By Bill M. Jesdale, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Lara Cushing, How Housing Matters, September 4, 2019
Extreme heat events—which are becoming increasingly common in metropolitan areas across the country–have the greatest impact in places with dense roofs, driveways, sidewalks, and roads and less green space. These impervious surfaces create urban heat islands, but tree canopies mitigate them. This study explores the relationship between these physical elements and racial and ethnic residential segregation, finding that the number of trees in a neighborhood is influenced by how segregated the metropolitan area is.
To conduct the study, researchers paired block group–level tree canopy and impervious surface estimates from the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset with demographic characteristics from the 2000 Census. Researchers used block group as a proxy for neighborhood. The researchers then analyzed the relationship between residential segregation and the distribution of heat risk–related land cover (HRRLC), which the authors defined as census block groups where more than half the population lacked tree canopy and at least half of the ground was covered by impervious surfaces. The authors analyzed 63,436 block groups across 304 metropolitan areas. Overall, nearly 29 percent of the US population in 2000 lived in census block groups that were analyzed. Thirty-six percent of the study population lived in block groups with HRRLC.
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