Without air conditioning or adequate ventilation, the Hazelwood Single Room Hotel, located in downtown Vancouver, East Side, is not designed for the heat of the 21st century. Jesse Winter / Globe and Mail
During a pleasantly cool September afternoon, it is unpleasantly hot at the Carl Rooms in downtown Vancouver East Side. The light flows into a small, empty, south-facing room waiting for a new tenant. Its windows swing just a few inches and a mechanism automatically closes the door: Forget about trying to cool things down with a cross breeze. There is no air conditioning system. And it won’t be soon.
Carl Rooms with 43 units is in most respects a typical hotel with a single room or SRO. There are dozens throughout Downtown Eastside, some built more than a century ago. They are not designed for the heat of the 21st century.
Janice Abbott, CEO of Atira Property Management, is based in Oppenheimer Park, one of the only green spaces in the Downtown Eastside that was kept closed to the public for much of the deadly heat wave in June 2021. Jesse Winter / The Globe and Mail
“When it’s 20 degrees here, it’s too hot for most people in those buildings,” said Janice Abbott, chief executive of Atira Property Management, a non-profit organization that manages approximately 30 SROs, including Carl Rooms. “So it doesn’t matter when it’s 35 or 38.”
Such temperatures were once unthinkable in this temperate city, but no longer. Mercury exceeded 40 C during a deadly, record-breaking heat wave in the Northwest Pacific in June 2021 that killed 619 people only in BC. Forecasts indicate that Vancouver will survive many more hot summer days as the Earth’s climate continues to warm.
This is bad news for the whole city, but especially for Downtown Eastside. This is already among the hottest neighborhoods in the city, according to a review of satellite data on surface temperature from The Globe and Mail. Yet just a few blocks away is Stratcona, one of Vancouver’s oldest residential neighborhoods. It has millions of dollars worth of houses and narrower streets lined with mature trees and lower temperatures.
“It’s like two different worlds,” said Ms. Abbott.
Earth’s surface temperature data reveal many such divisions in Canada’s largest cities. They also suggest that the way we plan and build often does not pay enough attention to heat. Through our municipal codes, architecture, zoning laws and building materials, we continue to spread heat-absorbing urban landscapes that will be with us for decades, even centuries. These elections help determine which neighborhoods are destined to become uninhabited, not just more inconvenient.
The fireplaces of civilization
19th-century US Secretary of State and abolitionist Theodore Parker called cities “the fireplaces of civilization from which light and heat radiate into the dark.” Earth’s surface temperature data show that this is literally true: cities are hotter than the surrounding suburban and rural landscapes due to a well-understood phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. Some researchers have found that the difference is up to six degrees.
Concrete, asphalt and other heat-absorbing materials obviously carry much of the blame. Cities usually have fewer trees, resulting in less shade and evaporative cooling. Densely populated neighborhoods usually have more than the former, fewer than the latter.
To identify some of Canada’s hottest neighborhoods, The Globe turned to Vivek Shandas, a professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Portland State University. He and his colleagues surveyed surface temperature data for 108 cities in the United States, examining the link between heat and the Red Line, an already illegal practice involving the denial of housing loans or insurance to neighborhoods inhabited by blacks and other minorities. explicitly racist grounds. The first-of-its-kind analysis links historic federal housing policy to disproportionate heat exposure in vulnerable communities.
“I cut my teeth on satellite imagery and there I received an assessment of the huge differences in the urban landscape,” said Prof. Shandas. “We release materials, regulations and codes into the world that do not take into account temperature variability – not to mention the extremes we are beginning to see.”
Prof. Shandas provided The Globe with surface temperature data for Vancouver and Montreal. Camilo Pérez Arau, a Montreal-based geographer who has studied urban warmth in several major Canadian cities, provided images of Toronto. Using a geographic information system software known as ArcGIS Pro, The Globe cross-referenced this data with satellite images as well as data from the 2016 census to examine patterns in heat distribution. We confirmed our observations with local experts.
Walking through the Downtown Eastside, one notices that the buildings almost entirely cover many plots, leaving little space for trees and grass. Many street trees on the main thoroughfare – the six-lane East Hastings Street – are young and revolving. Some look dead or almost. Nearby industrial areas – dominated by railway stations, warehouses and car parks – have virtually no greenery.
These conditions have been created for more than a century. Local historian Lani Ruswurm said many of the SROs were built after 1910. “There was a real boom between 1910 and around 1913,” he explained. “So they built them mainly to accommodate traveling workers like loggers who spent half a year in the bushes. Many hotels have built jaws on their jaws, sharing “light wells” between them that allow minimal sunlight but little wind.
On East Hastings Street in Vancouver, buildings cover almost all of the land, leaving little room for trees and grass. The Patricia Hotel, on the far right, is now managed as a maintenance housing with 195 units. Rafal Gerzak / Globe and mail
Some of the old hotels were destroyed, but dozens remained, including Savoy and Hazelwood. Over time, SROs have become what a local organization calls the last stop before homelessness. Like the red neighborhoods in US cities, Downtown Eastside has received little investment for generations.
“It’s a class problem,” said Vancouver City Councilor Jean Swanson. “If you’re poor, you can’t afford air conditioning. If you’re really poor, you can’t afford a fan. If you are really, really poor, you don’t have a house and you need shade. ”
Not all neighborhoods are hot for the same reasons. Other lively neighborhoods in Vancouver include the Sunset and neighboring Marpole. Both have densely packed residential plots, mostly occupied by buildings with asphalt roofs, alleys and paths and little planting space. But the main culprit is along the Fraser River.
“Right along the river, because it’s so built up and industrial, there’s almost no vegetation,” said Michael Brouwer, a professor at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia who co-authored a study on heat sensitivity. the lower part of British Columbia. continental part.
In the heart of Vancouver is the rich enclave of Shonessy, home to luxury homes sit on large, meticulously landscaped plots. It boasts the thickest canopy of wood in every Vancouver neighborhood; not surprisingly, he is among the coolest. The neighborhoods closest to the Pacific, including West Point Gray, Dunbar-Southlands and Kerrisdale, are even cooler.
Toronto’s ravines, lined with trees, small rivers and streams, stand out as oases in images of the earth’s surface temperature. Rouge National Park helps this part of the Toronto area enjoy some of the lowest temperatures in the GTA.
Toronto’s ravines, lined with trees, small rivers and streams, stand out as oases in images of the earth’s surface temperature. Christopher Katsarov / The Globe and Mail
The Davenport area of Toronto, a residential neighborhood densely packed with individual dwellings, is strikingly depressing: four degrees warmer than the coolest neighborhoods on the date of our image. Here the relief belongs only to the dead: Prospekt Cemetery, a narrow strip of land stretching two kilometers from north to south, is the only obvious refuge.
In Montreal, temperatures in the St. Lawrence neighborhoods are significantly lower. L’Île-Bizard-Sainte-Geneviève, which has the smallest population of any district in Montreal, is dominated by golf courses and parks and is surrounded by Lac des Deux Montagnes. The same goes for nearby Seneville, a rich enclave at the western end of the island of Montreal. Mount Royal Park, near the heart of Montreal, offers a rare break in the otherwise hot city center.
The industrialized neighborhoods in the interior of the island are the opposite extreme: the scattered blocks of industrial and commercial property in the Saint Laurent district – especially those near Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport – stand out.
David Kaiser, an environmental doctor at Montreal Public Health, pointed out striking contrasts between cooler, higher-income residential neighborhoods around the mountain (Outremont, Mont-Royal, Westmount) and hotter neighbors with lower incomes. incomes divided into nothing more than abstract administrative boundaries.
“There is no natural law that says people in a richer neighborhood should have more trees or be less exposed to heat than in a poorer neighborhood,” he said. “But it’s so obvious when you look at something like surface temperature data.”
A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change warns that the likelihood of extreme weather events, such as the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest last summer, will increase dramatically by the middle of the century. DARRYL DYCK / The Canadian Press
Cold nation in a deep fryer
According to calculations based on historical records, the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest from last summer …
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