Housing Discrimination Made Summers Even Hotter

American cities face increasingly unbearable summers—but the heat isn’t distributed equally. Low-income and minority neighborhoods can get significantly warmer than their surrounding areas due to the urban heat island effect. These areas typically lack trees and other cooling infrastructure that provide shade during the day, and stay uncomfortably warm at night as the heat absorbed by impervious surfaces escapes back into the air.

A new study finds that these disparities correlate closely with neighborhoods that were subject to decades of housing discrimination through federal redlining policies that prevented African Americans from buying homes in certain neighborhoods during the New Deal era. In 94 percent of 108 cities that the researchers looked at, they found that historically redlined neighborhoods were nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than non-redlined neighborhoods, though some cities showed starker differences—as much as 12.8 degrees.