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Building Heat Resilience Together


In the last post, we looked at some specific ways you can work to adapt your own home to the growing frequency and intensity of heat waves.  In this post, we will look at ways that you can work locally and collectively to reduce heat in your community. 

 

One of the simplest and most effective ways is to plant trees.  Trees draw water and nutrients from the soil through a process called evapotranspiration.  In this process, water evaporates from the surface of eaves, creating a suction effect that draws water up from below.  The evaporation creates a cooling effect in the air around trees.  Not only this, but trees create shade protecting everything underneath them from the intensity of the sun’s rays. The result of these two factors is that the more trees you have in an area, the cooler it is.  I live in Mt Airy, which is full of trees and is one of the cooler neighborhoods in Philadelphia.  A 15 minute drive away from me is Hunting Park, where I work a lot.  It has far fewer trees and as a result experiences heatwave temperatures that are a full 22 F hotter than in my neighborhood. 

 

In the last post, we mentioned planting trees in your yard as a way to cool your own property – but this is also a collective action, since those trees work with others to help cool the neighborhood as a whole.  That being said, your yard space restricts significantly how much cooling you can offer your community – however there are some great programs in Philadelphia through which you can contribute to broader tree planting efforts around you. 

 

Tree Tenders is a program run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.  It has chapters in neighborhoods all over the greater Philadelphia area where it trains people for street tree plantings and organizes planting days.  Street trees are shared trees, lining public spaces and benefiting the community as a whole.  There are countless blocks and spaces throughout Philadelphia that are treeless and in need of planting – so there is a lot you can do!  Another critical aspect of the Tree Tenders training is that it teaches people how to care for trees after they’ve been planted.  Leaving recently planted trees on their own, particularly in cities, can often lead to them dying.  Ongoing care, particularly for their first year, is crucial for them to become established and thrive.  Check here to see if there’s a tree tender’s group near you.   

 

Tree Philly is another program run by Philadelphia Parks and Recreation.  This program provides free yard trees to people who want them.  This is a great benefit for low-income people, as young trees aren’t cheap.  You can also volunteer to canvas and let people know about the Tree Philly trees and sign up for them, helping to spread trees to yards around the city. 

 

Wherever you are, tree planting is one of the simplest and most effective ways to increase cooling in your community. Trees also suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground – so the more trees we have, the more nature will be at work fighting climate change.  Philadelphia has a citywide tree plan which you can access here.

 

The less simple – yet absolutely crucial – task needed to make communities more heat resilient is the transformation of housing.  Climate resilient housing adaptations save significant money long term, but they also involve up front capital that can be challenging for middle income people to come up with.  For lower income people, the cost is usually prohibitive.  Add to this the fact that lower income urban communities already tend to experience higher heat extremes because they have fewer trees in them due to historic disinvestment.  So the hotter communities are the ones that have fewer resources to make the changes needed for their homes to become heat resilient.  This is fundamentally unjust. 

 

So how can we help improve the heat resilience of homes in low-income communities?  The answer is by organizing and pressing for policies and funding that will help accelerate these crucial home adaptations.    

 

As we looked at in the last post, white roof coatings, heat pump installations, and rooftop solar are three core adaptations that will make your home heat resistant, even in the event of a heatwave induced power blackout.  An additional adaptation that we didn’t look at is energy efficiency upgrades – like improved insulation, windows, repairs to cracks that are leaking air, etc.  The more efficient your home is at trapping the heat or cool inside it, the less hard your systems have to work and the less you have to pay for power.

 

Wherever you are, there are probably groups working on low-income housing challenges.  Here in Philadelphia, I will talk about two specific entities – a public program and an advocacy coalition.

 

The public program is Built to Last.  Built to Last is a citywide initiative focused on coordinating existing programs into a one stop shop that will repair systems, improve energy efficiency, apply white roof coatings, weatherize, solarize, and install heat pumps for low-income Philadelphia homes.  For low-income people, energy burden is a vicious cycle.  People who have low income rarely have the funds necessary to repair their homes.  As a result, their homes fall steadily into disrepair, becoming increasingly energy inefficient and causing them to pay more to heat and cool their homes.  As they pay more, they have even less to repair or improve their homes, which makes them more inefficient, and the cycle continues.  Add to this the fact that we have already entered into the economic inevitability of the phase out of fossil fuels.  Clean sources of power, though they cost more up front to install, are much cheaper than fossil fuels over time, which means that individuals and businesses that are able are steadily moving in that direction – and the transition is accelerating.  The challenge for low-income people is that as those with the income switch away from (for example) gas and start heating their homes with heat pumps, the customer base of gas producers is getting lower and lower.  In order to keep making their dying model work, they will have to raise rates higher and higher on their remaining customers, who will in turn be made up only by the low income people who couldn’t switch away in the first place.  Their energy costs will weigh on them until they go into default, and apply for utility assistance, which will be carried by taxpayers.  This will not be tenable long term for anyone, and the system will collapse.  Advocates in my circles who are working to pressure Philly’s gas utility, PGW, to transition into a clean energy heating and cooling utility, refer to this vicious cycle openly and regularly as the “death spiral” for PGW.  Many believe it has already begun. 

 

Built to Last is crucial because it is stabilizes low-income homes with public funding that low-income people simply can’t amass themselves.  The stabilization greatly reduces their energy burden, makes their homes more functional and healthy, helps families improve their own financial health and preserve generational wealth through their property, and (per the specific topic of this post), enables them to preserve a cool space during heat waves – with solar power to keep their cooling running even if the electric grid goes down.

 

This is an amazing program that has been very successful at a pilot level and is now shifting into its next stage.  A documentary was made about 6 homeowners in Hunting Park who had their homes transformed through Built to Last – you can view it here.  However, the need is much greater than the current funding.  The program has finished 50 homes in Philadelphia through its pilot project, but there is currently a wait list of over 1,000.  Fortunately, $5M in funding is coming to the program this fiscal year – and this is the direct result of advocacy.

 

This brings us to the second entity mentioned above – a Philadelphia-based climate-oriented housing justice advocacy coalition called HERE 4 Climate Justice, (or HERE4CJ).  HERE4CJ is a coalition I’m involved with that is bringing together a number of really amazing local, regional, and national organizations who are pressing for legislative change that will make homes more healthy, affordable, and climate resilient for low-income people in our city.  We have several different campaigns we’re working on, but our first big win was to pressure Philadelphia city council into giving Built to Last more funding in the FY 24-25 budget.  We pressed for $5M and got enough councilmembers on board to win the full amount.  That $5M will add 400 new Built to Last low-income home resilience projects to the 50 they’ve already done.  But we need to keep pressing for more funding.

 

This, then, is where so much of the heart of collective climate resilience must arise – through public advocacy.  There are so many ways you can get involved.  You can reach out to your representatives (find your state rep and senator here, federal rep here, and federal senators here) and tell them what you want.  Your calls really do matter.  You can also join coalitions like HERE4CJ to press for these changes.  The Evangelical Environmental Action Network (EEN Action) is constantly working on PA climate policies and has regular, simple, and guided ways to add your voice to different policy proposals.  POWER Interfaith is highly involved locally and regionally pressing for climate solutions for low-income families.  And you can also reach out to me – Allen Drew – to learn more about ways to get involved. 

 

Finally, vote for climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience that prioritizes communities with the least power.  Climate policy prioritization must be at the heart of our votes locally, statewide, and federal.  The transition towards clean energy, climate resilience, and ecological restoration is accelerating, but it needs to accelerate faster.  We are very close to global climate tipping points, beyond which global heating will accelerate beyond our ability to change it.  The next 5 years are absolutely crucial in pressing these transitions forward through the support of climate aggressive legislation.  Voting for officials this November who do not prioritize climate action – or who ignore it or even actively resist it and support fossil fuel proliferation – would be a crushing act of collective self-harm, given the climate realities we are facing.  It is crucial – absolutely crucial – that we all get out and vote for lawmakers who will move climate policy forward, for the good of humanity, and particularly for sake of the most vulnerable among us.

 

 

 

RESOURCES:

 

 

 

 

 

 

HERE 4 Climate Justice: www.here4climatejustice.org 

 

 

POWER Interfaith: www.powerinterfaith.org

 

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Adapting Your Home to the Heat



 

So how can you as an individual (or a household) prepare for the impacts of longer and more intense extreme heat waves?  What you do all depends on what kind of home you live in and  how heat adapted it already is, but here are some concrete approaches. 

 

If you rent an apartment, there isn’t much you can do to the property itself.  But what you should do, if you haven’t already done this, is get one or more air conditioning window units.  The kinds of heat waves we will be increasingly experiencing will be dangerous to try to ride out with a fan (as our parents and grandparents were able to do) – electric cooling will be critical. 


AC units are relatively inexpensive up front (you can easily get them for $100-$200) and are an important first step to ensure you have access to cool air in a heat wave.  However, they are not very efficient and can ramp up your electric bill substantially during heat waves.  They also contain refrigerant chemicals that, when they leak, are significant greenhouse gas contributors.   

 

Fortunately, there is a better and far more efficient way to electrically cool (and also heat!) your home using a window unit – it’s with a heat pump window unit.  Heat pump window units use highly efficient electric heat pump technology to either heat or cool your home, as needed.  Heat pumps are most commonly seen in the form of an outside unit that sends the cool into your home through either a central air system or installed wall units – but window units are starting to come on the market now, with a main focus on apartment buildings.  You can read a story about them here.  You can also find a link to the Gradient unit that story is about here.  The upfront cost of a heat pump window unit is more expensive than an AC unit.  Gradient’s unit is currently $2,000, though as the technology and adoption proliferates prices are likely to come down.  Furthermore, the Inflation Reduction Act will return you 30% off your total heat pump installation cost up to a maximum of $2,000 at tax time.  And the savings (20-40% annually) in both cooling and heating costs will return your money to you in a few years and save you far more over time.

 

As a renter, that’s pretty much the extent of what you can do to cool your space.  As a homeowner, however, there are a number of other options.

 

The first, and most cost efficient (if you haven’t done it already), is to apply a cool roof coating to your roof.  A friend of mine, Rory Stout, runs a company called Cool Roof Coatings and they can apply a high quality, water sealing, and highly sun reflective product from a company called Acrylabs.  Many old Philadelphia buildings have dark black roofs, which was the standard procedure a while ago. These roofs, however, absorb the heat of the sun tremendously and turn your home into an oven.  White roofs are an ancient practice in heat prone cultures – they passively reflect heat so that your cooling system doesn’t have to work nearly as hard.

 

Second, if you have AC window units or an AC central air system, replace that system with a heat pump system.  If you don’t have central air, your best option will be a ductless mini-split system, which sets the unit outside and installs wall units in the rooms you want heated and cooled.  This is an investment upfront, but it will save you money on AC electricity as well as on gas or oil heating.  I installed a heat pump system in my home in Philadelphia and I don’t run the gas heating at all in the winter – all heating and cooling is electric and is quite efficient and I’m saving a lot of money.  A good company I’ve used, which has an excellent business rating and I’ve found to be substantially less expensive than other options, is New Spirit HVAC.

 

Third (and finally), install solar on your roof.  Solar is an excellent financial investment.  With the 30% Federal tax credit on solar installations, the savings generated, and the income produced by Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs), the return on your investment is 300-400% over 25 years.  This is like putting your money away into a CD at an unheard of rate of 4-5%.  If you can’t pay for solar upfront, there are also good financing options available so you can have your solar savings help pay off the loan right from the start.  Still, for many others, the up front cost is too much for solar ownership to be an option for them.  That’s still not a problem, however, because there are great solar leasing options available.  You have to be careful with these – they can sometimes be predatory – but there are plenty that are not.  I would personally recommend Posigen’s 25-year fixed rate solar leasing program.  To get solar on your roof through them, you pay $0 up front, get a free home energy efficiency upgrade, get repairs and maintenance covered, are guaranteed savings as compared to your utility’s rates the first year (and are very likely to have those rates increase over time as utilities increase rates and yours remains fixed), and are able to purchase the panels for next to nothing at the end of your lease, when they will still be 85% efficient.  Also, if you sign on through the following link, your lease will be credited as a lead for HPCSI and Posigen will donate $400 to our climate justice work in Hunting Park if it goes to contract.  Here’s that link: https://bit.ly/posigen-hpcsi-lead 

 

Having solar is a great financial investment and it fights climate change – but it also has a particular value with respect to heat.  One of the greatest dangers of the progression of climate-induced heat waves is that if they get too intense, all the extra AC usage in an area can blow out the power grid.  Or, if a major storm or hurricane comes through a region and downs a lot of power lines (which is another major aspect of the climate crisis), and this is in turn followed by extreme heat, people can get in real trouble because there is no power to run their cooling systems.  These are very real threats, as “wet bulb” 95 F (or 95 F at 100%) is the upper limit of human survival and current heat waves are getting dangerously close to this.  As an example, there are currently 300 heat-related deaths under investigation in Phoenix, AZ due to recent extreme heat.  With solar – whether you own the panels or are renting them – the power from your panels will always go to meet your home’s needs first, and so it can keep your cooling system running during an extreme heat wave, even if the grid goes down.

 

Extreme heat waves are already here, and they are going to get steadily stronger during the course of our lifetimes.  How strong they get will have everything to do with how quickly we reduce carbon emissions over the next two decades, in particular the next 6 years.  Whatever we will be facing in the future, it will be more intense and more dangerous.  Because of this we need to start preparing now for a different world.  More than that, as Christians we need to be preparing now, so that when the times comes we will be able to offer shelter to other others in need.

 

 

 

RESOURCES:

Be Cool Roof Coatings:

Acrylabs Cool Roof Coatings:

New Spirit HVAC (heat pump installation):

Window Heat Pump Unit Story:

Gradient Window Heat Pump:

Posigen Solar:

Get a free design proposal from Posigen in a way that supports work of HPCSI at no cost to you:

Solar Renewable Energy Credit (SREC) Explanation:

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Beating the Heat in Hunting Park



Hunting Park is an example of the growing dangers of extreme heat that is very close to home.  A citywide heat survey conducted in 2017 found a number of Philadelphia neighborhoods to be a full 22 F hotter than cooler parts of the city during summer heat waves.  (This blew my mind when I first heard it.)  Not only this, but other factors such as age, income, language spoken, race, ethnicity, and health all contributed to the existing heat challenges to form a more robust evaluation we now call the “heat vulnerability index.”  Extreme heat is dangerous enough as it is – but someone who has the finances to install rooftop solar and a heat pump system for their home can shelter inside and stay cool even if the heat wave causes the power grid to go down.  Someone who can’t pay their energy bills, has a home that is falling into disrepair, and can only afford to run a fan is in a much more dangerous situation during a heat wave than that other person.  The heat vulnerability index combines localized heat dangers with other local social, environmental, and economic factors to indicate just how vulnerable different communities are to the increasing length and intensity of heat waves associated with the progression of the climate crisis. 

 

Taking all these factors into account, the study found the 5 worst heat vulnerability neighborhoods in Philadelphia to be Cobbs Creek, Point Breeze, Strawberry Mansion, and Hunting Park.   And as heat vulnerability maps from this study began to be produced, people started to notice some shocking similarities between them and the 1930s redlining maps drawn up by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC).  These maps were notorious for declaring black and brown communities to be “hazardous” and blocking people in these communities systemically from access to loans.  The impact of this practice was generational, trapping whole communities in cycles of poverty, poor educational and vocational opportunities, and leading many homes and businesses to fall into disrepair.  These factors, it turns out, also lead communities to actually become physically hotter.

 

How does historic disenfranchisement make a community hotter over time?  Disinvestment leads to a lack of investment in education, public green spaces, and other infrastructure.  Local economic depression leaves people just trying to survive, leaving very little money left over to repair or improve properties. Hunting Park, for example, has a great deal of concrete, a major lack of street trees, and far too many homes with old black roofs.  All of this makes the neighborhood absorb heat and bake in the sun.  And other heat vulnerable neighborhoods have similar stories.

 

But this is not the end of the story.  In 2018, the Philadelphia Office of Sustainability started a program called Beat the Heat.  The goal of this initiative was to set up a network of cooling centers that would get activated in a heat emergency so people would have a cool place to go if things got dangerous.  This initiative has itself had limited success (in terms of the setting up of cooling centers), but it has sparked a great deal of other climate-oriented energy and organizing in the Hunting Park neighborhood.  In 2022, a big Go Fund Me campaign raised the funds to donate a ton of air conditioners to people who needed them.  Esperanza, Inc has launched and developed a very active chapter of the PHS Tree Tenders program, which plants street trees twice a year and trains people to take care of them so they survive and start to build a real canopy in the neighborhood.  I have noticed the change, particularly over the last few years, of more and more trees starting to pop up on the streets of HP, bringing shade, beauty, and cooling and filtering the air.  The Hunting Park Community Solar Initiative (which I direct) started as a spin off of the Beat the Heat meeting – and we have been building a steadily growing solar installation vocational training program in the neighborhood, as well as doing public education around climate change and connecting people with existing programs (such as Built to Last) to repair, weatherize, and solarize their homes.  In the future, we also hope to start a cool roof installation training program.  The PA DEP has been funding HPCSI’s work.  A new community climate resilience grant from the EPA has found its way to a collaboration of different HP non-profits doing climate work, much of which is specifically related to heat vulnerability.  Neighbors are giving their time and energy and the word is spreading.

 

And so in the face of a significant heat threat to Hunting Park, the community has organized and is doing multi-faceted work to make the neighborhood cooler, healthier, and more resilient in the face of the growing heat waves we are experiencing.  And many Christians from the community are involved in this work. 

 

All of this gives me hope.  In the face of a growing climate threat, made much more dangerous by a history of racist policies and disinvestment, the community of Hunting Park has been rising up in quiet, unflashy, but determined ways to chart a different path for their community.  I feel very grateful to be able to offer whatever I can to the work in this neighborhood – and I know there are communities like Hunting Park all over the world who are pulling together to get the job done.  I continue to serve with hope that God will be with this work and cause it to bear more fruit that we imagine. 

 

There is so much to do – and so much going on.  What can you get involved in where you are?

 

 

 

RESOURCES:

The video focused on heat from the 6-part documentary we produced “This is Hunting Park”:

An excellent and very user-friendly story map of a heat vulnerability study in Philadelphia:

A documentary produced about 6 HP homeowners who got their homes repaired, weatherized, solarized, and installed with heat pumps through a publicly funded program called Built to Last:

HERE4CJ website – HERE4CJ is a coalition I work with.  We are focused on advocating for climate-oriented housing justice solutions. Heat is a huge issue we are working on – and we recently applied a pressure campaign on City Council that won $5 million in new funding for an expansion of the Built to Last program in the new fiscal year.

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