A lack of tree cover in low-income areas has left many residents especially vulnerable to rising heat. It’s a legacy of the city’s design—and its history of racist policies.
L.A.’s year-round sunshine has generally been considered a blessing. But it can make a long wait for a bus uncomfortable.ByAlejandra BorundaPhotographs ByElliot RossPublished June 17, 2021• 20 min readShareTweetEmail
Miguel Vargas vividly remembers when he first understood the power of shade. He was in middle school, sprinting up and down a scrubby soccer field in Huntington Park, a small city laced with train tracks and high-voltage transmission lines just south of the Los Angeles skyline. He ran so hard in the battering sun that he overheated.
His vision went fuzzy. His heart pounded. In a daze he stumbled toward a towering red pine near the southwest corner of the field—the biggest and almost the only tree in sight.
The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded Explorer Elliot Ross’s photographic work around the climate resilience of Indigenous communities in Alaska.ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MCKENDRYPlease be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
In that shelter, Vargas’s dizziness receded. His heart rate mellowed. He returned to himself, revived by the deep, cool shadow.
That simple blessing, he learned later when he took a job planting trees, is abundant elsewhere in L.A., primarily in rich, mostly white neighborhoods. But in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods such as Huntington Park, which is 97 percent Hispanic, shade is vanishingly rare. (Oregon once legally banned Black people. Has the state reconciled its racist past?)
Los Angeles isn’t Phoenix or Dallas. It has a moderate climate. But it too experiences deadly heat—and here, unlike almost any other U.S. city, it can strike year-round. Climate change is worsening the problem. It’s already time to “turn off the sunshine,” says L.A.’s chief design officer, Christopher Hawthorne. The city, he says, needs to find ways to build cooling, potentially lifesaving shade into its fabric.
Los Angeles’s car-centric design makes it seem as if the city is meant to be seen from an air- conditioned vehicle. Without much shade, pedestrians such as these at Vermont Avenue and Eighth Street, just west of downtown, often bake in the sun.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Modern Los Angeles is a city built on sunshine, not shadow. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Southern California boosters enticed migrants from the East with visions of “almost everlasting sunlight.” The allure of L.A.’s exceptional light has persisted, featured by Hollywood, celebrated by homegrown artists such as Robert Irwin. “On many days the world almost has no shadows,” Irwin told the New Yorker in 1998. “Broad daylight—and in fact, lots and lots of light—and no shadows.”
“Sunshine,” says Hawthorne, “had become one of our central commodities.”
Urban design in Los Angeles prioritizes access to the sun. The city code often defines where or for how much of the day a building can cast a shadow, lest it overly shade courtyards, parks, or patios. Architects have designed buildings to be transparent to sunlight and entire complexes to let it enter each corner. After the 1970s’ energy crisis, the city had a new reason to ensure sun access everywhere; today, L.A. has more solar power capacity than any other American city.
At the northern end of Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz, Moreton Bay fig trees arch over a grassy median where people lounge on hot days. The trees, planted around 1913 and carefully tended since, are on the Los Angeles list of historic monuments.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
But in the age of climate change, L.A.’s sunshine is no longer an unqualified boon. By mid-century, absent major international efforts to rein in carbon emissions, L.A. is expected to experience 22 days a year above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, more than triple the current number. The suburbs in the San Fernando Valley may see more than 90 days—a full quarter of the year. Heat already increases the risk of death in Los Angeles, even when it isn’t the proximate cause. During a short heat wave, the death rate from all causes rises by 8 percent above normal. After four or five days, that number swells to 25 percent—and up to 48 percent among older Black and Latino residents. (Too hot to live: Millions worldwide will face unbearable temperatures.)
“The really simple thing, if you care about making people more comfortable, is just to offer more opportunities for shade,” says V. Kelly Turner, an urban planner at UCLA.
On a hot day you feel much hotter in the direct sun than in the shade, even if the air temperature is the same. That temperature is a measure of how fast air molecules are moving and are heating you as they bump into you—but solar radiation heats your body too. In direct sunlight you might feel as much as 20 degrees warmer than in nearby shade.
Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Left: Most shade in L.A. is in communities such as Rolling Hills, where people can afford to care for the trees.Right: In low-income, largely minority areas such as Hawthorne, lack of public investment means fewer trees.
The same is true for buildings, sidewalks, and other massive objects: Direct solar radiation imparts more energy and therefore heat. Asphalt is a particularly good absorber, and along with concrete it releases that captured heat into the air for hours, even after the sun disappears, contributing to the urban heat island effect. A well-placed tree, on the other hand, can keep a building 18 degrees cooler than if it were fully exposed to the sun. Shade keeps everything cooler—and the overheating city is taking note.
When Spanish colonizers arrived in the Los Angeles Basin, they found a landscape carefully managed by the Tongva and other Native inhabitants, a rich ecological patchwork with profuse pockets of shade. Forests of oaks and other trees meandered along the rivers and in the highlands that now make up East Los Angeles, providing shade and showers of nutritious acorns. A village called Yaangna, near today’s downtown L.A., was “a very lush pleasing spot in every respect,” wrote Father Juan Crespí, an early missionary who visited in 1679.
The Spanish felled many of the oaks for lumber and cleared other tree-dotted land for cattle. They created shade with buildings rather than trees: Streets were laid out roughly 45 degrees off of north-south, to maximize sun and shade exposure year-round, and long, arched loggias lined the external walls of missions and residences.
Settlers from the eastern U.S. reshuffled the shade landscape once again in the 19th century, planting new crops and citrus orchards. In the 20th century, using water siphoned from outside the Los Angeles Basin, they eventually created an “urban woodland,” says Travis Longcore, an environmental scientist at UCLA. Especially after World War II, a neat single-family home with a car in the driveway and a pretty tree on the front lawn became the embodiment of the American Dream—and the booming L.A. population embraced it. Tree density grew by 150 percent from the 1920s to the early 2000s, when well over 10 million trees dotted the city.
(See how L.A.’s patterns of trees and heat can be traced back to racist maps drawn in 1939.)
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