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Homeless people across the country are feeling the impact of extreme heat from a warming climate. As Connecticut Public's Abigail Brone reports, leaders in various states are working to meet the need for shelter during heat emergencies.
ABIGAIL BRONE, BYLINE: When the weather warms up, Connecticut resident Clarence Braun and his wife Holly park their Mercury Grand Marquis in the shade or ride around with the windows down.
CLARENCE BRAUN: Oh, my AC's broken. I just drive if I can.
BRONE: Braun has lived out of the car for more than two years. But when it gets really hot, he seeks out some AC relief.
BRAUN: Got a little AC here in McDonald's. They got AC if you really need to cool down, you know? They don't much like it, but they allow it for a little bit.
BRONE: On a hot summer day in July, Braun, wearing a short-sleeve red polo and his hair pulled back in a ponytail, visited the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance in Hartford. This place serves as a cooling center on this day, and bottles of vitamin water and cold-cut sandwiches were available. Mark Jenkins is the founder of the alliance.
MARK JENKINS: We loaded a pallet of water in here yesterday. It's probably all but gone - 48 cases of 40 bottles inside a 12-hour period.
BRONE: To stay open longer, Jenkins brings on extra staff. Connecticut, a state that sees its first frost in late September and snowfall as late as April, is seeing drier and hotter summers due to climate change. An extreme heat protocol for the state was established in 2021. It's triggered when there are three or more consecutive days of temperatures above 90 degrees. So far this year, the state's heat protocol was put in place five times, up from three last year. Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, says the states seeing a rise in heat, like Connecticut, don't always have a summer shelter system in place.
DONALD WHITEHEAD: So there's always been, in the Midwest and the East Coast, the need to have those kinds of facilities for the cold. But now it actually is becoming almost a year-round activity.
BRONE: Thirty years ago, Chicago experienced a record-breaking heat wave in which more than 700 people died. It led to the formation of a city office which coordinates public universities and schools and libraries to function as cooling centers. Dr. Alexander Sloboda with Chicago's Department of Public Health says high temperatures are particularly dangerous in large cities.
ALEXANDER SLOBODA: You kind of have this urban heat island effect. And so even though kind of the environment cools down a bit, like, the - just the concrete, the buildings continue to release the heat absorbed during the day into the evenings.
BRONE: Opening cooling centers during heat waves is providing relief to some, but people are continuing to die.
SLOBODA: This city is trying to provide more, either later cooling center hours or even exploring 24/7 options as well.
BRONE: In parts of Arizona, the heat season typically runs from May to October. Eugene Livar, chief heat officer for Arizona, says that since last year, the state has opened nine around-the-clock cooling centers that operate during the heat season.
EUGENE LIVAR: And those could include for the unhoused, those that are house-burdened or those that are just seeking, you know, some relief because they may be housed, but they could be making some really critical decisions between utilities and different, you know, needs that they have.
BRONE: Livar says these shelters are helping. For the first time in nearly a decade, Phoenix saw a small decline in the number of heat-related deaths.
For NPR News, I'm Abigail Brone. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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