Fighting past inequities, New York, like Phoenix, struggles to acclimate to rising heat
NEW YORK — Anieto Henvill's eyes scanned the edge of the woods and grew wider as they locked on a plump mushroom about the size of a roasting hen.
Like flowers appearing after a springtime rain, this fungus, blooming in mid-August, was an edible treat suggesting a welcome change of seasons. A cooling rain had coaxed it out after waves of unbearable heat.
The Caribbean native and longtime New Yorker wore a city-issue T-shirt bearing the slogan, "It's my park," evidence that she routinely volunteers to take care of the land that takes care of her. She was heading into the Seton Falls Park woods, which shelter her, her children and her grandchildren daily from broiling Bronx summers, when she spotted the mushroom's orange folds and declared it dinner.
"Chicken of the woods!" she said. "It really tastes like chicken." She might have roasted it in another season, but that would overheat the home in August. Instead, she would stir-fry it with jerk seasonings.
The native hardwoods at Seton Falls cover roughly the same area as another Bronx landmark, Yankee Stadium, and were maintained by family ownership until the city bought the land 110 years ago. In the 1990s, neighbors fended off a plan to replace the woods with a recreational sports complex.
Today, their dense canopy cools the area by more than 10 degrees on the hottest days, compared to the surrounding Bronx sidewalks. The trees were a lifesaver when New York steamed at 95 degrees in July and again in early August, when Henvill had used them as a shield against her warming world.
"It's like we're in a microwave oven and someone zaps the button periodically," she said of this summer. "It's been terrible for me. I feel it in my body."
A summer high in the 90s might sound like a dream to Arizonans. In New York, it's a wet heat. Humidity compounds the danger by limiting the body's ability to cool itself through sweat. The concrete and asphalt in America's largest city further concentrate the misery in a heat island that adds 2.3 degrees more to local temperatures than the one that bakes Phoenix. The problem worsens as warming increases the likelihood of dangerous heat waves and tips the Eastern Seaboard into a different climate zone.
"Apparently we are a subtropical climate now," said Chris Dobens, spokesman for the New York advocacy group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, "which blows my mind."
Heat is a growing menace in cities struggling to prepare
Phoenix often grabs the national headlines with sensational temperature and death milestones. This year's newsmakers: 113 straight days at or above 100 degrees, a record 61 days at or above 110 and 39 nights above 90, with more than 600 deaths either confirmed or still under investigation.
But cities across America are struggling with risks they arguably aren't as prepared to take. Where community cooling centers are widespread and open throughout heat season in Phoenix, cooler cities have either no defined centers or centers not well known because they welcome people only during rare, officially designated heat emergencies, such as when the heat tops 95 for two straight days.
It is America's deadliest natural disaster, year after worsening year, but one that FEMA does not call a disaster or fund as such. In New York, the current pace of climate change could produce a six-fold rise in the number of 90-degree days this century, according to the Mayor's Office of Climate & Environmental Justice.
Before plucking the mushroom and carrying it to her home a couple of city blocks away, Henvill stepped into the woods to review what else was growing outside the sun's mid-August glare in her cooling neighborhood sanctuary. It's where she goes to escape the ever-worsening urban heat, and she needed it more than ever this summer.
"I use this park to the best of my ability," she said.
She walked under the shadow of a dense oak-hickory canopy to the rocky cascade for which the preserve — Seton Falls Park — is named. Past the burbling falls she found city foresters taking inventory of native flora growing streamside: ashes, shrubby spice bushes, black cherries and tulip trees. Beyond the creek, clustered sassafras stems shot skyward out of a fire scar in the understory.
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These woods are Henvill's sanctuary from a city that, like so many in America, is getting dangerously hotter.
In a 2024 summer when heat waves scorched much of the nation, high temperatures reached into the 90s on 21 days in New York, a humid metropolis where many residents lack home air conditioning.
While Phoenix and Maricopa County are leaders in tracking heat-related deaths, the threat is only now becoming clearer nationwide. Heat contributes to 350 New Yorker deaths each summer, according to the city. Black New Yorkers make up a quarter of the population but half of the deaths, a fact that advocates say shows how chronic underinvestment in poorer neighborhoods can kill.
Window air conditioners indoors, outdoor scaffolding for shade
Henvill is among the lucky New Yorkers who have someplace cooler to go near home.
Michael Ortiz is not so lucky. "I don't like summer, period," he said, leaning out the open window of his first-floor apartment in one of 18 brick towers at the Jefferson Houses, an East Harlem public housing complex. "The weather has changed."
There's little for Ortiz to like. A native Puerto Rican but a New Yorker since 1982, he said he can't be outside too long in summer anymore without getting exhausted or breaking out in a rash. The city has always been hot at times, but not for as long, he said. He prefers to stay indoors in summer, but has to go out to work at salvaging scrap metal, sometimes for people who pay him to remove it from hot basements.
"Regardless of the heat, you gotta go make money," he said.
Residents of these or the nearby Wagner housing complex can rent window-unit air conditioners from the city housing authority, though not all have one. Living in the densest public housing concentration in the United States, they have access to some grass and gardens between buildings, and benefit from proximity to some mature shade trees that are next to the buildings but fenced off from access.
When they must leave home and walk to subways, markets or workplaces, they can expect lots of concrete and practically no natural shade. Most bus stops offer no shelter, and the few that do are covered on three sides and on top by glass — fine rain or snow protection in season, but a sweltering greenhouse in summer. Construction scaffolding sits for months or years in front of some buildings on East Harlem's wide commercial corridor along 125th Street, emblems of the sluggish pace of improvements in the long-neglected neighborhood.
"The scaffolding, as ugly as it is, is some of the only shading you'll find in the corridor," said Annie Carforo, environmental justice advocate with WE ACT. The group advocates for more livable streetscapes in this part of the city, as well as aid to people who can't afford to buy or power air conditioners.
Carforo and Dobens, the group's spokesman, accompanied The Arizona Republic on a walking "heat tour" approximating one they routinely offer to public officials and interested parties to learn how inequality is a danger in summer.
New York's concrete and asphalt absorb heat and intensify the warming that comes with climate change more than most cities. Where Phoenix's urban heat island effect adds an average of 7.4 degrees to what residents experience, New York's adds an average of 9.7 degrees, according to independent researchers at the nonprofit Climate Central. On that group's heat map of the city, Harlem, like most of Manhattan aside from Central Park, is blood red to denote its ranking in the highest category of heat amplification.
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Heat discriminates because of redlining, other practices
East Harlem is one of America's prime examples of how past investment decisions and discriminatory housing practices crowded poor and minority residents together and then turned up the heat on them. It still suffers the influence of redlining , Carforo said, referring to the government practice that began in the 1930s and mapped neighborhoods according to racial composition for use when deciding whether to guarantee housing loans. Black and mixed neighborhoods lost out on investment opportunities, compounding poor conditions over the decades.
Redlining is illegal now, but its effects remain in long-vacant lots and a dearth of street trees, Carforo said. Even as the city attempts to spur investment in East Harlem with bargain deals on those lots, she said, developers tend to build apartment buildings that are self-contained and unaffordable to most who already live in the neighborhood, and they don't enforce conditions that would enhance shade. As an example, she pointed at young, dead trees outside a new building on 125th Street, evidence that the builder planted the trees as requested but then left them to die without care.
Down the block, at an intersection near the convergence of major thoroughfares including the Robert F. Kennedy (Triborough) Bridge and FDR Drive, Dobens pointed to a temperature sensor at a manhole cover on the sidewalk to show how the sprawling asphalt, concrete and steel concentrate heat. While the National Weather Service reported that the city's air temperature was in the low 80s that afternoon, the sidewalk radiated 108 degrees.
"This is our 'Sweat Corner,'" Dobens said.
Studies have strongly linked redlining to continuing pockets of heat beyond what other neighborhoods endure. One led by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers and published in the journal Climate reviewed 108 American cities and found that the formerly redlined areas in 94% of them are consistently hotter than their urban areas overall.
This summer, Florida Atlantic University researchers published a study in the Journal of Urban Health showing that redlining still affects how much older residents walk during the summer, a healthful activity in moderate temperatures but a potential hazard in extreme heat. Those living in the best of the redlined neighborhoods reported walking less than those in cooler parts of the city. But in more impoverished redlined neighborhoods ranked as declining or hazardous, residents kept up their walking through the heat despite the danger, possibly because they had no alternative.
Residents of East Harlem's public housing complexes can relate. If they have air conditioning, they're safe as long as they can avoid going out. But many can't stay home throughout a heat wave.
"When it's real hot, I don't come out," said Sarah Pought, a 40-year resident of the Robert Wagner Houses. She rents two window units from the housing authority for $16 a month so she can keep cool unless the power goes out. When she needs groceries, she must drag them back from the store a few blocks away. She also needs to restock bottled water so she can avoid drinking the brown water that flows from her tap.
Another resident, Veda Henderson, said she stays in front of her living-room AC unit during heat waves but does not have one in her bedroom.
"It makes you irritable," she said. "You don't want to sleep. You don't want to eat."
In Phoenix, as in New York, historically redlined neighborhoods tend to be the hottest, according to an Arizona State University analysis. Those neighborhoods generally cup downtown Phoenix in a U-shaped swath extending roughly from Sky Harbor Airport to Interstate 17 and then northwest on the south edge of Grand Avenue, and they produce some of the hottest land-surface temperature readings.
They have more than their share of concrete, asphalt and warehouses, and less than their share of trees. It will take smart planning now to cool neighborhoods afflicted by the poor and racist planning of the past, said Melissa Guardaro, a former New Yorker and an assistant research professor who works on community sustainability programs at ASU's Knowledge Exchange for Resilience.
"We need to be thinking about developing for a hotter future," Guardaro said.
That means building with materials that are less likely to heat their surroundings and thinking more about how the structures themselves can shade the streets and sidewalks in places with lots of renters who may lack the incentive or funds to maintain street trees, she said. If developments are to have trees, she said, those backing the projects might want to require a plan for maintaining them.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development could start requesting these types of improvements when it calls for proposals from developers. "Every federal agency has a role," Guardaro said.
One agency in particular, FEMA, needs authorization to treat extreme heat as a disaster worthy of its funding, Guardaro said. Doing so could help communities pay for air conditioning that can cost tens of thousands of dollars at a single public cooling center in the summer, for instance.
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero this summer wrote a letter to FEMA, co-signed by 16 mayors from around the country, asking the agency to change its guidelines so it can treat heat as a natural disaster. Such a move would unlock funds not available for routine emergencies deemed the responsibility of local and state governments.
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'We're not taking care of the Earth'
In their days off, New Yorkers who feel safe venturing out into the heat can at least find some relief by taking a subway to one of the public beaches. One such escape is Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, where thousands spread out under umbrellas or gazebos and splash in the Atlantic Ocean. That's where 60-year-old Sharon Brown, who lives in the borough's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, brought a group of Black women in white sun hats and dresses for a painting class in the sand on an August Saturday.
"After we paint, we can always go jump in the cold water," she said.
Brown worries about her older neighbors, who are at risk from asthma and other conditions and tend not to come outside in summer as often as she remembers in cooler years.
"I don't remember the summers being this bad," she said. "I believe in global warming. We're not taking care of the Earth."
Henvill, the Bronx resident who spends most days in the shade of Seton Falls Park, said it's critical to her that neighbors help maintain the woods. She organizes cleanups three days a week, removing all manner of debris. On the day when The Republic accompanied her into the park, a car tire had appeared deep in the woods, which she said is common, apparently rolled in and left by people looking for free dumping.
Children from nearby public housing complexes and several schools use the park, she said.
"This is the one hub that we have in the community that brings everyone together," she said. "It's very important that people get the message of why we should keep the forest."
On the hottest days, the forest proves its worth.
In a 2021 study of forested areas among U.S. cities, the New York-based Natural Areas Conservancy found that on one day that year, July 21, the Seton Falls tree canopy knocked 13 degrees off the heat that neighbors felt when walking under street trees just beyond the park. It's a native Northeastern woodland that New York never paved over, and a lesson for planners adapting to heat nationwide.
Forested natural areas tended to cool their areas by 3 degrees or more in the studied cities. Phoenix and the Southwest beyond Texas were not analyzed. Generally, the research found that healthy forests provided the best cooling, compared to degraded forests, manicured lawns with street trees, or buildings and streets. In Austin, Texas, hardwood forests cooled the air by about 3 degrees on average but were far less extensive than trees planted over lawns, which did not cool the broader area.
Urban forests need nurturing, said Clara Pregitzer, deputy director of science at the Natural Areas Conservancy. It's true whether in rare native stands in New York or in woods or scrublands being displaced in high-growth southwestern cities.
"City governments have not been funding them to the degree that they need to be cared for," Pregitzer said. That care includes removing invasive non-native species that can degrade the canopy, such as vines that New York foresters have to keep from strangling young oaks that are forming the next mature canopy at Seton Falls. It's tough work, made tougher by the fact that the city has cut dozens of workers tending them since the COVID-19 pandemic.
New York's tree canopy covers about 22% of the city, Pregitzer said. Within that cumulative shaded area, about a quarter lies in forested natural areas like Seton Falls Park, as opposed to more open and manicured areas like Central Park. Yet three-quarters of the city's trees grow in these natural areas providing far more natural air conditioning than a row of trees rising from a curb. Less than 1% of the city parks budget goes toward maintaining them. Communities across America ignore native tree cover at their own peril, Pregitzer said.
Each warming summer shows how critical it will be to keep the woods healthy and shading neighbors who can't afford the power for air conditioners, said Renee Patterson, a Bronx resident who heads the Seton Falls Park Preservation Coalition. The summer of 2024 was only the latest proof.
"Hot as hell," Patterson said. "Thank God we got this little bit of land, because everybody has been in the park this year."
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at .
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
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