Residential development in New York City outside of Manhattan is generally abysmal. Infill development is dominated by what are called “Fedders houses” - named after the air conditioning company whose name is prominently displayed on the air-conditioning unit sleeves.
In most other cities in the United States, new housing will usually have central air conditioning; external wall-mounted air conditioning units aren’t needed. In New York, though, it seems to be the norm. Why? Is central air conditioning prohibited in local building codes?
I lived in a place built in the seventies that had the heat and AC set up like this. The nice part was that each unit could set the temperature to what they wanted and you could have the bedroom and the living room be different temperatures.
Generally abysmal? Seems a little harsh. I think the practice generally stems from a desire to have the user pay for it directly rather than have it be a building wide service. This would be especially important in rental properties.
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I would think this would not be true for moderate income housing. Certainly high end housing would, but that is true in NYC as well.
A few years back I lived in an apartment building (4-plex, 2 upstairs apartments, 2 downstairs) with central forced-air heating & AC in each unit. These weren’t especially fancy apartments - I’d call them moderate-to-low-income housing.
On the other hand, I live in an area where the temperature regularly exceeds 100 degrees F in the summer and gets below 10 degrees in the winter, so pretty much anything built in the last 30-40 years has included it. Might as well, I figure. Central heating is less likely to start a fire than baseboard heaters, and central AC doesn’t fall out of the window and land on people’s heads
