Seeking Shade In A Warming World

0:07Last week saw dangerous weather in Europe where a brutal heat wave swept across the continent. As Britain baked, the wise and the fortunate sought refuge on beaches and in Lido's anywhere to take the edge off the unusually high June temperatures. At Wimbledon, it was the hottest opening day on record and tennis fans came prepared. And in late June, hundreds of heat records were set across the U.S., including in Baltimore, which saw a record high of 105 degrees. So let's take a look at the Almanac for today. We had 97 degrees at BWI Marshall, 10 degrees above average for this time of year, one degree shy of the record high.

0:48Once you factor in the humidity, though, it's feeling like 104 degrees right now at the airport. It feels like 110 in White Marsh, feels like 105 in Owings Mills. Friends in Columbia, you're feeling like 107 degrees. Heat is a deadly threat that intensifies each summer. And while some of us turn to air conditioning, many don't have that option. What else can we do to cool down? The answer may be something as simple and as ancient as shade. It's how many of you find relief from the heat. Whether in the car or outside of the car with a blanket, I can always find a great shade space in the local cemetery close to my job and close to my home.

1:29It's something I love and appreciate very much. There's just wonderful old trees that have grown there, and it's just become a wonderful place for me to gather and pause. This is Ruth from Tucson, Arizona. To promote shade, the Tucson Electric Company encourages you to plant a tree on your southern exposure by offering you a tree at local nurseries for$5. We have a pomegranate and I'm looking forward to it growing and giving us shade. Thanks for those messages. Today, we take a closer look at the power of shade to help us cool down and the steps some communities are taking to help bring relief to residents.

2:12I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast, where we get to the heart of the story. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

2:24Let's meet our panel. Joining us from New York is Sam Block. He's a journalist and the author of the new book, Shade, the Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. Sam, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. And with us from Petaluma, California, is V. Kelly Turner. She's an associate professor of urban planning and geography at UCLA, where she researches how cities can adapt to extreme heat. Kelly, welcome. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Sam, let's just start with the headlines. How hot is it so far this summer, and how does that compare to recent years? Well, on the East Coast, we just passed through record-breaking heat.

2:58I'm talking about three consecutive days that in some areas pushed air temperatures well above 100 degrees. And, you know, in New York City, we set, I believe, a record for the hottest day in the city since 2012. But the thing that I was really more attuned to is the fact that this is the kind of heat that, while extreme, we might actually expect later in the summer. But this time we saw it on the very first weekend of summer in late June. and that was upsetting and kind of worrying to me because I think for a lot of us, you know, the first weekend of summer, this is a time that we want to celebrate and go outside.

3:37Right. But when you have the heat index pushing 105, 110 degrees, if you spend too much time outside in the sun, you know, your skin is going to cook, your heart rate is climbing, your brain gets foggy, you have to slow down. For elderly people, three hours in those conditions can be fatal. And then even for younger, healthier adults, those conditions are survivable, but they're not very livable. You know, you have people passing out at concerts in Washington, D.C., passengers on a train that gets stuck in Baltimore because the steel tracks are getting warped. All of these things are sort of, I would say, you know, directly and indirectly kind of warping our daily life.

4:17And, you know, if climate scientists are to be believed, like, this is only the beginning. We're going to see a lot more of this kind of heat in the very near future. Kelly, you work with and research cities around the country. What worries you about the heat we're seeing this year? Yeah, thanks. I think what worries me about the heat this year is not just the kind of extreme heat, deadly heat headlines, But what Sam said about survivability versus livability, as it gets hotter and hotter for more and more of the year, cities are becoming unusable for daily life. Things we like to do, like go outside for a walk or a run, for people who work outside, for children who need to play outside for their mental and behavioral health.

5:04What worries me is that we have a city that's shrinking. Sam, your book Shade opens with a scene in LA. There are people crowding into just like a sliver of shadow at a bus stop. And it's a scene you saw yourself. That's what inspired this book. What was happening in that moment? Yeah, that is a surprisingly common site in Los Angeles where I used to live. And it's something that I think really shocked me the first time because, you know, I used to live in this really hilly neighborhood that was filled with trees and stayed really cool and calm on hot days. But when I drove down through the neighborhood, I would pass by these streets where there's no trees at all and no bus shelters at all, just stops where you have passengers standing behind street signs and telephone poles, so desperate just to catch a little sliver of shadow and get out of the sun.

5:59And that was the reality not just for the riders in my neighborhood, but also for most of the 700 ,000 or so people who get on a bus in L.A. every day. And 75 % of whom, at least within the city limits, have no dedicated shelter where they can sit down and get out of the sun. And I think seeing this phenomenon, this kind of, you know, desperate contrivance of shade, doesn't seem right and it doesn't seem fair. especially in a city like L.A., which we know is getting hotter and drier, especially for transit riders who we know have to endure these long waits for the rides, maybe 30 minutes or an hour if they miss one ride, and who are demographically among the most vulnerable to the health effects of heat.

6:42Sam, I can't help but wonder about the hundreds of thousands of unhoused people in the U.S. as well. Oh, my goodness. The situation for them is even more dire. I mean, you know, there's a heat scientist who works in the city of Phoenix who is estimated that unhoused people are 200 to 300 times more likely to die from heat than the rest of us. You know, they can't go inside and find air conditioning on a hot day. They're really just stuck at the mercy of the streets. And the conditions can be incredibly grueling and very hard for them. And something that I discovered when I was writing my book is that during the pandemic in the summer of 2020, when there was a shelter-in-place order, you actually had neighborhood residents in L.A.

7:25and L.A. cops and city attorneys all trying to basically conspire in some cases to remove tree shade from these encampments just to get homeless people, the unhoused populations, to leave, which is so tragic for so many reasons. Kelly, what do we know about how effective shade is at cooling down people and environments? Because when you say, oh, just find some shade, it sounds like an overly simple solution. Yeah, shade is one of the most intuitive solutions that people naturally seek when it's hot. I think almost anyone can remember a time that they've been outside on a hot day and thought, oh, there's some shade.

8:07I'm going to step into it to cool down. But there's a reason why it's so effective. Shade fundamentally changes the equation about how much energy your body needs to expend when it's hot. All else equal, a person standing in the shade can be up to 30 degrees Celsius cooler than someone just a few feet away standing in the sunlight. And there's a reason for that. So heat is actually a process of energy exchange between objects and the environment. So when we open our cell phone and we look at the air temperature on app, we're just getting a snapshot of one part of that process. But the amount of sunlight that reaches our body is another part of that process.

8:48And that's solar radiation, which has a large direct and immediate effect on how hot we feel. Now, you helped create a national shade mapping tool with American forests. And it's an interactive map that shows shade infrastructure across more than 360 U.S. cities and towns. So it provides this accessible tool for communities to see how much shade they have, where it's located, and whether it's coming from buildings or vegetation. What did you learn from mapping shade at noon, you mapped it at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. across these hundreds of U.S. cities? Yeah, so we looked at over 300 U.S. cities, and we found that 91 % of U.S.

9:27cities have less than 50 % of shade at noon, and more than half have less than 25 % at that time of day. So that means that in most places in the U.S., people are fully exposed to sunlight in the middle of the day. And when it's hot, that means that those places are less safe and less comfortable for the uses that they're intended for. We also found that trees provide 99 % of the shade when the sun is directly overhead. But as the day goes on, buildings contribute to more shade. So nationally, shade nearly doubles by 6 p.m., but that increases entirely from buildings. And I think that's one part of the story that we often miss.

10:07We think about trees providing shade, but shade infrastructure can be cast by any vertical object that blocks the sun. Jodi emailed, my favorite shady spot is in my own yard. We have several big old trees that provide abundant shade when sitting or working outside. It's a blessing, so we work with an arborist to keep our trees healthy. Sam, that makes me think about the way we build, especially neighborhoods these days. And I grew up in a neighborhood in Detroit that had just a lot of old growth trees until a blight came through. And I remember them cutting down the two big trees that shade at the front of our house and just sitting on our front porch crying because those trees felt like our friends.

10:51But when you go into newer neighborhoods or urban environments now, you don't see as many trees being included as part of that infrastructure. Yeah, that's right. And if I may, was your block a victim of Dutch elm disease? I believe it was. I think it might have been, yeah. Yeah, tragic. I mean, totally changed the way that so many neighborhoods looked and feel. And I mean, you know, I didn't have to go through that. But I can imagine that must have been like a pretty significant moment for you when you first realized how important shade was. Absolutely. Because up until then, during the summers, you could sit on the front porch.

11:30Totally. You could sit on the front porch and just, you know, talk to neighbors, hang out with your friends. But once those trees were gone, it completely changed my experience of our home. Absolutely. So to get back to your original question, though, I mean, there are a lot of different reasons why we might see shade in some neighborhoods and not in others. I just want to talk about two really quickly that I think are really interesting and that kind of piggyback on what Dr. Turner was saying about built shade or engineered shade. shade. So, you know, we think about shade from trees, and we'll get to that in a second, but the shadows and the shade that we get by buildings, in general, as a rule, it is basically just really hard to get this kind of built shade in American cities, because they have been designed deliberately to be sunny places.

12:19You know, the first place where we can start is with our roads, which are much, much wider than they are in other cities around the globe. And when you have more of that urban surface exposed to the sun. That's going to make your neighborhood hotter. It also means you have sidewalks that are too narrow to safely accommodate a large tree or a bus shelter. We have zoning codes, which determine the shape and form of buildings. And for the most part, those date back to the 1920s. And that's a time when people actually believed that shadows could cause tuberculosis and that darkness could fester all kinds of other urban vices like crime.

12:55So where I now live in New York, you see Art Deco skyscrapers that are kind of stepped back like wedding cake tiers at the very top just to let more sun come through and hit the streets below. And then outside of New York, almost all residential neighborhoods in America, they're not filled with apartment buildings or row houses, the kind of stuff that could cast shade in the middle of the day. but freestanding single-family homes that are short and set back from the street and spaced as far apart from each other as possible because that creates more open space for sunlight and it prevents buildings from casting shadows on each other.

13:31So that's one kind of shade. But the other one, if I can just finish up here, that I want to talk about are trees, which we all love, which you yourself just told me this sort of heart-wrenching story about. But it's no secret that this kind of shade is highly unequal in America. You know, we probably understand intuitively that, you know, older, richer neighborhoods have more beautiful, well-maintained shadier tree canopies than poor ones. But this didn't happen by accident. It was planned that way. To give just one example from my book, I spent some time in this L.A. upper-class subdivision called Windsor Square, which is a neighborhood that was designed in the 1910s and 1920s to be green.

14:13And to this day, residents still pay good money to make it that way. You have homes on big lots, lots of room for vegetation, sidewalks lined with big strips for street trees, and even telephone poles are undergrounded so the canopies can get big and flourish. But when Windsor Square was built, black people were not allowed to live there because of racially restrictive covenants. Where they were allowed to live was a working-class South Los Angeles city and now neighborhood called Watts, where there wasn't any money available for trees or other environmental amenities because it had been redlined, deliberately shut out of access to capital.

14:50Well, let's talk a little bit more about redlining in a moment. But Kelly, you were co-leading the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Center for Heat Resilient Communities, and that program was funded by the Inflation Reduction Act to help local governments develop their own heat action plans. But just one day before you were set to announce the first group of participating cities, the Trump administration pulled the program's funding. What was the goal of that project, and where does it stand now? Yeah, well, the goal of that project was—well, let's start. Let's move back a bit to start.

15:23HEAT has lacked a central entity in the federal government to oversee it. So unlike things like flooding or fire, we don't have systems set up to deal with heat. So this was a first attempt to try to get those systems in place. So what were we going to do and what was lost? Well, we were going to be providing really cost-effective technical support to 30 communities, diverse communities across the U.S., with the broader goal of providing resources that communities anywhere in the country could use to create their own heat action plans. And we were doing that against a backdrop of shifting the federal government shifting toward more local control over hazards.

16:04So we were creating tools and guidebooks and tailored recommendations for community-specific heat action. Let's take a quick pause here. Coming up, as Sam alluded to, shade wasn't just forgotten by urban planners. It's also been intentionally removed. We'll hear more about why in just a moment. Stay with us.

16:31Sam, I wanted to circle back to your reporting, which shows that many neighborhoods most exposed to dangerous heat are often the same ones historically targeted by redlining. What does the history of redlining mean in practical terms for shade access today? Sure. So redlining was a government-backed or government-aligned practice of denying access to capital and to mortgages and loans to neighborhoods that were basically ethnically mixed. so racist financing policies based entirely on the color of your skin. And in the past few years, there's been a lot of really good research, much of it done by a climate adaptation professor who I talked to named Vivek Shandas, to show how the maps of red-lined cities that were put together to either encourage or dissuade investment in certain neighborhoods correspond to extremely dangerous heat situations today.

17:26Professor Shandas lives in Portland, and during a fatal heat dome there in June 2021, he took air temperature measurements from around the city and found that a rich neighborhood on the west side of town over the Willamette River, which was in the shadow of a natural forest, was 25 degrees cooler than a poor one just five miles away on the other side of town that had suffered from that legacy of discrimination and disinvestment. I mean, 25 degree difference in this city, that's like going from spring to summer. That's huge. And he has a theory about what happened in redline neighborhoods in Portland, but also in L.A.

18:02and other American cities, which is essentially that when you have neighborhoods where residents can't take out loans or mortgages, they can't invest in the neighborhood. And when they can't invest in the neighborhood, the real estate value plummets. And because the real estate value in these neighborhoods plummeted, the land became a lot cheaper. So it attracted these large urban renewal projects that would have been a lot more expensive in wealthier neighborhoods, like public housing, like factories, arterial roads, highways. All things that we know today are really terrific at absorbing the sun's heat when they're unshaded and raising temperatures.

18:39And, you know, instead of saving space for parks and trees like developers did in wealthier green-lined neighborhoods, that land is paved under. and it's why Watts and other formerly redlined neighborhoods all across America, where millions of people still live today, are much hotter and much bearer and have less shade than their Greenline counterparts. And if there's one thing I want to add to that, it's that we probably think of trees as something natural and to a degree they are, but when it comes to how they've been systematically excluded from certain neighborhoods and cities, there is nothing natural about that.

19:16Well, we heard from Daniel in New Hampshire who emailed, I moved from the city to woody suburbs in New Hampshire due to being on the autism spectrum. I know it's not as sustainable, but the surrounding green space is necessary to deal with my sensory issues, and the prevalent shade and cooler temperatures are an added benefit. I wish cities would make more of an effort to incorporate green barriers in between buildings and streets. It would not only passively lower temperatures, but make cities more livable for those like me with sensory overstimulation concerns. I mean, Kelly, you reviewed emergency and climate resilience plans from the 50 most populous U.S.

19:51cities. What did you find out about how often shade even shows up in their official strategies? Yeah, of all of the interventions, shade was the least mentioned. In fact, so we looked at emergency management and things like the urban heat island dominate planning documents. And that's a disservice to people, at least the emphasis on urban heat islands. And let me tell you why. And it goes back to sort of what Sam was talking about here, about how we've invested in communities. So the urban heat island, for those of you who aren't familiar, is this phenomenon that cities tend to be warmer than a surround, an approximate area in the surrounding landscape that's not developed.

20:37And it's a difference. It's a measured difference between areas with a lot of asphalt and impervious surface and vegetated areas nearby. Unfortunately, this is just one way of thinking about cities and heat, and it's been used to drive interventions recently. So the urban heat island is caused by something called albedo or reflectivity of these surfaces. So what happens is the sunlight comes and it hits asphalt and the asphalt kind of slowly soaks up that sun's energy and then re-radiates that heat energy throughout the day. And the best way to stop that process from happening is to make those surfaces cooler or lighter with something called reflective coatings.

21:29But those coatings don't actually make the city cooler. What they do is they change the speed at which that process happens. So they reflect the sun's energy more quickly. And what happens is that energy gets re-radiated back at people between 11 o 'clock and 2 p.m. in the day and can actually cause a local warming effect that makes people feel hotter. So the surface to the touch feels cooler, but people's bodies feel warmer. So I fear that by focusing on the urban heat island and that reflectivity, which seems like an attractive solution, that we're repeating some of the mistakes of the past where we put too much asphalt and not enough vegetation in low-income and communities of color.

22:16We're experimenting and trying to rectify our problems of the past. We're well-intentioned trying to cool them down. But in fact, we're giving them a lesser solution by focusing on coatings rather than providing shade or giving green vegetation to those communities. Well, we've been focusing really on structures during this conversation, but we have to talk about transportation too. We got this email from Jesse who says, I've said for years that I think covered parking lots or even just covered parking spaces should be standard in Florida because the shade it provides to a car is invaluable in the heat.

22:51I park under an awning at work, and every day I get in my car that's been shaded all day, it makes a huge difference to the temperature in my car. Why aren't we doing this in more parking lots? Let's just first talk about why you think automobiles and shade are in conflict with one another, Sam. Yeah. First of all, Jesse, great question, great observation. I personally would love to see a lot more of this. We obviously have a huge opportunity to, well, we did have a huge opportunity before a lot of the subsidies for solar energy were put at risk to turn cities into basically clean energy factories, as silly as that might sound.

23:34but to get back to the question about this kind of conflict between cars and shade I mean I mentioned a few minutes ago how when you focus your street design basically on efficient transportation for automobiles you have to widen streets and that is going to come at the expense of sidewalks which are going to get narrowed away and that's going to take away opportunities on the sidewalks for shade trees and for bus shelters and for other forms of shade so you'd sort of have the physical space but then I think it even goes deeper than that when you have cities that really prioritize cars and their street design there are all sorts of other invisible rules that make it harder for shade even if the physical space for a structure or a tree appears to be there for example in Los Angeles at a street intersection you're required to have 50 feet of clearance on every side, you know, for the good reason to avoid collisions.

24:33But when you have a city that is so, you know, paved under and dominated by cars, those intersections are going to be everywhere. And that means all your crosswalks are going to be bereft of shade. You have driveways, constant feature of LA, that takes another eight feet of clearance on either side. Again, no shade you can have there, all because of this sort of fealty to drivers. And then on top of that, you have all this other urban infrastructure like overhead power lines, utility poles, underground water meters and vaults. All these things require clearance. So you can't have tree canopies or their roots nearby.

25:09And based on what I've seen in the reporting that I've done in L.A., this kind of crowded, overdeveloped, auto-centric urban phenomenon, it really seems to be concentrated in a lot of these neighborhoods that have been neglected and disinvested. And so I talked to an urban forester who said to me something like, yes, it's great to have more money for trees. Of course we want that. But the funders are a little naive about what it's actually going to take to bring shade to these neighborhoods and to these streets that have been so carved up for cars. What you really need to do is retrofit that street to be greener.

25:46And what you really need to do is take away parking spots and some of the traffic lanes and put trees there. And let's hear from another one of you. This is Jane calling from Tulsa, and I'm always chasing shade because it's hot in Tulsa. And this is my query. Do trees that have like dark purple leaves, is the shade under them cooler because dark is supposed to absorb more heat? Or would it be just the same as under a green tree? I've always wondered that. I love the dark purple leaves of certain plum trees and stuff like that. And I was just curious if that's true. Jane, thanks for the question.

26:31I mean, Kelly, how much does it matter the type and placement of shade? Or is it more about total coverage? Yeah, it's more about the placement of the shade, but it's also about total coverage. I know that's sort of a non-answer. But to get to the caller, she brings up a good point. First of all, all shade is better than no shade, but there are differences in shade quality. So studies are finding that things like buildings and walls provide pretty good shade because they don't let any sunlight through, whereas a more porous shade structure might provide a little bit less. But again, those differences are really minor.