KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With an excessive heat advisory issued in Kansas City for the next two days, some families say they’re heated over their lack of air conditioning.
The thermostat inside Rachel Ivy’s home at Cloverleaf Apartments read 85 degrees Wednesday.
Ivy, who is 6 months pregnant with an 11-month-old son, said she’s had no working air conditioning since the beginning of summer.
”This is unacceptable. It’s 100 degrees outside today,” Ivy said. “I take showers like five times because I’m sweating so bad. I just want to get cool. It’s miserable.”
Ivy said she called management in April when she first noticed problems with her AC. They told her someone would come by and fix it, she said nobody ever came.
Ivy said she received an email dated July 08, 2021, that the maintenance request was complete and corrected.
“It’s frustrating. How did it get completed if my air isn’t working? I was here all day and no one came,” Ivy said.
She said she’s had to use her own funds to purchase a fan.
“Every summer, we have the same thing happen. Our hotline is flooded with calls from tenants whose air conditioning has been out for hours, sometimes days or weeks, with really grave impacts to his health and life,” Director of KC Tenants Tara Raghuveer said.
It’s a battle the KC Tenants group said they’ve been fighting to change.
Kansas City doesn’t require landlords to provide air conditioning to tenants.
In 2019, the group wrote a Tenants Bill of Rights. The first draft included a protected right for tenants to have air conditioning, but landlords lobbied and had the order stripped out.
“We know in Kansas City, the summers get hot. When you live in an apartment building, it’s even hotter. When you’re an elderly person, a person with disabilities, sometimes that heat is a difference between life and death,” Raghuveer said.
Raghuveer encourages people to contact KC Tenants hotline at 816-533-5435; the city recommends you call Healthy Homes, who will respond to complaints.
Ivy is hopeful her air conditioning will be restored soon.
The health department is sending a crew to inspect her home on Aug. 4.
“I just want you to fix it, for my babies and me, because it’s too hot,” Ivy said.
FOX4 attempted to reach Cloverleaf Apartment Management for comment, but our calls were not returned.
