‘That house was like an oven’: How residents of Philly’s hottest neighborhoods are coping as temperatures rise

On Thursday in North Philadelphia’s Hunting Park, residents were doing what they could to stay cool in 85-degree heat.

A sprawling park off Ninth Street offered residents some of the only shade trees in the neighborhood. The park’s pool was closed because of poor air quality from Canadian wildfire smoke.

For residents hoping for some relief, it was a disappointment. “It could be a lot shadier for people out here,” said Jordan Floyd, 18, who sat on the bleachers by the shuttered pool with two friends. They had planned to swim, but Parks and Recreation staffers had turned them away.

“It’s boiling here!” a young boy pleaded with pool maintenance worker Michael Tate.

“We can’t go against the city,” Tate told him.

Hunting Park is one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city, and temperatures here can rise some 20 degrees above other parts of Philadelphia, leaving medically vulnerable residents at risk.

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Advocates say a lack of tree cover and excessive hot surfaces, like asphalt, create “heat islands” in Hunting Park, Strawberry Mansion, and Point Breeze. Making matters worse, residents in these neighborhoods often struggle to pay for air-conditioning. And they’re more likely to have health conditions such as asthma that put them at greater risk for heat-related illness.

On Thursday morning, people in Hunting Park weighed their options: Stay inside and sit in stifling heat — or pay for air-conditioning bills that many may not be able to afford. Go outside, and breathe in air filled with particulate matter.

“On days like this, no decision feels like the good one,” said Jamile Tellez Lieberman, senior vice president for community engagement, research, and health equity at Esperanza, a faith-based organization that works with North Philadelphia’s Hispanic community.

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In 2019, the city released its first plan to combat extreme heat in communities vulnerable to heat-related injuries and illness. They focused on Hunting Park, where buildings, roads, and pavement make up 75% of the land, compared with 52% in all of Philadelphia.

Hunting Park is what’s known as a heat island, a place that gets hotter than other neighborhoods. Trees and greenery can reflect heat, but the higher concentration of asphalt and man-made materials in heat islands tend to trap heat.

“If you think of a cast iron pan that’s really thick, if you heat it up, it’s going to retain heat for a really long time, even if you turn off the burner,” said Abby Sullivan, the interim chief resilience officer at Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability.

Residents, community advocates, and city officials agree that the heat in Hunting Park is a direct result of some of Philadelphia’s most entrenched issues: decades of redlining — racist housing policy that devalued property in Black neighborhoods — and the associated poverty and institutional neglect.

“Our neighborhood is almost designed to be this way,” said Tellez Lieberman.

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The city based its heat plan on interviews with hundreds of residents, many of whom said existing approaches to combating heat weren’t effective. For example, some lacked transportation to get to the city’s cooling centers.

Heat can be dangerous for elderly individuals, children, and those with chronic health conditions. Hunting Park has some of the highest rates of children hospitalized for asthma in the city, and heat aggravates asthma symptoms. It traps pollutants like ozone and other particles that can irritate the airways.

Climate change and other environmental issues are making the problem worse. The city instructed residents to stay indoors to avoid smoke from Canada’s wildfires for several days this past month, which is difficult for households without AC that have to head outdoors to stay cool, Tellez Lieberman said.

These problems are all connected, Sullivan said, and will require resources to address.

» READ MORE: What the Canadian wildfires mean for children with asthma in Philly

So far this summer, the city hasn’t reached temperatures hot enough to declare a public health emergency. That at occurs when the heat index — a measure of how the combined effects of air temperature and humidity feel — reaches 106 degrees or above for two consecutive days, or when it reaches 103 degrees or above for three consecutive days.

If a heat health emergency is declared, the city will open 13 cooling centers at libraries — two more than last year — as well as park four to five air-conditioned buses in neighborhoods that need them.

Sullivan’s office is working on longer-term solutions. These include funding for residents to renovate their homes to make them cooler and a pilot program to treat roads with reflective surfaces that can reduce heat.

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The office also wants to support community organizations to make their own heat plans, modeled after the 2019 Hunting Park initiative, and hope to hire a staffer dedicated to the heat issue.

At Esperanza, Tellez Lieberman has partnered with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to plant more trees in the city’s hottest neighborhoods, aiming to decrease temperatures long-term.

But residents are worried about how to protect themselves from heat now.

Earlier this year, Esperanza staff released a report calling for Pennsylvania to give out federal grants to help lower-income residents pay for cooling bills. (Right now, those grants are only available for people who struggle with paying for heat.)

“We don’t want people choosing between whether they pay their electricity and gas bill or food,” Tellez Lieberman said.

On Thursday, Gloria Velazquez Julius walked her children home from the street where they’d been playing, and wished the fire department would open a hydrant or two for the kids to cool off.

Down the street, block captain Debbie Santos, who has both asthma and diabetes, was trying to stay inside: With her health conditions, the heat is especially dangerous.

Santos and Velazquez Julius are both longtime Hunting Park residents; Santos lives in the house where she was born. They’re eager for long-term solutions, like planting more trees in the area, but in the short term, they’re committed to taking care of vulnerable neighbors.

Velazquez Julius’s tight-knit block is home to 12 people over 70 years old. “They’re in the house, sweating,” she said.

This summer, she and other neighbors got together to get a window unit for a woman down the street, worried for her safety in the heat: “If you went in that house, it was like an oven,” she said.

On hot days at her own house, Velazquez Julius pulls the blinds closed, keeps the lights off and sets the ceiling fans running. And she tries not to turn on the AC: “We need it, but the bill is extremely high,” she said. “Years ago, it wasn’t as hot and humid.”

Editors note: This story has been updated with details on the temperature threshold for city health officials to announce a heat emergency.