Kathy Shows sits on bedding made of furniture pads laid out on the sidewalk at the corner of Jefferson and 12th Avenue near downtown Phoenix. At 11 p.m. on the 25th day of a record-breaking extreme heat wave, it’s still 99 degrees outside after a high of 116. Concrete cools slowly after the sun goes down.Every few minutes, the 63-year-old Shows pours water from a plastic bottle over her bare arms and legs and splashes some on her face to keep her cool. Her boyfriend, Fernando, who is recovering from liver surgery two months ago, sleeps shirtless next to her. But she has trouble resting in this heat.Across an urban landscape increasingly reliant on air conditioning as temperatures rise, Shows and her boyfriend are two of nearly 10,000 people experiencing homelessness in Phoenix and Maricopa County as of January 2023, an uptick of 7% since 2022 and 72% since 2017. Experts say it’s likely an undercount.Hundreds have set up camp — pitching tents and making shelters out of tarps, wooden pallets and cardboard — across a stretch of asphalt west of downtown Phoenix known as “The Zone,” near a shelter and other support services for the unhoused. Shows tried to get a bed in the air-conditioned shelter for the night, but she got in line too late and even the overflow spaces were full. So she’s sweating it out on the sidewalk a few blocks away.In the morning she’ll try again to find temporary work at the job agency. She’s had luck in the past, getting shifts clearing debris at luxury apartment construction sites along Van Buren Street, earning $15 per hour for a 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift. Two weeks ago she was making enough to pay the weekly rate at a motel where she and Fernando take shelter from extreme heat when they have the funds. Lately, her luck has run out.“Once it’s nighttime, it’s not so bad,” Shows said, cracking open another disposable water bottle, pouring a small amount in her hand and carefully wetting her face. “At a certain time in the morning, it’s bad, it’s treacherous, it’s not so good. I get a piece of cardboard and I shelter myself behind the job agency when I can’t get work.”With hardly a patch of shade or vegetation in sight, The Zone is one of the hottest areas in Arizona, due in part to what is known as the urban heat island effect, the result of man-made structures heating up faster in the sun and cooling down more slowly overnight compared to natural surfaces.A recent analysis by the nonprofit organization Climate Central found that 1.3 million people live in areas of Phoenix that are, on average, now 8 degrees hotter due solely to urban development compared to an undeveloped landscape. That’s on top of warming caused by climate change. The same is true for 408,000 people in certain regions of Tucson. Often the hottest neighborhoods are those with more low-income and Latino residents, due to differences in shade, construction materials and design compared with …
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