A 69-year-old Atlanta woman and her disabled son say they spent nearly two years living without a working air conditioner, enduring two full summers of Georgia heat while repeated pleas for repairs went unanswered. It wasn’t until their story reached a television camera that Atlanta Housing Authority ordered the air conditioner problem fixed within days.
The mother and son’s ordeal was first detailed by CBS News Atlanta, which reported that the pair made repeated pleas for repairs before anything changed. The son’s disability made the broken system especially dangerous, since extended heat exposure poses elevated health risks for people with underlying conditions who lack reliable ways to cool their living space.
Under Georgia’s Safe at Home Act, which took effect on July 1, 2024, landlords carry a statutory duty to keep rental housing fit for human habitation and are barred from cutting off cooling as an essential utility, according to research published by the Georgia Law Review Online. Before that law passed, Georgia was the only state in the country without a statutory warrant of habitability. Separately, Georgia landlord-tenant guidance from GeorgiaLegalAid.org makes clear that while landlords aren’t required to install air conditioning in the first place, they are legally obligated to repair and maintain any AC system that came with the unit at move-in — meaning once a cooling system exists in a lease, the landlord cannot simply let it stay broken.
A Two-Year Gap Between Complaint and Repair
The scale of the delay stands out against the emergency repair standards that are supposed to govern subsidized housing. Atlanta Housing Authority regulations and HUD standards require emergency work orders involving life-threatening health and safety hazards to be abated or repaired within 24 hours of notice, while routine non-emergency repairs are allowed up to 30 days, according to the agency’s own published plan. A near two-year gap between the mother and son’s complaints and an actual fix reflects a dramatic breakdown of that timeline, one that only closed once the case drew outside attention and the housing authority ordered the repair completed within days…