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New York City has a cool class of rebels — those who elect to brave the crushing summer heat without air conditioning at home.
It is a small, but mighty group that opts to use fans, take cold showers and work in cool alternate locations during the hot months. Now, following a dreary holiday weekend, temperatures are back on the rise — and these locals are ready to take the heat.
Eleven percent of New Yorkers do not have air conditioners at home, according to data touted by the city comptroller in 2025. Another 15% never or seldom use AC, an older survey by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health indicates.
The top two reasons for not owning or using AC were the electricity bill and to conserve electricity, the journal determined.
Those are nothing to sneeze at, with the cost of summer cooling in the Big Apple climbing by more than 50% in the last decade, per the city comptroller’s release.
With that said, here are three New Yorkers who happily forego AC in the summer.
Blow this popsicle stand
Queens resident Charlotte Beisel would rather sweat it out than spend the dough on having AC.
Beisel and her partner live in a 900-square-foot railroad-style apartment on the second floor of an Astoria walk-up. They are in their third year living in the three-bedroom apartment, which has no AC units.
The pair relocated to the Big Apple from Washington, D.C., where utilities were included in the rent.
“It wasn’t something we thought about. Then we moved here and the utilities are not included,” said Beisel, who writes branded content for GovExec.
Beisel, 26, who grew up without AC, works from home. To beat the summer heat, she’ll spend time in coffee shops with air conditioning.
At home, she uses three fans, keeps wet towels in the freezer to cool the body down, puts ice in a metal bowl with the fan behind it, eats a lot of ice pops, takes cold showers, refrains from wearing socks in the house, sleeps on top of the bed covers and tries not to exert herself too much. Plus, the couple has three fans that “point directly at us,” she said.
Bruce, their cat, has a cooling mat, which he gravitates to when it’s hot.
“I like to think that I’m saving that $100 [a month], but I guess I’m spending it on these ice pops that I’m eating three a day,” Beisel said.
Old habits die hard.
“It is hard to escape the frugal mindset that I grew up with,” Beisel said, but her partner, who grew up with AC, “is definitely inching me in that direction.”
Living off the grid
Josh Spodek, a leadership coach who works from his 500-square-foot Greenwich Village studio apartment, finds living with no air conditioning is about mindset.
“I have been here a little over 25 years,” Spodek, 54, said. “It has central air. If I put it on it would cool the room and it wouldn’t cost me any more.”
But he doesn’t, primarily for environmental reasons.
“I don’t want to pollute and deplete the rest of the world,” he said.
You can acclimate, he said, by shifting your perspective.
“People have lived on this island of Manhattan for thousands of years,” Spodek said. “AC has been around for a few decades. We don’t need it. I think that over the years my total summer comfort is higher, not lower, than people who use AC. They seem to suffer every time they go outside. I was like that too. Now it’s just part of nature having seasons.”
Still, when it’s really hot, Spodek takes cold showers, works from the air conditioned library across the street and rolls out his futon by the open window to sleep.
In general Spodek — who grew up with limited AC — lives “off the grid,” having canceled his ConEd account. He taps solar panels and a car-sized battery to power up for a couple of days at a time. Spodek uses ambient light coupled with some LED lights to conserve electricity, and takes the stairs to his fifth-floor apartment rather than the elevator. He also cooks with a pressure cooker and eats a lot of raw food.
Sleeping with veggies
For financial reasons, Jeff Harding is opting out of using the 5-foot-long immovable air conditioner that management installed in his Central Harlem rental.
“I used to have it on three or four hours a day here and there,” said Harding, whose childhood home didn’t have ACs in the bedrooms or attic. “I never really liked having it run.” It brought his $100 summer utility bill to $300 to $400 a month.
The AC unit takes a lot of space on the floor in his 450-square-foot studio, so the beverage industry consultant uses it instead as a horizontal base for fans and other odds and ends.
“I didn’t need it during this last heat wave so I’m planning to not use it this summer,” Harding, 60, said. “I don’t really know why, but I just prefer fans. I mean the AC is expensive and it just seems wasteful.” He added, “it’s like having a car running in the house.”
To survive the summer, Harding said he has “just been getting fans and placing them strategically.”
As a kid, Harding recalled staying on his grandmother’s farm. In the basement there was a naturally cooled root cellar for apples and potatoes.
“The window was cracked to keep the vegetables fresh,” Harding said. “Everyone wanted to sleep in there in the summer.”
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