Everyone Deserves Shade: A perspective on urban inequity
Since its inception, Los Angeles has been known as the city "built on sunshine". For many decades, urban planning and design initiatives have prioritized sun access, impacting building code restrictions on shading as well as architectural design features promoting sunlight both within and around building sites. Though this may have been beneficial (especially during the energy crisis in the 1970s) for many decades, climate change has now impacted heat indices to where roughly 22 days a year, the temperature in LA will be above 95 degrees. What does this mean for the city and most importantly, for those who are at a high risk of feeling the negative impacts of hotter temperatures?
Urban inequity provides a stark and hard truth that answers that question. Often, lower income communities will bear the most negative impacts due to lack of public (and private) investment that is needed to implement resiliency strategies to aid communities, such as in Huntington Park, in combating the lasting impacts of climate change. As this article demonstrates, one key factor that typically aids in mitigating impacts felt from hotter temperatures is promoting shade (usually by tree canopies). Shade offered by tree canopies can lower surface temperatures of objects up to 45F and can lower air temperatures by 9F due to the rain or groundwater evaporating from these trees; however, the issue is that investment in urban forestry is not distributed equally as we will see in the challenge discussion below.
The main challenge this article highlights is that most shade in L.A. is in wealthier communities where people can afford to invest in the planting and care for tree coverage; however, the same cannot be said for low-income communities where there is a lack of public investment correlating to less tree coverage. The writer poignantly illustrates this disparity by illustrating a series of pictures along Vermont Ave where at the northernmost end of the street, there is a more significant amount of tree coverage in wealthier areas; however, as you continue to drive south, the neighborhood demographic changes and along with it, the tree canopy coverage where hardscapes (such as more streets, sidewalks, etc.) dominate the environment in these low-income areas.
How did this come to be? We have redlining to thank for such disparities that resulted out of the federal Homeowner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s. As a part of the New Deal, HOLC implemented a grading system that helped enforce both segregation and disinvestment in communities of color. This disinvestment denied residents, within these neighborhoods, real estate loans and further perpetuated racial restrictions on property deeds. Though this may have happened many decades ago, the lack of tree coverage is just one of many issues that highlight the lasting impact of these effects today and there are considerable benefits of having more tree coverage in terms of combating extreme temperatures.
Just the use of more tree coverage alone illustrates the successful impact in lowering temperatures as evidenced in wealthier L.A communities where a 7.6F difference is seen from that of lower income communities without adequate tree coverage; however, the city has claimed to plant more than 90,000 trees by the end of 2020 with the goal of increasing tree canopy coverage in lower income communities to 50% by 2028. Given the severity of what has been presented in this article, communities such as Baltimore, Phoenix and Boston are implementing shade maps, tree planting initiatives, street redesigns and more shaded structures to help mitigate the impact of rising temperature in low-income and often, underrepresented communities.
When seeing how this urban inequity issue relates to ARUP’s, City Resilience Framework, I can’t help to see how this directly impacts the "Health & Well Being" parameter (for more information on this framework, see here). For "Health & Well Being", LA has failed to provide inclusive and integrated systems to further achieve minimal human vulnerability as well as effective safeguards to human health & life as it relates to this issue. As the writer highlights, during a short heat wave, the death rate, as it pertains to older Black and Latino residents, dramatically increases from 8% to 48%. Safeguards such as investing in urban forestry and more shaded shelters (such as for bus and other means of public transportation) can aid the city in achieving this goal more impactfully and effectively.