Since 2019, I’ve been studying how exposure to extreme heat and its effects is unequally distributed — what’s often described as thermal inequality. Thermal inequality disproportionately affects those who have already been harmed by other kinds of inequality. One is residential redlining, which in turn has been central in shaping thermal inequality.
In the 1930s, as Americans struggled through the Great Depression, the federal government established the Home Owners’ Loan Corp. to refinance the terms of loans for homeowners facing foreclosure. After completing this phase of its work, HOLC moved on to generate its infamous “residential security maps” of major cities across the United States. According to HOLC’s assessments, certain areas were deemed “hazardous,” as in too risky for investment, and were marked in red on these maps.
Urban areas with high concentrations of people of color, particularly Black people, tended to be redlined. For residents of these areas, it became difficult to getaccess to financial resources, including mortgages, small-business loans, lines of credit and insurance coverage, from both public and private lenders.
Decades of disinvestment have resulted in communities of color living in areas with more concrete and less green space than their white neighbors have, which means that these areas are far hotter as well. A prime example is the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, where we have been interviewing residents about their experiences with heat.
The thermal inequality experienced by Watts residents, who are overwhelmingly Black and Latino, is built on a long history of other kinds of inequalities, including those exacerbated by redlining.
The heat in Watts is amplified by the built environment: pavement everywhere, a lack of shade and the use of building materials that absorb heat and slowly release it back into the environment. We heard from one Watts resident about her son fainting on a sweltering playground at school. In describing a bus stop, another resident noted that the “bench is out in the open, and the heat’s on it, so I don’t sit on it.” He added: “Let’s say you were to walk — you’d be walking around in the open, because there’s barely any trees.”