The urban heat island effect, a phenomenon that causes city sidewalks to be approximately 9+ degrees Fahrenheit hotter than those in surrounding suburbs, is wreaking havoc on the unsheltered homeless community.

Invisible People reporters recently spoke with Kate Pocock, PA-C, a member of the street medicine outreach team who has hands-on experience treating unsheltered homeless people sustaining injuries and even death due to extreme heat. The strenuous impact could not be understated. Pocock described cases ranging from critical burns and cardiac arrests to respiratory complications and pregnant women going into premature labor.

The Urban Heat Island Effect Can Be Deadly for America’s Homeless Population

Homeless people account for a disproportionate number of heat deaths each year. In the hottest cities, they usually make up more than half of all heat-related deaths. For the surrounding community members, this translates to morbidities, overcrowded and under-resourced emergency room facilities, and a drastic seasonal drop in communal health outcomes.

The urban heat island effect is a distinctly citified problem that stems from the urban blueprint—how we tend to build modern metropolitan centers. Like homelessness, higher temperatures are literally built into the infrastructure of many cities.

Consider, for a moment, the towering skyscrapers that stretch across the horizon as soon as you cross a bridge into a major city. Layers of glass act like curtains around the metal framework, structuring the building like a lighthouse constantly drawing in the sun. These quasi-lighthouses sit on the surrounding concrete sidewalks, which are notoriously void of greenery and far from any bodies of water.

Here, we see each city street is isolated from the elements of nature and covered in lighthouse-like structures that capture the sun and hold that heat in the concrete below, hence the term “island.”

Reducing Homelessness and the Urban Heat Island Effect Is Possible if We Change the Way We Build Our Cities

Authors from the Science Direct publication “Reducing Heat Risk for People Experiencing Unsheltered Homelessness” state that policy changes must be made to address what they call “thermal inequity” in the unsheltered community. By combining qualitative research with street interviews, the scientists came to the following conclusion:

Read the full article about the urban heat island effect by Cynthia Griffith at Invisible People.