The 14 Spokane residents who died during the 2021 heat wave were living in a wide variety of circumstances.
Most were older than 60, but Andre Pharr was 36. Nadine Hager was 45 and David Bishop was 51. Some were homeless, but most were housed, often in temporary shelters or apartments of last resort with rock-bottom rents and amenities to match, but at least two owned their own homes.
The Spokane City Council is pointing to their deaths as they prepare to adopt a new law Wednesday requiring landlords to provide cooling to every tenant in the city, arguing that saving lives like theirs is worth the costs to landlords of both market-rate and affordable housing.
The law wouldn't have saved many of them. The homeless, the elderly homeowners, possibly the resident of a mobile home, depending on whether they owned the building and just paid rents for the land — none of them would have benefited from a protection being extended to tenants.
Some died within a minute's walk from refuge. Edwin Kedish, a 65-year-old child sex offender released from prison in 2010 with consequently few housing options, died just outside the Catholic Charities-run House of Charity, where he had stayed in an AC-cooled unit the night before.
Alan Rosane, 81, died on the same block as the Fahy Garden Apartments, another Catholic Charities building. He had been a Catholic Charities tenant years prior but was not at the time. Five years later, Rosane's ashes are unclaimed, still in the possession of the county medical examiner.
Others may be alive today if the law had been in place.
Pharr and 68-year-old Robert Hunt were both tenants of the New Washington apartments — a building with some of the cheapest rent in the city and a long history of pest infestations and other unsanitary conditions. Their units didn't have AC or running water.
Deana Farwell, 64, was a tenant of the nearby Wolfe Apartments. Death was common in both buildings, both of which are owned by Jason Wolfe — 19 were found dead in the two apartment buildings between May 2016 and August 2021, according to an investigation by the Inlander. Pharr, Hunt and Farwell all died in two days from the most miserable heat Spokane had faced in a century.
Both buildings at one point had explicitly banned tenants from installing air conditioners — a restriction that the Spokane City Council outlawed in 2024 and the state outlawed in 2025 — though Wolfe told the Inlander in 2022 that was no longer the case.
Pharr, Hunt and Farwell also died less than 1,000 feet away from safety. Catholic Charities had opened five downtown cooling centers just two days before the deaths would begin, and several were only a couple blocks away from their apartments.
These kinds of impromptu, emergency cooling centers have proven relatively ineffective, said Brian Henning, director and founder of the Gonzaga Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment. The city's own pop-ups, whether in the convention center or the Looff Carrousel, were expensive and underutilized, he said in an interview.
Reliable "resilience hubs" — places like libraries and convention centers that residents are already comfortable with — are preferable, Henning argued. But that is still, at best, a second line of defense.
"The goal is to have them be able to stay in their home safely as long as possible, and have a backup if everything goes sideways," Henning said.
If the "right to cooling" law is approved Wednesday, landlords this summer will be required to provide adequate cooling in every bedroom "sufficient to avoid risks to tenant health..." An earlier version of the ordinance drew that line at 80 degrees, but the language was loosened in later versions.
The change was made ostensibly to provide more flexibility for landlords — not everyone's health is put at risk by 80-degree weather, Councilwoman Kate Telis argued in June. Critics argue the vague language means the threshold will be decided through lawsuits, leaving landlords uncertain if they're breaking the law.
Landlords would be required to provide adequate cooling within 72 hours of a written notice from tenants. If they failed to do so, tenants would have the right to seek several forms of remedy, including unilaterally installing a cooling device at the landlord's expense up to a maximum one-time $500 deduction from rent.
The proposal has drawn fierce opposition from real estate and landlord interests, who argue that it would be costly to offer air conditioning units and disastrously expensive to retrofit older buildings to handle the increased electrical load. But low-income housing providers have also been vocal critics, arguing they are least able to absorb additional costs without raising rents beyond their tenants' limited ability to pay.
That's a concern shared by Mayor Lisa Brown, who has generally supported the council's pursuit of stronger tenant protections.
"I take that really seriously," she said in a recent interview. "Housing affordability, energy conservation and protecting people from extreme heat are all important. And so the question is how to get there."
Brown has also been working on addressing extreme heat in people's homes but hopes to do so instead through direct assistance programs in partnership with agencies like Spokane Neighborhood Action Partners.
"That could be not just a device, it could be with energy retrofitting that saves money on heating and cooling," Brown said. "And so we are working on that approach right now, and we're talking to organizations that already provide assistance like SNAP, and we're talking with Avista, and we hope to have something to announce soon."
She argues that this approach addresses some of the populations not helped by a tenant protection, noting that many homeowners live in houses not built for the kind of extreme heat becoming more common from climate change.
Everyone deserves to live someplace with heating and cooling, argued Jonathan Mallahan, who heads Catholic Charities Eastern Washington's housing program. The vast majority of that nonprofit's housing units have permanent air conditioning, and the ones that don't have temporary cooling units.
But Mallahan also believes the council is ignoring the consequences of how they're attempting to achieve that shared goal. While much of the focus has been on the high costs of retrofitting old buildings, it's new construction that has Mallahan concerned. Faced with state development and energy standards, Catholic Charities couldn't simply install a handful of $200 window-mounted air conditioning units into new or rehabbed buildings, but would have to build much more costly "mini-split" units. He estimates this would add $12,000 to the cost of every unit.
Supporters on the council argue that critics overestimate the costs of implementation — the law is "agnostic" about how to achieve cooling, noted Councilman Paul Dillon — and argue the real costs will be outweighed by the lives potentially saved.
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