LOS ANGELES — Street vendor José Damián has lived in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacoima for the past five years and has felt temperatures hit 105 degrees as he’s pushed his cart of Mexican street snacks and shaved ice in the blazing midday sun.
But the heat had never stopped him from doing his job until last summer.
While heading to Sara Coughlin Elementary School, he was sweating excessively and became dizzy. He decided to get checked out at a hospital.
“All of the salt in my body was depleted,” said Damián, who drank about 15 water bottles that day. “Now I bring my Gatorades. I don’t walk too much anymore. I stop at certain spots with shade.”
Pacoima residents have long suffered from high temperatures. Cecilia Zepeda, 60, said the heat can be unbearable even into the night. Georginna Carrasco, who grew up in the neighborhood and now has two kids, said she usually takes three showers a day and keeps her apartment lights off to cool down. She sometimes has to make the difficult decision of keeping the AC off during the summer because it can get too costly.
“It does feel like it gets hotter and hotter every year, but growing up in the San Fernando Valley, you’re just used to it,” said Carrasco.
In California, the death rate for heat-related deaths was about 4.2 per 1 million people in 2022 — the highest in two decades outside of the historic North American heat wave of 2006. And the communities most in danger are low-income communities of color like Pacoima.
A 2021 study of satellite images found that California’s metro areas saw greater temperature disparities between the poorest and wealthiest neighborhoods than any other Southwestern state, with tree canopy unevenly distributed across Los Angeles County. The study also found that Latino-majority neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area, like Pacoima, were 6.7 degrees hotter than neighborhoods with few Latino residents.
Pacoima ranks among the hottest neighborhoods in Los…
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