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Mark Clayton Can’t Stand the Heat

Fighting to keep tenants cooler gets him hot under the collar.
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Dean Hochman, via flickr
Photograph by Dean Hochman, via flickr

Mark Clayton has been fighting with his fellow Dallas City Council members over how much landlords should have to be able to cool their air-conditioned apartments. The new regs, which were approved last week and go into effect in January, say 85 degrees; Clayton, the lone holdout on the vote, wanted a (relatively) cool 82.

The current Minimum Housing Standards set out in the Dallas City Code require landlords to provide screened windows that open or air conditioning that can cool the inside temperature to 85 degrees or 20 degrees less than the outside temperature, whichever is warmer. Meaning that if it is 120 degrees outside, which I just learned was the hottest temperature ever reached in Dallas, the inside only has to be cooled to 100 degrees. Ouch.

A set maximum indoor temp of 85 degrees is a big step in the right direction, as are the many other newly adopted improvements for tenants. In comparison, as far as I can tell, Austin does not regulate the maximum internal temperature of rental units. Nor do Texas prisons; advocates have been desperately trying to set an 85 degree maximum after numerous deaths.

So I did find it somewhat puzzling that Clayton saw the 3 degrees as a deal-breaker. According to the Dallas Morning News, he seemed to take the temperature personally:

“On this council, if one of our air-conditioning units went out in the summer, we might last a night. I kind of doubt it. We’d go to the Hotel Palomar, where we can bring our dogs, because we’d be inconvenienced for the night.”

Aside from the fact that the Hotel Palomar is now The Highland Dallas, albeit still dog-friendly, and that I heartily applaud Clayton’s concern for tenant rights, I was stymied by his comment that, when all was said and done, “I feel a little dirty.” Maybe because I remember the time when, as a landlord-tenant attorney, I felt really dirty.

My client told me the stench was unbearable. Like rotting garbage on a urine-soaked street in August. At first the landlord said it probably was the smell of garbage, wafting up from a dumpster down the street. When the tenant kept complaining, he said it was probably ethnic food being cooked by other tenants in the building, and he told her to open her windows. She noted that it didn’t smell like any Indian food she had ever eaten.

Days passed. The tenant tried to locate the source, but by that point the cloud of putrefaction was omnipresent. Then she noticed a leak in the ceiling. It was dripping down through her light fixture onto her couch. She complained again.

She didn’t think things could get worse. But then she noticed the maggots—in the couch. The landlord said she must be leaving food out, but she hadn’t been able to stomach anything in the apartment since the smell started.

It wasn’t until the postal carrier noticed that the mail was piling up outside the door of the upstairs apartment that the landlord finally decided to investigate. When he opened the door, he found the tenant in his boxer shorts, dead, lying on a bare mattress in the middle of the floor. In the summer heat, his body was decomposing into the mattress, liquefying and dripping into the apartment below.

I requested the police photos of the body so I could see for myself. It looked like a weirdly technicolor melted wax corpse from a horror film.

Now that’s dirty. Eighty-five degrees with the windows closed is just hot.

 

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