Bellingham resident Heather Hills recently tucked her children into their beds at 10 p.m. The high temperature was 85 that day. Typically her two children are in bed by 8 p.m., but with the lack of a cooling system, Hills had to improvise.
That night, the family of three resorted to eating bowls of salad for dinner in an attempt to avoid cooking. With no central air conditioning, Hills had pushed two beds into the living room underneath the apartment’s sole ceiling fan, with their lights turned off and blinds closed.
Bellingham was in the middle of a days-long heat advisory from the National Weather Service, when temperatures reached 88 degrees.
The mother of two said she was “fed up.” Since the firing of the Trailview Apartments manager three months ago, she said that staffing to open the community room — the one spot with air conditioning in the complex — had been sparse. The room is normally reserved for special events.
The 77-unit apartment building designed for low-income residents is managed by Mercy Housing. Many of those who live there, children and the elderly, are more vulnerable to heat extremes.
On Monday, the community room opened following several days of complaints on social media and tenants’ attempts to reach Trailview management.
“Trailview’s air-conditioned common room was opened on Monday and remains open for residents,” Joe Thompson, president of Mercy Housing Northwest, said in an email. “In the future, if hot weather is forecast, I have reminded site staff to make common rooms available during weekend days as well.”
Residents such as Hills had advocated for nearly a year to open the room, especially on days when the National Weather Service predicted a heat advisory for Bellingham and Western Washington.
Hills was one of the first to move in after the apartments’ completion in November 2022. As a member of Trailview Ambassadors — a local tenant group — Hills has worked with other residents, such as Aunna Whitson, to meet with management to try and resolve complaints. Whitson, 28, works as a caregiver for Consumer Direct Care Network Washington and has lived in the complex since December 2022.
The process for getting a portable AC unit requires documented verification of need for an accommodation by a third-party professional, said Thompson. Once approved, a resident will receive a portable unit, but the building design does not allow for window-mounted models.
Another one of Mercy’s low-income housing properties, The Millworks, opened in June with central air conditioning.
“Our Millworks project does have in-unit air conditioning as it was designed several years after Trailview,” Thompson said. “Like at the Eleanor [Apartments], residents at Trailview having a medical need may request a portable air conditioning unit via our reasonable accommodation process.”
Aurora Fox, 73, lives on the fourth floor where several older residents are. Her irritation about the community room’s closure prompted her to write to Thompson on July 7.
“We have repeatedly asked staff to open our community room from 9 [a.m.] – 10 [p.m.] EVERY DAY (like is available at Eleanor House for their community room) only to be told ‘we will look into it’ and then no further response,” Fox wrote in her email.
Referring to a resident’s death in 2021 at Eleanor Apartments, Fox continued, “Now it is imperative you make this room available to residents for everyone’s safety before someone else dies.”
The Eleanor resident apparently suffered from a stroke during a record heat wave. Some residents received portable cooling units immediately after, said Fox.
The 2021 record-breaking heat wave was known as the Northwest heat dome, a high-pressure system that traps heat over a region, said Tirthankar Chakraborty, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
“If you are vulnerable, that makes it difficult to find solutions, especially indoors if you don’t have air conditioning,” Chakraborty said. “There are cooling centers, but in many cases … they may not be comfortable driving to a cooling center.”
In a heat wave it’s easy to talk about what could be done, added Chakraborty, especially if an individual doesn’t have the funds to seek out short-term solutions against high temperatures.
The body’s response to heat is gradual, too.
“If you have continuous exposure to heat, your body basically can no longer cool down … in many heat wave events, we actually see a lot of people die after multiple days of exposure,” he said.
Despite residents’ frustration with this design, community engagement manager Key Wynne explained in an email that new residential units are not required to have cooling systems when they are constructed, but are required to have natural or mechanical ventilation systems.
“The city is monitoring heat issues as part of our work to plan for and adapt to the changing climate, and in the future, this could include code changes,” Wynne said. “At this point, cooling isn’t considered a significant life-safety issue in Bellingham.”
Olivia Capriotti is a Dow Jones summer news intern, specializing in data journalism. Reach her at oliviacapriotti@cascadiadaily.com.
