With Southern Nevada under an extreme heat warning through 8 p.m. Sunday, the last thing anyone wants is for their air conditioning unit to go out.
“Dangerously hot conditions (will emerge) across the Mojave Desert,” with temperatures ranging from 110 to 120 degrees, the NWS said in a statement. There will be “little to no overnight relief,” with lows of 80 to 95 degrees expected, the agency said, adding, “This will result in major-to-extreme heat risk.”
For renters, an AC outage can leave many scrambling to understand their rights and what steps their landlord must take to restore a safe living environment.
What rights do Nevada tenants have when their air conditioning breaks?
Taylor Altman is a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, a nonprofit law firm assisting people without the money to pay for legal services. She said the first thing tenants should do in this situation is send a “habitability letter” to their landlords notifying them of outages of essential services.
“We recommend doing it by certified mail, and then the tenant should keep a copy for their own records,” Altman said. “And so that puts the landlord on notice that they have 48 hours to fix that essential service.”
The habitability letter doesn’t actually need to be printed out and mailed, Altman said. It just needs to be in writing, so an email or text message can also work, she said.
Template habitability letters are available online through the Civil Law Self-Help Center, operated by the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada.
Property owners have 48 hours after receiving a habitability letter to restore the essential service or “use his or her best efforts to remedy the breach,” according to Nevada law. This excludes weekends and legal holidays.
If owners don’t fix the problem or make a best-effort attempt, there’s a few different avenues tenants can go down, Altman said.
“The most common things or common remedies that the tenant can take is withholding rent until the problem is fixed,” she explained. “The tenant can also move out temporarily to a comparable rental unit. Another thing they can do is sue the landlord for damages.”
Exercise caution
Ben Iness, a coalition manager at the Nevada Housing Justice Alliance, an advocacy group focused on tenants’ rights and housing issues, said people pursuing any legal remedies should be careful, as they often need to follow “very specific” processes.
If tenants want to withhold rent, they still need to make the same payments into a court “escrow account,” he said. These accounts are set up by justice courts for situations where rent can legally be withheld, such as if a unit isn’t in habitable condition. Tenants can’t just hold the money themselves.
“There may be an eviction hearing, and a tenant is like, ‘Hey, my AC has been broken for weeks. I withheld my rent,’” Iness explained. “But they’ll still get evicted because they unfortunately didn’t follow that specific process.”
Another solution some tenants can take is staying in a hotel and billing their landlord, Iness said, but there’s limitations there as well.
“Say you had to rent a hotel and motel for three days,” he explained. “That hotel and motel, those three days, shouldn’t exceed what three days worth of your total rent would be.”
Tenants with landlords who willfully interrupted their essential services have five days to file a complaint for expedited relief with a justice court, once again excluding weekends and legal holidays, Altman said. The court can order the property owner to restore services or even pay damages as a result.
In cases where an essential service has been down for a long time, Altman said she was unsure as to whether tenants could still seek expedited relief, as the five-day window had long passed. It’s a “strict deadline,” she added.
But if the date of the original violation in any case is unknown, there could be an argument that the property owners’ mismanagement was still ongoing, she said. These types of situations are approached differently depending on the situation.
“It’s probably best to come in and see us, and we can take it on a case-by-case basis,” Altman said. “And maybe it’s a continuing violation or a continuing unlawful act by the landlord, meaning they’re still within the five days.
