Unjust past causes heat waves in minority neighborhoods

A woman spends time in a library on a hot day in the Bronx borough of New York. Associated Press

Ruben Berrios knows the harsh reality that in extreme heat, where you live can be a matter of life and death. The 66-year-old lives in Mott Haven, a low-income neighborhood in New York City’s South Bronx, where more than 90 percent of residents are Latino or black. Every summer, the South Bronx becomes one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city, with temperatures 8 degrees (4.5 degrees Celsius) higher than the lusher, mostly white Upper West and East Side neighborhoods less than a mile away.

Heat isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s the leading cause of weather-related deaths nationwide, silently killing an average of 350 New Yorkers each year, according to a city mortality report. Taking a break from his pool game at an apartment complex and senior community center that serves as a designated cooling space, Berrios recalled a recent heat wave: “I lost two people. They were close to me.” Tens of millions of Americans face major heat waves, with temperatures regularly topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit. But in big cities, the heat hits people of color and low-income residents the hardest. In New York City, Black residents die from heat stress at twice the rate of white residents. “Only a quarter of the population of New York City is African American, but half of the deaths from heat are African American,” said Bill Ulfelder, executive director of the Nature Conservancy in New York. “So there’s something totally disproportionate.” Mortality records from cities across the country have shown that heat kills along socioeconomic and racial lines.

In 1995, a deadly heat wave killed 739 people in Chicago. Most of the victims were poor, elderly and black. Last year, blacks accounted for 11 percent of heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, even though black residents make up only 6.8 percent of the county’s population. During heat waves in Memphis in the 1960s and 1980s, “some people were too poor to turn on their air conditioners” and died, said David Jones, a professor and historian of science at Harvard University. Some elderly people living in housing projects died at night because they were afraid of burglars and wouldn’t open their windows or go out to sit on their porches.

Environmental justice advocates trace this inequality to decades of discriminatory housing policy, particularly redlining (the 1930s government practice of assessing the investment value of neighborhoods using race as a determining factor and denying mortgages to minority buyers). Labeling minority neighborhoods as at-risk has restricted resources for generations. It has also deprived these areas of parks and trees and affected how residents experience heat today. Comparing redlining maps from the 1930s with recent heat vulnerability maps from the New York City Department of Health reveals striking correlations between how areas were categorized and where residents are most likely to die from heat. “These heat islands — they’re really in these historically redlined neighborhoods, and that’s where the trees need to go,” Ulfelder said, referring to the urban heat island effect, where heavily paved areas with sparse vegetation trap more heat than outlying areas. In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corp. gave Mott Haven a “D” rating, the lowest possible, for “hazardousness.” For the adjacent Morrisania neighborhood, the agency listed “infiltration of blacks and Puerto Ricans” and “obsolete homes” as “adverse influences.”

Today, the South Bronx has some of the lowest green space per capita in the city and is crisscrossed by power plants, sewage treatment plants, and highways that cause severe noise and air pollution. Residents face high rates of infant mortality, cognitive impairment, heart disease, and asthma—so high that Mott Haven is sometimes called “asthma alley.” These conditions increase vulnerability to heat. “Environmental racism in the South Bronx is very visible,” said Arif Ullah, executive director of the environmental justice group South Bronx Unite. Similar inequities have been identified across the country. In 2022, a Boston University analysis of 115 metropolitan areas from San Jose, California, to Louisville, Kentucky, and Hartford, Connecticut, found that air conditioning was less likely to be available in places with more residents who identify as Black, African American, Hispanic or Latino.

In an effort to combat rising temperatures, New York City Mayor Eric Adams activated the city’s heat emergency plan for a week on June 18, designating hundreds of locations as air-conditioned facilities where residents can cool off during the day. New York City Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said the city is distributing “cooling kits” and indoor thermometers. He called for more funding for a program that helps low-income residents meet their heating and cooling needs. It has already received 21,000 applications this year. For people with mobility issues, installing air conditioning — which actually increases outdoor temperatures — or accessing cooling centers may not be possible. In areas like Brownsville, the South Bronx and East Harlem, residents also report that going outside to cool off means risking encounters with crime and drug activity. Selene Olivaria, who has lived in the South Bronx for nine years, brought her two grandchildren, ages 9 and 4, to cool off in the fountains at Willis Playground. She said the opioid epidemic has led drug users to inject themselves in the toilets. She worries a child might pick up a needle.

One solution to combating heat in sprawling cities, environmentalists say, is to plant more trees, create green spaces like parks and meadows, and cover roofs with plants. “Low-income communities, communities of color, often immigrant communities — that’s where we need to focus,” Ulfelder said. Neighborhoods with majority people of color have 33 percent less tree canopy than predominantly white neighborhoods. That can make them up to 13 degrees warmer (7 degrees Celsius) than neighborhoods 2 miles away. Last fall, the New York City Council passed laws adding trees to the city’s charter sustainability plans and requiring the city to develop an urban forest plan to increase tree cover from 22 to 30 percent by 2035.

On a recent sweltering day, Howard Shillingford, a 58-year-old janitor who grew up in the South Bronx, said he had “never felt heat like this.” It’s especially bad when he’s cleaning school stairwells, where the windows often don’t open. “Oh my God, these stairwells are like ovens,” Shillingford said, reading the news on a computer at the Mott Haven Public Library, another cooling hub. Residents in heat-vulnerable neighborhoods are inventive. Berrios keeps a wet towel on the back of his neck. Olivaria sprays his grandchildren with plastic water guns. Jorge Morales, a 54-year-old graffiti artist from the South Bronx, showers twice a day and rinses his Chihuahua, Buggsy, in the sink. Sometimes residents unscrew fire hydrants, letting water spray onto sidewalks and streets.

“I don’t like wasting water, but that’s what people do here. It’s a survival technique,” ​​said Morales, who is of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, as he charged his phone in the same library. Extreme heat is likely to become the new normal, experts say, and it shouldn’t be underestimated. Last year, the United States experienced the most heat waves since 1936. “At the rate things are going, the heat waves of 2044 are going to be much worse than they are right now,” said Jones, the science historian. “This is not a freak heat wave. This is a taste of things to come.”

Associated Press