In NYC is it a thing to have the owner pay for heat for the whole complex via one giant efficient boiler in the basement, and the individual apartments cool by electricity they're separately billed for? This is not unusual in the midwest.
On one hand in my bachelor pad apartment a really bad August was like $40 of electricity for cooling, on the other hand times 40 apartments, I'm sure the owner would prefer "we" pay instead of him.
Very common, to the point of being nearly universal except in relatively recent construction. Many (perhaps most) NYC apartments don't have thermostats. Don't like the heat the landlord has chosen? Open the window or buy a space heater. Want to be cool in the summer? Buy a window air conditioner.
Any idea how that system got common? NYC used to have mainly heat based on steam radiators, which are perfectly easy to control per unit by just adjusting the radiator valve. Since the 1930s, there are even "automatic valves" that raise/lower the radiator inflow automatically to maintain a set temperature, like a thermostat (this is the invention that Danfoss was built on). That's exactly the system I had when I lived in Copenhagen, and it worked pretty well. But it seems to have been largely replaced in NYC with forced-air heating that has no individual controls? So yes, to "adjust the thermostat" downwards, people literally open their windows in January, blowing heat into the outdoors.
NYC landlords are a unique species of scum. If it's doesn't cost them anything, it's good.
There's a lot of history that got us here. One of the outcomes/legacies of this stuff is rent regulation, and the standards of operation there extend into unregulated apartments as well.
Fixing the steam heating valves will decrease their energy costs as tenants reduce the heat they demand, since they all seemed to be overheated. I wonder why they don't do it.
Because the tenant pays the bill, not the landlord so the landlord has no incentive to fix.
With a proper working housing market the landlord might have an incentive to fix (because people just won't rent from your wrecked place if they can get a better place for the same money) - but given the housing shortage in cities like NYC, even a run down shack is better than sleeping in the park.
There are two things. One, many of the steam units have a knob which doesn't actually work (landlords seal/paint it to the point that you cannot move it.) One of the apartments I grew up in in Brooklyn had one of these "units", and according to my grandmother, the knob hadn't worked in many decades (she started living in that apartment in ~1930.) How this came to be is definitely a mystery.
Two, some steam apartments don't have a unit at all, just a pipe from floor to ceiling. Older tenements feature these (the one I'm living in now has one, for example.) If you want to adjust the temperature with this, your only choices are A/C or the window. These apartments were just built this way, and this was likely the cheapest/only tech available at the time.
To agree with chmullig, NYC apartments I've seen are almost all steam heated, but I don't think I've ever heard of a working valve. Most people I know adjust temperature in the winter by opening windows (apartments are largely overheated, for some reason).
The reason we heat with full-apartment systems and cool individually is that landlords are required to pay for heating (and hot water) but don't want to pay for cooling.
On one hand in my bachelor pad apartment a really bad August was like $40 of electricity for cooling, on the other hand times 40 apartments, I'm sure the owner would prefer "we" pay instead of him.