Shade in the City

I live in Silverton, Oregon. A town of just over 10,000 people, we’re situated approximately 45 miles south of Portland and about 12 miles east of Salem. As long as you don’t mind rain—which I don’t—the climate here is relatively benign. Our winters are mild and heavy snow is rare. Even in August, our hottest month, the average temperature is just 81 degrees. So it came as no small shock to the system of my fellow Oregonians when we hit 116 degrees a few days ago, at the end of June.

And that we hit 116 degrees at all.

Prior to last weekend, the all-time record temperature for Portland was 107, set in 1981. Last Saturday, Portland hit 108. On Sunday, it climbed to 112. And on Monday it peaked at 116. To put that in wider perspective, Dallas, Miami, New Orleans, and downtown Los Angeles have never been that hot. Salem got as hot as 117 on Monday, matching Las Vegas’s all-time high. Seattle also set records. And one small town in British Columbia set Canadian national records on several consecutive days, reaching 121 on Tuesday. (That village, Lytton, is now tragically on fire.)

The author’s housemates, including their eight-month-old son, at the neighbors’ house, where they weathered a 116 degree heat wave.

The communities in my area simply aren’t designed for life inside a heat dome. Portland’s streetcar system was suspended for two days because the extreme heat melted power cables. Streets and sidewalks buckled, too. And air conditioning isn’t as ubiquitous in homes here as it is elsewhere around the country. Nationwide, 91% of homes have primary air conditioning installed. That number is just 78% in Portland. I’ve lived in Oregon for the last 15 years and never had A/C…until two days ago. By that point the extreme heat had moved on, but we’ll be ready for the next one.

My family was fortunate in that we got to camp out for three days in our neighbors’ air-conditioned home. Our friends Mike and Lisa Leslie helped start a co-housing community on the property behind us. (You may have heard Lisa on a recent episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution Podcast.) Not only was my household, which includes an eight-month-old baby recovering from surgery, able to stay relatively comfortable, but the Leslies’ community opened up their “hub building” as an impromptu cooling shelter for any neighbors who needed it.

Unfortunately, many people don’t have access to the same financial and social resources we do. According to The Wall Street Journal, the heat wave caused at least 76 deaths in Oregon and Washington, including 45 deaths in Portland’s Multnomah County. “Many of the dead in Multnomah County, [Oregon], were alone and lacked air conditioning or fans,” the article says. The extreme heat is being blamed for hundreds of deaths in western Canada too, and, again, many of the dead were seniors, people who lived alone, and people whose residences were not cooled or well-ventilated.

Extreme Heat and “Social Infrastructure”

The heat we experienced was extreme to say the least. Oregonians may not see another heat event like it in my lifetime. Or perhaps for another couple years, as with the rolling heat waves in Europe. Or, who knows, maybe later this summer. But the last week brought home some of the struggles many people experience regularly as they navigate daily life in the unrelenting sun and heat.

Have you seen our July cover story? https://t.co/mq72JqoELl pic.twitter.com/QGoFMSxjvp

— National Geographic (@NatGeo) June 30, 2021

By coincidence, when I received my copy of National Geographic this week I noticed the cover story was about the unequal distribution of shade—including mature shade trees—in Los Angeles. And in fact, the magazine contains two feature stories on heat and shade. (Both articles are behind a paywall as of this writing. Still I recommend getting the magazine, if only for the three-page, fold-out cover about L.A.’s street trees.)

In the first article, Elizabeth Royte explains why extreme heat is a “nested problem,” inseparable from larger social issues, including how we build our cities and how we care for our most vulnerable neighbors. Access to shade, as we’ll see, makes a huge difference, but so too does living in vibrant neighborhoods. When it comes to beating the heat, reducing social isolation may be just as important as getting people into air-conditioned spaces. “In New York,” she writes, “Black residents die of heat-related causes at twice the rate that white ones do, but whites succumb at three times the rate of Hispanics and five times the rate of Asians—in part because whites are more likely to live alone.”

Royte cites the work of Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist who studied the 1995 Chicago heat wave that killed more than 700 people: 

[Klinenberg] discovered that low-income neighborhoods with vibrant public spaces and plenty of commercial activity had fewer heat-related deaths. People in less animated neighborhoods were far less likely to step outside for relief or visit with caring neighbors, he surmised, because they didn’t know one another, had few places to go, and were sometimes scared to walk the streets. And so they stayed inside—often with windows closed to guard against burglars—sweltered, and died.

I took Klinenberg’s book, Palaces for the People, off my shelf and read more about his study of the Chicago heat wave. Despite high levels of poverty, he wrote, Latinos had fared better than other ethnic groups, “simply because in Chicago they tend to live in crowded apartments and densely packed neighborhoods, places where dying alone is nearly impossible.”

He found that the difference between how two neighborhoods weathered the heat wave was tied not just to social capital, the network of relationships there, but also to social infrastructure, the physical conditions—everything from libraries and sidewalks to community gardens, churches, and businesses—that make those relationships possible. This is from Klinenberg’s book:

When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves. Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local, face-to-face interactions—at the school, the playground, and the corner diner—are the building blocks of all public life. People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures—not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow.

Looking for Shade

In the second National Geographic article, “A Shady Divide,” Alejandra Borunda  writes about how urban design in Los Angeles, including a legacy of redlining and building roads through predominantly low-income neighborhoods, has made residents more vulnerable to rising heat. Borunda explains that the city code dictates where and how much of a shadow a building can cast, “lest it overly shade courtyards, parks, or patios.” And redlining led to loss of wealth for residents (and therefore the city as a whole) as well as “massive disinvestment” in public goods, including shade trees. “Furthermore,” says Borunda, “to make way for cars, the city removed trees along streets and narrowed sidewalks. Trees were also felled or trimmed to allow street surveillance by L.A. police helicopters.”

This disparity, in full view if one knows to look for it, is one that leaves many residents exposed to increasing and unhealthy heat levels https://t.co/MezKkheRyG pic.twitter.com/uddyS9Laqe

— National Geographic (@NatGeo) June 30, 2021

The result is a huge disparity today in how Angelenos can mitigate the heat. About 20% of the city’s trees are located in just five census blocks, home to just 1% of the population. The magazine includes side-by-side charts that compare formerly redlined and non-redlined neighborhoods, both in terms of the tree canopy and heat exposure. “Formerly redlined neighborhoods are on average 7.6 degrees hotter than the richest ones,” Borunda writes. The land-surface temperature on a hot July day in a formerly-redlined, largely treeless neighborhood can be 40 degrees hotter than a canopied neighborhood up the road.

Back in 2019, journalist Sam Bloch wrote an article for Places Journal about why it’s so hard to find shade in Los Angeles, or even create your own. The dearth of street trees is attributable not only to a legacy of racist policies, but also to L.A.’s auto-centricity, its wide roads, and vast parking lots. Multiple city parks are even built over underground parking structures, “which means there is no depth for deep-rooted shade trees, and no respite from the sun for visitors.”

Many bus stops don’t have shaded shelters, and, in an interview with 99% Invisible, Bloch described seeing people who were waiting for the bus angling for shade behind street signs and telephone poles and even each other. He also said that resident-led efforts to create shade at home or in public are often met with resistance. DIY solutions—like makeshift shelters and canvas roofs—are removed because they violate municipal code or because neighbors complain.

What Can We Do Now?

Average temperatures in many North American communities are rising steadily and magnifying the heat-island effect. The costs of the heat are real and varied. Elizabeth Royte writes that researchers have linked higher temperatures with a greater incidence of premature, underweight, and stillborn babies; lower test scores; diminished physical and mental health; and higher incidents of violence. They also contribute to decreased productivity, lost working hours, and many other economic costs.

Reflecting on our super-heated weekend in the Pacific Northwest and all that I’ve been reading and listening to since, I’m more convinced than ever that the Strong Towns approach has much to authentically contribute to towns and cities enduring the sun and heat. Here are three such lessons, by no means exhaustive:

1. We need to plant more street trees.

We’ve been writing for years about the benefits of street trees, so I won’t belabor the point here. Not only do they cool our buildings, sidewalks, and courtyards, they also increase home values, increase the value of commercial districts, help reduce crime, improve public health, and slow cars. No wonder we’ve described planting street trees as the highest returning investment your city can make in a neighborhood.

2. We need to change how we build our cities.

Image via Josh Rose on Unsplash.

Los Angeles has set a goal of planting 90,000 street trees by the end of this year. The goal is laudable yet, as journalist Sam Bloch explained, the city may not fully appreciate the structural challenges of planting all those trees. For example, L.A. prohibits the planting of a street tree within 45 feet of a driveway. “Let’s be real,” says Bloch, “that’s practically all of Los Angeles.” He goes on: “That makes me think the city is not understanding the complete, wholesale reimagining of the street necessary to plant 90,000 street trees.”

So not only do we need more trees for our streets, we need better streets for our trees. We need to convert dangerous and unproductive stroads into prosperous, human-scaled streets. We also need to grow “complete neighborhoods.” Such neighborhoods make it feasible and comfortable to conduct much of life within walking distance. They also encourage the kind of social infrastructure Eric Klinenberg has shown contributes to greater health, resilience, and overall well-being—even in the midst of a deadly heat wave.

3. We need to unleash the bottom-up energy and innovation of residents.

Trees take years if not decades to develop mature, shade-giving canopies. Similarly, the process of incrementally transforming streets and neighborhoods will (and often should) take time. But people shouldn’t have to suffer needlessly in the meanwhile.

James Rojas—an urban planner who coined the term “Latino urbanism” (and a favorite inspiration of Strong Towns senior editor Daniel Herriges)—says Latino residents have mastered the art of finding or making shade. The defining aesthetic with these homemade shade solutions, writes Alejandra Borunda in National Geographic, is rasquachismo, “a Chicano term for resourceful, cheerful cobbling together of whatever is around to create something vibrant and functional.” Cities—from Los Angeles to Portland and my own town of Silverton—should learn from, rather than stifle, such efforts. From tarps and shade sails to makeshift bus shelters and plazas, creative, bottom-up interventions like these will be the key to surviving and even thriving in all kinds of weather.

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