Cindy Quenneville & Amy Schwabenlender — Surviving the Heat: Homelessness, Extreme Weather, and Community Response in the Desert Southwest

Thank you.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.

So Amy, let's, let's start with you.

I, I know that your organization, Keys to Change, has been very involved, and we'll touch, touch on this in a little bit.

But for listeners outside of Arizona, help us understand what the summer heat in Phoenix actually means for someone who's living outside on the streets.

What the summer heat here means is, like, danger, right? I grew up in Wisconsin, which is hot and humid in the summer.

I've been here in Arizona now over 20 years, and, uh, takes a while to acclimate to it, and if you have an air-conditioned car and you work in an air-conditioned place, it's easy to go in and out and not necessarily feel heat for very long.

If you are homeless and if you're unsheltered, you're spending most of your time outdoors in a city that has very little when it comes to tree cover, bus stop shade areas that are very small.

They're not built for people to be able to sit on them or, you know, lay down, fall asleep on them for very long.

And the high today here s- is supposed to be 107 degrees.

It doesn't take long with no clouds in the sky for every surface to feel hotter than 107 degrees.

And Phoenix itself has become a bit of a concrete island, and this urban heat effect, uh, that people smarter than me in that science study it and look at it and do heat maps and show how dramatic the increased temperature is.

And so for people who are outside, if they sit down on the concrete, they sit down on a sidewalk, they lean up against a metal fence, their skin can be burned.

You start to sweat initially, but if your heat exhaustion, your heat illness starts to turn into heatstroke, your body actually stops sweating.

And if you've experienced any of that a little bit, maybe starting to get lightheaded or dizzy if you get hot, you sit down, you cool down, and maybe you're okay.

But if you never have a chance to cool down, you're not okay, and you can start to feel disoriented.

Uh, you can start to exhibit what people might label as very odd behavior.

It happens quick, and I think-- when I think again of Wisconsin and winter and snow and ice, you can see that.

You don't see what heat is doing to the environment.

Yeah, you, you bring up a couple interesting points.

One, today when we're recording, it's 107, but it can get well above 120 in Phoenix, correct?

Absolutely.

Just two summers ago, we had the longest streak ever of temperatures, I believe it was over 115.

And that means at night it's staying above 90 degrees.