Hot time: summer in the city

Clip You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan I just spent the last two weeks way out in the country on a farm, and from what I heard whenever I checked in while I was gone, the city that I live in and plenty of other cities around the world were pretty hot.

Clip Montreal, in its first heatwave of the summer season. Toronto activates its heat relief network, opening cooling centers across the city. The UK Met Office issuing its first-ever red warning for extreme heat.

Jordan While Toronto and Europe and other places were burning up. I was about 150 km away from any large city in the middle of nowhere, basically, and it was hot there too. It was above 30 degrees Celsius for much of the past week, and it felt more like 35, which without air conditioning is uncomfortable. There’s a reason I’m telling you this story because there’s a difference between the heat in Toronto and the heat on a farm. Every night during the heat wave on the farm, usually a little after 11:00 p.m., when the sun had been down for a couple of hours, the heat just went away. I went to bed after one of the hottest days I’ve ever had out there with a fan blowing in my face, with a bottle of cold water next to me and under the lightest sheet that I could find. And around 02:00 a.m., in the middle of this heat wave, I woke up freezing, Which brings me back to cities like Toronto, where the heat never goes away. Where in the middle of a real heat wave like last week, temperatures can feel almost the same at 02:00 a.m As they do at 02:00 p.m. And as more and more cities see record temperatures every single summer, and more and more days above normal, the danger just builds. So we need to take a look at how our cities are put together at the level of heat they can withstand before both people and infrastructure start collapsing, and how to adapt them to the future that we’re already living in. Because while heat waves aren’t as gripping as super storms and forest fires, they are every bit as deadly, especially in the city. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. I swear I wasn’t bragging to you about being out on a farm for the past two weeks. I really did. It was really hot. I’m back here today with Inori Roy, who is a Toronto-based journalist, associate editor at The Local, which has combined with The Narwhal to produce a series on climate in Canada’s largest city. Hey, Inori.

Inori Roy Hi, Jordan. Thanks so much for having me.

Jordan You are most welcome. Why don’t you start by telling us about Lydia Ferreira? Who is she? What does she do?

Inori Roy Yeah. So Lydia is one of the volunteers at Crew, which is the community resource for extreme weather. They are a team of volunteers in St. Jamestown who work to check in on vulnerable people during heat waves and other extreme events in Toronto. So the vulnerable people they check in with are usually people who are elderly or have chronic illnesses and don’t necessarily have networks in their homes or neighbourhoods that they can reach out to when they’re feeling the health effects of extreme weather.

Jordan So one of the places that she works is St. Jamestown. Can you just kind of describe, especially for people who may not live in Toronto, describe St. Jamestown in general, but also those apartment buildings when Toronto is in the middle of a heat wave?

Inori Roy Yeah. So St. Jamestown is a very densely built neighbourhood. It’s one of the most dense neighbourhoods in the entire country, and it’s comprised mainly of high-rise buildings that were built in the 1960s. So they don’t necessarily have the infrastructure to be able to install air conditioning in most of the apartments there. And so, as a result of being older buildings that don’t necessarily have new and updated infrastructure, they’re also largely populated by low-income and racialized people who’ve been priced out of other parts of the city. And a lot of those people are also elderly. So those combined factors means that when there’s a heat wave, the temperature inside those apartments gets really high, the apartments become really stifling and muggy. And the people who live in those apartments also face the health effects of heat in a more extreme way than younger and healthier Torontonians would. And so, as a result, they become more susceptible to a lot of different factors.

Jordan And what do they do? Do they sit in their apartments and sweat? What are their options?

Inori Roy Well, the thing is that they could go downstairs to their lobbies, which are often designated as, like, cooling centers for the building because city recognizes that there is a problem of lack of access to air conditioning. But a lot of the people who are worst impacted also don’t have the mobility to be able to go downstairs. They use mobility aids, or they’re not able to leave their apartments, or they’re not comfortable leaving their apartments because they don’t really have a network in the building, and so they don’t want to necessarily go and sit with strangers. So sometimes they do go down to the lobby. Other times, they end up sort of sequestered to their apartment, which leads to even more suffering.

Jordan Do we have any idea of the scale of this problem during a heat wave? I know one of the things I took away from your piece is that it’s really hard to determine when or if heat is the cause of death or serious illness.

Inori Roy Yeah, absolutely. So it’s really complicated because when heat affects the human body, it doesn’t necessarily like you don’t necessarily immediately have a heat stroke, and that’s not usually what people die of. It’s more often that heat makes it more difficult for people with existing conditions. So you know heart conditions, breathing conditions, diabetes, things of that nature. People with those conditions are more likely to suffer during heat waves because it exacerbates what’s already happening to them. So the Ontario Coroner’s Office doesn’t record heat deaths the same way that, for example, Montreal does. In Montreal, when a person, when a first responder attends a scene where there is a heat-related illness, they will note down that the conditions were very hot. But in Ontario, that doesn’t necessarily happen. And so that means that we don’t really have a count of how many people are getting sick or dying during heat waves. Instead, the coroner’s office believes that the most important thing is prevention. But a lot of advocates say that means that you know we’re severely undercounting the genuine effects that this heat is having on all the elderly people in the city.

Jordan Let’s talk about Toronto specifically, because that’s where your piece focuses. I know all cities kind of have this problem, but what do we know about the heat waves Toronto has been getting recently, the patterns of them if they’re increasing, et cetera.

Inori Roy Yeah. So just this past week and towards the end of June, we’ve had a couple of heat events. Over the course of a few days, Toronto is getting hotter and hotter and will continue to as climate change worsens. And so there are a couple of different emissions and temperature projection models that have come out. And so one of the key projections is that even if we have a low carbon projection model in which emissions go down, starting in 2050, Toronto is still going to experience more than three times as many hot days as they were in the latter half of the 20th century. And then, if the emissions remain as high as they are now, the number of hot days could go up to more than four times they are now. And so you know in the course of a single year in that projection, you’d have, like, 55 days where the temperature was 30 deg or more, and the average length of the heat wave in that scenario would go up as well. So it’s inevitable that Toronto is going to get hotter. It’s just about by what degree.

Jordan So far, we’ve talked about Toronto getting hotter as though it’s one place, and when it’s 40 degrees on a day, it’s 40 degrees all across the city. Is that true?

Inori Roy Well, so urban heat island effect means that the way that cities are designed is sort of inherently unequal, because wealthier and wider parts of cities, specifically Toronto, but also most other urban centers, are more likely to have access to tree cover and shade and you know water spaces and, like, a lakefront and things like that. Whereas low-income and racialized spaces usually don’t have enough tree cover, which means that they don’t have access to shade. Canopy, tree canopy decreases the temperature significantly. And so when you’re living in this beautiful, green leafy neighbourhood, you are not experiencing as much heat as you are if you live in sort of a dense neighbourhood full of high rises, and also the building materials for each of these spaces are different. And so in high-rise communities, especially older ones, you have a lot of building materials that retain and absorb heat. So dark-coloured surfaces and concrete and asphalt, all of those things retain heat, and then in the night release that heat into the surroundings, which means that you don’t even get to cool down your surroundings at night. And so all of these different factors, paired with the fact that low-income residential neighbourhoods are also supposed to be closer to industrial areas, means that the poorest and most vulnerable residents of the city are usually the ones also experiencing heat, the worst.

Jordan Do we have a way to measure that difference, say, from a green leafy neighbourhood to high rises a few blocks over? And here I’m thinking specifically for people who know Toronto, since you described it, the difference between Rosedale and St. Jamestown, which are next to each other.

Inori Roy So there are some academic models that do sort of satellite imagery and test for temperatures along those lines and use different sorts of academic measures to be able to understand the differences. It’s a bit tricky because it won’t be a difference of like 35 and 40 degrees necessarily. But the thing is that in the shade, temperatures can be affected for between ten and 20 degrees, depending on how extreme the temperature is. And so if you stand, for example, under a tree in Rosedale, you will be much cooler by a factor of several degrees than you would be if you’re standing on the asphalt in St. Jamestown.

Jordan Can you reach way back? And tell me about Toronto’s worst heatwave ever? First of all, it’s a novelty these days when the worst weather event for a city is still like decades in the past because I’m used to them all happening now. But tell me about the worst heatwave in Toronto history and how the city has adapted to dealing with heat since then.

Inori Roy Yeah, so Toronto’s worst ever heat wave within 1936, which is really wild because you think about the fact that temperatures are getting worse now, we’re probably going to be seeing more and more events like that. But that was the worst one on record. Temperatures were in the mid thirty’s and forty’s for several days in a row, for eight straight days. Part of what I thought was really strange and interesting when I was reading about that was that in response, a lot of people sort of took to the lakefront and stayed there during the night for several days in a row, only going back to their houses for brief periods of time. And I think that that’s one of the key things that has changed in the way that we would respond to a heat wave now is that we don’t end up like we don’t access communal areas with the same level of comfort and freedom, necessarily, that we may have in 1936. And so now I think if there was a heat event, you probably wouldn’t see people sleeping on the beach overnight. And so now what ends up happening is that because communities are sort of a little more insulated and isolated, you’ll have people sort of suffering through the heat alone. The response to heat has improved certainly. You know now we have relief networks throughout the city and volunteers checking in on vulnerable people. But there are also some drawbacks in the amount of industrial space in the city now versus then. The lack of pre-cover now and the fact that people don’t feel as comfortable accessing those open spaces where they might feel cooler.

Jordan I realize this next question is a privileged one to ask, but the other thing we have now that we didn’t have widely back then at all is air conditioning. Why can’t we just get everybody in an air-conditioned space?

Inori Roy Yeah, so that’s really the question that everyone is grappling with right now. Right? Because air conditioning is the most immediate solution that we can think of. It is the easiest and quickest solve for this particular moment in time. And so part of the problem is that a lot of people in places like St. Jamestown and other lower-income parts of the city, they do have air conditioners in their houses, but they can’t afford to use them because of the energy bills. And so for the people who don’t have access to AC, there’s no infrastructure to get those built in because those buildings are built in the 1960s, they don’t have, like, HVAC systems running through them. And so the renovations would be a massive amount of money and they would be the responsibility of the building owner. And then for places that do have air conditioning, people can’t afford to turn it on. And so part of the problem of using AC as your sole solution is that not everyone is going to have the infrastructure. And also the cost of the energy grid would be immense. The city’s not really built for every single resident to be using air conditioning at the exact same moment. And so you’re going to have an immense toll to the energy grid, the potential for huge blackouts, things of that nature. And so air conditioning is really key because it’s the thing we need to be getting people right now so that they don’t die during these heat waves. And we need to be creating ways that they can access that, whether that be providing funding to lower-income people who can’t afford to use their air conditioners or providing floor model air conditioners to people who can’t sort of fit one into their window or install it into the HVAC system. There are solutions, but more broadly, we need to be thinking about resilient architecture and building design that creates passive cooling.

Jordan I’m going to get to the architecture in a moment, but first, just on the AC question. I mean, there are lots of rules and regulations if you want to be a landlord or own buildings about, you know you have to have heat in the winter. You have to be able to keep your units above a certain number of degrees as the world gets hotter. Isn’t the logical solution to require that in the other direction?

Inori Roy Absolutely. That is something that a lot of people have been talking about at the moment. There is, I believe, a proposal from an MP to put that into law. Part of the problem is that changes that would happen to the requirements for residential tenancies that would have to go through the province. And so it needs to be a priority for the province to create that sort of maximum temperature regulation in the home. And you can’t mandate that landlords have ACS because that would be, again, a sort of massive provincial change that needs to happen to the Tenancy Act. And so you know those two things combined mean that there needs to be significant political will for people to actually get the ball rolling on that. And right now, you get some of that at the city level. You don’t get much at the provincial level.

Jordan What do we do at the city level right now? You mentioned Lydia and people like her, but what does the city do and what is it planning to do to adapt to increasing extreme heat?

Inori Roy So we’ve got a few different things going on. So first of all, we have the city’s heat relief network and heat relief strategy. So that is a complicated rollout with mixed results and mixed perspectives. So the city essentially has created a network of public spaces that they redirect people towards when on extreme temperature days. And so you’ll have public libraries that have air conditioning, malls, pools, community centers, things of that nature. For example, when Lydia goes to one of the buildings in St. Jamestown to check in on the residents, you’ll see in the lobby that it says your nearest cooling center is like the local public library or the local community center. The problem with that is that, again, a lot of people don’t have the mobility to be able to go 25 minutes away from their home in order to get cooling. There’s no existing sort of transit system that would help people get there specifically for those purposes. No sort of specialized mobility system for the seniors in these communities. And you also have the issue of community and isolation, right? People don’t necessarily feel like they would be comfortable going to a community center and being around strangers if they’re relatively isolated in their communities. And so all of those factors mean that while the heat release network is important, it’s not actually necessarily reaching the people who need it most. So a lot of advocates have said that it’s not really enough. And in terms of new buildings, there is the Green Standard for buildings, which means that buildings that are being proposed and built now over the last half a decade have to have 50% to 75% cool materials used to build them. And so they’re not retaining heat in the same way older buildings are. And they have to have green roofs or cool roofs that mean that their roofs are actually helping with cooling down the building as a whole. And so they are pretty solid standards set right now for the buildings that are going to be built. But part of the problem is that who’s going to be able to afford to live in those buildings, right? And in terms of renovation, there is a fund through the city that would provide low-cost financing for landowners and property owners to retrofit their buildings with the kind of infrastructure that would help put in AC. But then you’re leaving it to landlords and building owners to prioritize that themselves and that’s something that we can’t guarantee it’s going to happen.

Jordan Since you mentioned isolation and you also mentioned how vulnerable seniors are, I have to ask you about long-term care facilities because I was pretty shocked, I imagine a lot of our listeners are pretty shocked to learn that not all of these places have air conditioning which seems frankly kind of insane to me.

Inori Roy It’s really tricky because the provincial government likes to say that 100% of long-term care homes have air conditioning. But what they mean by that is that they have it in one designated room of the building that is used for cooling. Part of the problem is that in individual rooms and residences you won’t necessarily have access to air conditioning. And a lot of the people in long-term care homes are bedridden in a way that people living in their own apartments might not be. And so it’s even worse in long-term care homes to expect them to go down to a general cooling zone because in those areas someone needs to be on duty to wheel them down and back to their rooms whenever they need. You know if they’re bedridden then they won’t have access to those rooms at all. So it becomes a really unfair and inequitable approach that people are marketing as it’s working much better than it is.

Jordan So far there’s been a lot of unfairness and inequity and the solutions that I’ve heard from you so far are long-term planning things. What could we work on tomorrow in this city to make sure more vulnerable people survive the next heat wave?

Inori Roy Yeah, it’s a very complicated question because it depends on who you ask. A lot of people would say access to air conditioning is one of the key things because while there are reasons that air conditioning isn’t necessarily a sustainable long-term solution, it is a sort of like potentially life-saving solution in the interim. You know some people would argue for better access to air conditioning, whether that be city-funded, getting people ACs that they can just plug into their rooms and funding for covering the cost of the energy that runs an AC. Other people would say just creating better community models that create more accessible cooling spaces closer to home and also where people have an actual incentive to go. Part of the reason that people don’t necessarily want to sit in their lobby all day is because there’s no incentive to be there. There’s no sort of community provisions. The seating is uncomfortable. They don’t necessarily have access to the kind of resources they would in their home. And so just making those spaces more welcoming and having more sort of funding, not leaving it up to the individual buildings to just sort of throw together some lawn chairs to give people seating, those are some key things that you would need in order to make those spaces more attractive to people. So those are two of the key ways. And then everyone is sort of, there’s a consensus about having passive cooling for the future and for future buildings so that this isn’t a problem that we’re going to necessarily be able to handle generations on unless we have those in place.

Jordan How close are we to a really dangerous point where we’re having several of these events a year?

Inori Roy It’s really scary because we don’t necessarily know because of broader concerns about how much are people actually committing to reduce emissions? Which model of emissions projection is going to be the most accurate one for the future? Those are questions that are really up to politicians and business leaders to answer, more so than any of the rest of us can. And so if that urgency is not reflected in the action that people take, it’s going to be quite soon that we’ll probably start to see this happen more and more often. But yeah, it’s really a question of when and not if. And I think people are bracing for the worst in the years to come.

Jordan And in the meantime, I guess check on your neighbours takes on even greater urgency.

Inori Roy Absolutely. Check on your neighbours, check on your elderly loved ones, and just yeah make sure you’re looking out for each other.

Jordan Inori, thank you so much for this.

Inori Roy Thank you so much for having me.

Jordan Inori Roy, associate editor at The Local. I wasn’t kidding. I was on a farm for two weeks. It was hot. I’m back. It’s lovely to be here. Thank you so much to our amazing guest hosts, Takara Small and Garvia Bailey. I’m always glad when they let me have the chair back after someone fills in. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can write to us [click here!] and you can call us at 416-935-5935. It’s been a while. I just wanted to see how fast I could do that. You can find The Big Story everywhere you get your podcasts, you can ask your favourite smart speaker to play The Big Story podcast. And, of course, thank you for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page