Poor people and minorities are most vulnerable to extreme heatwaves. That's not an accident.
Residential redlining in the 1930s created mightily to today's urban heat disasters.
Welcome to EarthWatch, the environmental news and opinion newsletter for people who think you should never turn your back on Mother Earth—written by me, Jerry Bowles, an ancient scribbler who has been around the Sun a few times and doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
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Photo: I shot the photo of Lower Manhattan above 45 years ago today from a rooftop in Brooklyn on the occasion of America’s 200th birthday. Happy Fourth of July.
There is a certain—I’m guessing, willful—irony in the insistence by GOP leaders that they want to stick to traditional transportation projects in a new infrastructure bill to avoid funding “experiments in social engineering.” It’s almost as if they believe that decisions about where to build roads and bridges and tunnels and carbon-spewing electrical plants happen in a vacuum without predictable positive impacts for some communities and disastrous consequences for others. As historians Erika M Bsumek, University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts and James Sidbury, Rice University, point out in an enlightening new article, infrastructure spending has always involved social engineering. They write:
“… we believe it’s important for Americans to understand that infrastructure investment has always involved social programming. That has inevitably meant that it benefited some and disadvantaged others. In our view, Americans have been far too hesitant to acknowledge that many infrastructure projects, whether consciously or through neglect, have hurt communities of color.”
Consider the great Westward expansion of roads and railroads of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries that brought waves of migrants into lands inhabited by Native Americans for centuries and pushed them out entirely or into reservations. The American south was largely built on the backs of enslaved people. After the Emancipation Proclamation, discriminatory housing and transportation and health infrastructure were planned features (in short, “systemic”) of Jim Crow America well into the 20th century.
This not ancient history. The expansion of the American interstate highway system in the 1950s and 60s displaced millions of marginalized people and, in many well-documented instances, actually cut off poor people of color from “white” parts of cities. In a 2020 article in the Vanderbilt Law Journal, Deborah N. Archer, Associate Professor of Clinical Law and Co-Faculty Director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, New York University School of Law, wrote:
In states around the country, highway construction displaced Black households and cut the heart and soul out of thriving Black communities as homes, churches, schools, and businesses were destroyed. In other communities, the highway system was a tool of a segregationist agenda, erecting a wall that separated White and Black communities and protected White people from Black migration. In these ways, construction of the interstate highway system contributed to the residential concentration of race and poverty and created physical, economic, and psychological barriers that persist.
Now, at a time when extreme anthropogenic heatwaves are making many cities even hotter and more dangerous, a recent climate study highlights how neighborhoods of color are more vulnerable to the damage of extreme weather thanks to a discriminatory federal housing policy called “redlining’ which in the 1930s created maps of hundreds of cities, rating the riskiness of different neighborhoods for real estate investment by grading them “best,” “still desirable,” “declining” or “hazardous.” Black and immigrant neighborhoods were typically rated “hazardous” and outlined in red, denoting a dangerous place to lend money.
For decades, until the 1970s, people in redlined areas were denied access to federally backed mortgages and other credit, which limited their ability to accumulate wealth to improve conditions or move to better neighborhoods.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn the study—titled The Effects of Historical Housing Policies on Resident Exposure to Intra-Urban Heat: A Study of 108 US Urban Areas also found a stunning example of the negative consequences of systemic racism and environmental injustice that explains why underdeveloped neighborhoods are more vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather:
Formerly redlined neighborhoods are today 5 degrees hotter in summer, on average, than areas once favored for housing loans, with some cities seeing differences as large as 12 degrees. Redlined neighborhoods, which remain lower-income are more likely to have Black or Hispanic residents, consistently have far fewer trees and parks that help cool the air. They also have more paved surfaces, such as asphalt lots or nearby highways, that absorb and radiate heat.
These findings are reinforced by a more recent study by the Nature Conservancy which studied the relationship between extreme heat and incomes and found that 92 percent of low-income blocks in the U.S. have less tree cover and hotter average temperatures than high-income blocks.
The inequality is most pronounced in the Northeast, with some low-income blocks in urban areas having 30 percent less tree cover and average temperatures 4 degrees Celsius higher than high-income blocks. Five of the ten worst discrepancies were found in Connecticut. Grist quotes Rob McDonald, lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy, as saying that’s no coincidence. The poorest blocks in the area have 54 percent less tree cover and are 5 Celsius hotter on average.
None of these findings are all that surprising given what we already know about our original sin of slavery or the immutable reality of human existence everywhere which is that people with money usually have better stuff. They are long-overdue scientific and historical research into our wallpapered over past and perhaps a hint that a little critical race theory this Fourth of July weekend could be more useful than many voters seem to think.
Dig Deeper
The Effects of Historical Housing Policies on Resident Exposure to Intra-Urban Heat: A Study of 108 US Urban Areas (Jeremy S. Hoffman, Vivek Shandas, and Nicholas Pendleton)
The tree cover and temperature disparity in US urbanized areas: Quantifying the association with income across 5,723 communities (Nature Conservancy)
“White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes”* : Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction (Deborah N. Archer)
Infrastructure spending has always involved social engineering (The Conversation)
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