Racist segregation, heat waves, trees as carbon sinks, and more creative "solutions" to add tree cover to cities

25 years ago there was a terrible heat wave in Chicago, and hundreds of people died.  Sociology graduate student Eric Klinenberg researched what happened, leading to his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.

He focused on what he now calls "social infrastructure" and how communities with the same racial and income dynamics but differences in the level of social capital--functioning community organizations and local commercial districts with active retailers, etc.--between them accounted for the differences in death rates.

The New York Times has an aricle, "How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering," which looks at this phenomenon more generally, reporting on findings linking redlining to heat-related deaths, reduced tree cover, etc., although they didn't discuss social infrastructure. From the article:

On a hot summer’s day, the neighborhood of Gilpin quickly becomes one of the most sweltering parts of Richmond.

There are few trees along the sidewalks to shield people from the sun’s relentless glare. More than 2,000 residents, mostly Black, live in low-income public housing that lacks central air conditioning. Many front yards are paved with concrete, which absorbs and traps heat. The ZIP code has among the highest rates of heat-related ambulance calls in the city.

There are places like Gilpin all across the United States. In cities like Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Portland and New York, neighborhoods that are poorer and have more residents of color can be 5 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in summer than wealthier, whiter parts of the same city.

And there’s growing evidence that this is no coincidence. In the 20th century, local and federal officials, usually white, enacted policies that reinforced racial segregation in cities and diverted investment away from minority neighborhoods in ways that created large disparities in the urban heat environment.

Yes, typically low income neighborhoods didn't get a lot of investment in urban design and placemaking related elements, from quality school and library buildings, to parks and trails ("," Chicago Tribune), to trees and sidewalks.

And this is still a problem today, although the "social urbanism" planning approach is a good way to right the imbalances ("Social urbanism and Baltimore," 2019).

The other day there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about how companies are buying old growth forests for their function as carbon sinks ("Preserving Trees Becomes Big Business, Driven by Emissions Rules").

Reading the article, I was thinking that while it's great these forests won't be clear cut in the future, I couldn't help but ask the question " what about planting more trees now in places that are lacking in trees?" ("Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis," Guardian). From the WSJ article:

For much of human history, the way to make money from a tree was to chop it down. Now, with companies rushing to offset their carbon emissions, there is value in leaving them standing.

The good news for trees is that the going rate for intact forests has become competitive with what mills pay for logs in corners of Alaska and Appalachia, the Adirondacks and up toward Acadia. That is spurring landowners to make centurylong conservation deals with fossil-fuel companies, which help the latter comply with regulatory demands to reduce their carbon emissions.

For now, California is the only U.S. state with a so-called cap-and-trade system that aims to reduce greenhouse gasses by making it more expensive over time for firms operating in the state to pollute. Preserving trees is rewarded with carbon-offset credits, a climate-change currency that companies can purchase and apply toward a tiny portion of their tab.

But lately, big energy companies, betting that the idea will spread, are looking to preserve vast tracts of forest beyond what they need for California, as part of a burgeoning, speculative market in so-called voluntary offsets.

It seems to me that investments in forests as carbon sinks ought to be tied to new investments in tree plantings too.

Urban neighborhoods lacking in tree coverage ought to places for such targeted investments.

Absolutely there is a need for equity planning I've argued for many years about social and other infrastructure investments in low income communities as a way to help strengthen those communities and extend opportunity.

I have an outline for equity planning that I need to further develop (I pop into the comments links to programs and concepts I've come across since), but it's basically about investment in all the types of "infrastructure" that a community needs.

-- "An outline for integrated equity planning: concepts and programs," 2017