sometimes takes landlords to court for especially egregious outages.
Santiago encouraged owners to communicate with tenants if the heat’s not working.
“If you know there is an issue, keep your tenants informed about what's being done to fix it,” she said. “Let your tenants know, ‘I'm aware that the heat is out. We have a plumber coming in a few hours.’”
That also limits the strain on the city’s inspectors, she added.
“Boilers break. They’re machines,” she said. “And keeping people informed helps stop a lot of unnecessary calls to 311 where something might be going on already to fix it.”
What if my heat doesn’t come back on?
Absentee or especially neglectful landlords might never respond, even after housing inspectors visit and issue fines.
In those instances, tenants can take their landlords to court through a process known as an “HP” action where they can ask a judge to order the owner to make repairs.
Attorneys and organizers advise tenants to track the temperature in their apartments and log it in a notebook to show the judge as proof of the problem. But even taking a landlord to court probably won’t lead to immediate relief.
In the meantime, tenants might have some leverage when it comes to withholding their rent. They could refuse to make payments until the problem is fixed. But housing attorneys caution that could lead to an eviction case and suggest tenants set the money aside to pay later on, once the heat is back on.
“With rent strikes, the first thing [that's] always important is to save the money. Each month that you're on rent strike, put it away," New York Legal Assistance Group attorney Jared Riser told Gothamist in 2022. "You shouldn't expect or assume ‘I'm getting an abatement, I'm getting a discount on rent because of the heat, I'm not going to have to pay this.’ I think it's always a good idea to save the money."
What can public housing tenants do?
Heat outages are a chronic problem across NYCHA campuses, often due to ancient equipment breaking down.
The number of heat and hot water outages at NYCHA apartment buildings has declined in each of the past two years, according to agency data. In 2022, a federal monitor overseeing NYCHA operations even praised the agency’s preventive maintenance program and prompt response times. The monitor’s latest report, released in December 2024, found NYCHA reported even fewer outages over the first month of the heating season. And while the agency’s response times for fixing heat issues worsened earlier this year, they have improved overall in recent years.
But that’s cold comfort for public housing tenants still stuck in freezing apartments.
When the heat is out, NYCHA tenants should call 311 or the Customer Contact Center at (718) 707-7771, or use the MyNYCHA website to lodge a complaint and find out when the heat is coming back on. Tenants in NYCHA complexes turned over to private managers can also use the Customer Contact Center.
Tenants can track the status of their outages on the NYCHA website.
What if it gets too hot?
It’s not ideal, but many New Yorkers have been there: The radiator is cranking and clanking, the apartment is sweltering and you have to open a window on a chilly day to let the hot air out.
In a lot of buildings, especially older ones, the heat system works unevenly for each apartment or floor, so landlords often turn up the temperature. That means it might be comfortable in one unit and stifling in another.
But the Housing and Preservation Department said there are no regulations around maximum temperatures during heat season and encouraged renters to ask their landlord to turn down the heat.
The heat season rules only apply when the outdoor temperature dips below 55 degrees. So if the radiator is blasting and it’s 80 degrees out, tenants should contact the landlord or property manager — turning off the heat in those instances makes everyone more comfortable, and saves the property owner money.
A previous version of this article referenced services provided by the organization Heat Seek, which has recently shut down. This story has been edited to remove links to the organization.
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David Brand
David is a reporter covering housing for Gothamist and WNYC. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 908-310-3960.
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