City’s cooling centers are ghost towns
Even in extreme heat, many are choosing to hunker down instead of visiting facilities.
Anthony Willis has been living for years at a homeless encampment on Vermont Avenue and West 3rd Street near Koreatown.
During last week’s tripledigit temperatures throughout portions of Southern California, Willis used a hand fan and big umbrella and drenched himself with ice in an effort to stay cool.
“It’s so hot,” said Willis, 35, on Friday. “I go to the Starbucks and grab ice water every day to keep from dying out here. I’m surprised we have a breeze coming through today — the wind is actually blowing.”
Willis had heard about the cooling centers opened by the city of Los Angeles but hadn’t visited one. He said he’d consider going if there were free transportation that would drop him off at one.
“We don’t have our phones charged all the time or GPS, and most of [the centers] are downtown,” he said. “We don’t really go to them because they’re further from our encampment. We just tough it out where we’re at.”
To address the scorching heat, the city on Aug. 31 opened nine “augmented” cooling centers — air-conditioned facilities that operate on expanded hours during heat emergencies — to help people get out of the sun.
After the National Weather Service warned that the heat wave was expected to last at least all of
last week, the city added two more centers and extended the longer hours, which were originally supposed to end on Labor Day, through last Friday.
But only about 2,256 Angelenos visited nearly a dozen cooling centers at recreation and parks centers between Aug. 31 and Sept. 9, according to Joseph Riser, a spokesperson for the city’s Emergency Management Department.
With the nine centers open for 10 days, and the two additional ones open the week of the heat wave, that breaks down to about 21 visitors per center per day — for a city with almost 4 million residents.
In addition to the recreation and parks centers, more than 70 city public library branches serve as cooling centers during regular business hours. Daily attendance at libraries and other cooling centers isn’t tallied because those seeking refuge from heat “likely blend in” with other patrons, Riser said. However, he said, staff members have noticed increases in traffic at many of the facilities.
During a heat wave last year, five augmented cooling centers opened in the city June 15-20, Riser said. About 83 people visited.
A Times investigation published last year revealed that California has severely undercounted the number of people who have died due to extreme heat and has largely failed to provide resources to communities that are most vulnerable to the effects of heat and global warming. As climate change worsens, heat waves are expected to become more frequent and intense.
On Friday at about 3:30 p.m., four people sat in folding chairs at the Lafayette Recreation Center near Koreatown — one of the augmented cooling centers the city opened for the heat wave. Seven people had visited the center that day, when temperatures in downtown L.A. hovered around 100.
Brian Vega, 38, went to the center Monday to Friday last week because his air conditioner was broken and his apartment was heating to more than 90 degrees at night. Vega said he found out about the cooling centers online and drove from Silver Lake each morning, staying from 11:30 a.m. to about 7 p.m.
“There hasn’t been that many people. I’m surprised,” he said. “[But] I’ve seen a lot of senior people come in, and those are the ones who really need to come in and need to find out about this.”
Vega sat alongside five or six people each day, he said, adding that he doesn’t think most people know about the centers or think they are necessary.
“They’d rather be sweating out there — they should come here,” he added.
Javier Moreno, a facility director for the Department of Recreation and Parks, said the number of people fluctuated day to day at the Lafayette facility but peaked
the previous weekend; temperatures on Sept. 3 reached about 98 degrees in downtown L.A.
“We had ups and downs, but for the most part, we have a consistent number of people coming in,” he said. “It’s a pleasure for me, especially working for the community here, opening our doors to them during these hot times.”
Moreno said 60 people had come in one day, but attendance then started to dwindle. On Thursday, about 10 people showed up.
Homelessness advocates and politicians say lack of need isn’t the reason cooling centers aren’t being frequented. Rather, they say, there aren’t enough centers or ways for people to get to them.
Andreina Kniss, an organizer for Ktown for All, a homeless outreach and advocacy group, said that for most unhoused people in L.A., going to a cooling center simply isn’t feasible.
In Koreatown, a cooling center is located near Liberty Park, a long trek from the northern part of Koreatown, Kniss said. Because many unhoused people are disabled, they aren’t able to easily get themselves to a cooling center without a car or free public transportation, she said.
“While an able-bodied person can make that in 20 minutes, it’s an all-day trek for someone who’s immobile,” she said. “They’d rather stay in a tent and not move and hope to make it through the heat than risk a heatstroke from moving to a location.”
The rules at libraries also deter people from showing up, Kniss said; because many libraries don’t allow animals, some unhoused people choose to remain outdoors rather than abandon their pets. Other community centers allow animals if they’re brought in a crate — another barrier for vulnerable populations that can’t afford such items for their pets.
“There are more than 60,000 unhoused people in Los Angeles County, and when you add the number of people who are housed but don’t have air conditioning and need to seek refuge from the heat, simply designating a library as a cooling center doesn’t address that need,” she added.
Kniss recommended that
the city address heat-related illness and deaths by barring businesses with air conditioning from kicking people out during heat emergencies, utilizing existing infrastructure to give people rides to cooling centers, mandating that all apartment buildings have air conditioning units and allowing people to ride air-conditioned buses for free.
Kniss said that every summer, she has to call 911 for people suffering from heatstroke. On average, five homeless people die in Los Angeles County each day; during a heat wave, the number rises to about nine, she said.
“I’ve never seen this amount of people suffering en masse,” she said. “The sustained heat for this length of time has made it particularly awful. There are a lot of people with comorbidities, like HIV, cancer and diabetes, that make them particularly vulnerable to the heat.”
Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Resolve, described cooling centers as a “salve for people’s conscience,” because they are underutilized. He said he rarely sees anyone at Los Angeles’ cooling centers during extreme heat events.
“That is a failed policy, in my view,” Parfrey said. He said a much better policy would be to create community-based hubs, such as churches or clinics, that are known locations that are already trusted, rather than cooling centers in unfamiliar facilities.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who represents the southwest San Fernando Valley, helped conduct outreach with unhoused people to try to get them to go to cooling centers, but he met with some resistance.
“I talked to folks who are blistering in the sun and are just trying to hunker down with a little bit of shade, and it’s heartbreaking,” Blumenfield said.
Last week, he spoke to an unhoused woman in her 20s who was in a shaded area with a couple of friends. He gave her a flier about the cooling center at a Canoga Park facility, but she chose not to go.
“They were getting high, so that’s how they wanted to deal with it,” he said. “She was flushed from the sun, and it pained me, because I did my best convincing both for her going to a cooling center but also to sign up for housing.”
Like others, Blumenfield said the cooling centers aren’t being widely utilized due to a lack of transportation. Also, he said, some people choose to go to other places that have air conditioning, such as Starbucks or other businesses.
“Part of the issue is that the cooling centers are few and far between, so if it’s not convenient for folks to go there, they’re not gonna go there,” he said. “People don’t necessarily want to go to an area with a lot of folks they don’t know. They want to be in their private setting or somewhere they can blend in.”
Blumenfield hopes that more cooling centers will open and that libraries and recreation and parks centers will have permanent extended hours to accommodate people trying to get out of the heat.
He also thinks cooling centers should be opened on a regional basis. Because he represents the hottest part of the city, which can be 30 degrees warmer than other areas, his region might need the centers more than others, he said.
“The West Valley could have blistering temperatures, and it may not affect the rest of the city enough for the mayor to declare a heat emergency and open up the cooling centers,” he added.
While libraries don’t pay extra to function as a cooling center, it costs about $292.79 an hour to operate a cooling center at a recreation and parks facility in the city, according to a July 2022 report from the Emergency Management Department.
The county operates about 159 cooling centers but doesn’t track total numbers of daily visitors, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management.
“Many locations that function as a cooling center operate during normal business hours providing their primary services to the public,” the statement said. “As such it is difficult to make a distinction who is at that facility/location for the purposes of obtaining services (i.e., checking out a book at a public library; recreating at a park or pool) or finding relief from the heat.”
Emily Montanez, associate director of the L.A. County Office of Emergency Management, declined to comment on which cooling centers see the most traffic.
“There are any number of scenarios that could be drawn up to paint a picture of spikes and attempt to explain one over another,” she added.
Willis, who is in the process of trying to get housing, said it’s all a matter of making the cooling centers more known and accessible.
“It’s just knowing the addresses and getting the motivation to get there,” he said.