Research examines cities’ mini “heat islands” and their ties to racism

Streetsblog has a new article with a video about the heat islands within our cities.

As summer heat rages across America, some neighborhoods are substantially hotter than others — thanks to the legacies of racist transportation policies that still affect our cities.

In a new video, Grist explores how decades of racist (and fully legal) policies, such as discriminatory mortgage lending, resulted in rampant disinvestment in non-white communities — which especially hurt mostly Black, downtown neighborhoods, which became prime targets for clearance so that planners could build the federal highway system.

This research isn’t quite breaking news. You can read NPR’s report from January which includes charts of the data. My own city is in the top ten.

And the reality behind the data certainly isn’t news to anyone who lives in a city and who travels sans car. When you’re on foot or on bike, the difference in temperature between neighborhoods is drastic.