Victoria Price still shudders to think about her nearly 18 years in Silver Spring’s Charter House, a senior-living high-rise she called the “Charter House of Horrors.”

There was flooding and mold, she said. Mice. The chill of winter nights. And long, stifling summer days.

At points, temperatures on upper floors of the 1960s-era building topped 100 degrees. Price, who served on Charter House’s resident advocacy board, recalled two neighbors who fainted from heat and another who died of hyperthermia, his body found decomposing in an apartment without working air conditioning.

“It was absolutely horrible,” said Price, now 75, of the building’s unreliable air conditioning.

Price moved to a Kensington building with consistent AC in 2022. She and other Montgomery County residents now also enjoy a protection not available during most of her time at Charter House.

In early 2020, after advocacy by Price and others, Montgomery County passed a law requiring landlords to provide air conditioning during the summer. Air conditioning effectively became a legal right, and Montgomery County the state’s first jurisdiction to enshrine such protection.

But as summers grow hotter and longer, landlords across much of the rest of Maryland are under no obligation to cool buildings. So far this summer, at least 32 people have died from heat-related causes in Maryland — more than in any year since 2012. Though circumstances around all of these deaths aren’t known, health officials stressed that lives can be saved by checking on vulnerable residents without reliable AC.

“It’s getting hotter and hotter,” said Del. Mary Lehman, a Prince George’s County Democrat who unsuccessfully sponsored a statewide AC mandate in Annapolis. “It is virtually inconceivable to see how people can live without air conditioning on these very hottest days.”

To some, the new climate extremes make air conditioning a common-sense requirement.

No one would suggest that regulators scrap mandates for fire protections or winter heating, said Tom Hucker, the former Montgomery County councilman who sponsored the jurisdiction’s AC mandate.

Hucker heard hundreds of complaints from across the county while pushing for his bill: children whose asthma worsened in hot apartments and disabled veterans clutching frozen water bottles to keep cool.

When elderly people die in their homes, heat often isn’t listed as an official cause. But it exacerbates existing problems, the former councilman noted.

“Air conditioning is pretty close to a life-or-death requirement as heat,” Hucker said.

Not long after Montgomery County passed its law, Prince George’s County enacted a similar policy. Other U.S. cities are also considering AC requirements. Dallas and New Orleans have mandates, while Los Angeles County this month approved a maximum rental unit temperature of 82 degrees.

These laws, though, have limits. In both Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, AC requirements don’t kick in until after May, an increasingly hot month, and only mandate that rentals are cooled to a still-balmy 80 degrees.

Such policies also present climate quandaries.

Powering air conditioning makes global warming worse, straining the power grid on hot days and, in some older units, leaking a potent greenhouse gas.

At the same time, poorer residents may have to choose between cranking the AC and the costs of their next utility bill.

As Montgomery County weighed its AC mandate, the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington, which represents the D.C. area’s real estate industry, pushed for modifications to make it less burdensome.

In a statement, spokesman Brian Anleu said the group’s members generally meet the new requirements. But Anleu, a former staffer in Hucker’s office when the county considered the AC mandate, added that new regulations should be flexible and offer financial support for building owners to get into compliance.

The mandate also makes it much harder for building owners to comply with new carbon-free building regulations, Anleu said. Setting temperature requirements too low may increase tenant comfort, he said, but it could make the state’s energy requirements unachievable in older buildings.

Charter House’s owner replaced its air conditioning chillers in 2023 and now complies with the mandate, said Jennifer Smith, a spokeswoman for nonprofit housing provider Affordable Homes and Communities, which bought the building in 2014. It sometimes switches from heating to cooling earlier than required.

Montgomery County officials say their policy protects residents. Of nearly 350 AC complaints filed last fiscal year, only 11 resulted in citations for non-compliance. Resident complaints about air conditioning increased dramatically, but officials believe that’s partly due to growing awareness of the law.

Montgomery County has also seen proportionally fewer deaths since the mandate, said Earl Stoddard, the county’s assistant chief administrative officer.

Over the last two summers, Montgomery County has recorded six heat-related deaths, while Baltimore accounted for 13 deaths despite having almost half the population.

Older residents least able to escape hot apartments are especially at risk. Of the 32 lives claimed by heat in Maryland this year, 24 were 65 years or older. Sixteen deaths happened indoors.

That’s one reason the AC policy found traction in Montgomery County, said Matt Losak, the head of Montgomery County Renters Alliance. The county has seen a “senior bubble” of elderly residents moving into high-rise apartments, Losak said, and that demographic joined a growing group of middle-class renters to push politicians to approve the AC mandate.

Still, the policy proposal has run aground so far in Annapolis.

Carol Ott, a Baltimore tenant advocate, has spent nearly a decade advocating for a statewide mandate. She said half the summertime complaints she hears from tenants have to do with AC.

“My question to legislators has been: What’s the acceptable death toll to you? What number? Just throw out a number,” Ott said. “Nobody, of course, is willing to do that.”

It’s not clear how many Maryland residents live without reliable access to air conditioning, and some argue that a legal mandate would make little difference.

The Maryland Multi-Housing Association, which represents large landlords, recently polled members who oversee more than 128,000 units. It found just 0.5% of units with neither window units nor central air conditioning.

That “statistically negligible percentage” shows a statewide AC mandate is unnecessary, Aaron Greenfield, the organization’s spokesman, said in a statement.

Older buildings like Charter House may be equipped with air conditioning and nonetheless struggle to meet temperature maximums.

Outside one such building in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill last month, senior residents described problems with the old chiller system earlier this summer.

Karen Johnson, an 82-year-old former teacher now on disability, and two friends said their AC was off-and-on when temperatures soared over 100 degrees in late June. They received notifications that management was working to fix the problem, but not fast enough, Johnson said.

“I’m generally a nice person, but I guess the heat can make you easily evil,” she said. “What the f—— you need to do? Walk to China to get the part and then walk back?

One landlord that could be impacted significantly by any mandate is the state’s largest public housing provider, the Housing Authority of Baltimore City. In the last two sessions, HABC sought exemptions for its oldest buildings.

Authority President Janet Abrahams argued in a March letter to lawmakers that retrofitting public housing sites, some more than 80 years old, would be too burdensome. Tenants in buildings without central air can buy their own window units, she told lawmakers.

Just one of its public housing sites, accounting for 157 of more than 4,700 total units, is equipped with central air, according according to a 2024 HABC report to lawmakers.

Lehman plans to reintroduce a state bill next year.

A former Prince George’s County councilwoman, Lehman first became interested in an air conditioning mandate more than a decade ago after reading about postwar-era buildings in Langley Park where apartments were so hot that some residents slept outdoors.

Lehman believes the protection is needed statewide. Even communities in the Western Maryland mountains are susceptible to dangerous heat waves, she said.

“Things are changing,” said Lehman. “It’s not gonna get better. It’s gonna get worse.”