in this podcast episode, george washington university student marzia zunino sits down with environmental activist dylan basescu to talk about the urban heat island effect in washington, d.c., and the devastating impact of heat inequality on vulnerable communities, especially low-income neighborhoods and people of color.

basescu highlights the serious health risks posed by rising temperatures and dives into d.c.’s innovative solution: the permeable surface rebate program, which helps property owners replace heat-trapping materials with cooler, water-absorbing surfaces. drawing on his expertise in environmental law, basescu shares his vision for strengthening such initiatives to better protect those most affected by extreme heat. 

listen to the podcast below!

podcast transcript:

marzia zunino: hi everyone. welcome back to the green divide, a podcast that explores how communities often overlooked are fighting for environmental justice in the spaces that they call home. from polluted neighborhoods to the struggle for access to clean energy, we will uncover the quiet, powerful ways people are demanding a safer, more equitable future for all.

in today’s episode, we will talk about a very important issue, which is heat islands in washington, dc. i am joined by dylan basescu, a george washington university alumni who is an advocate for this precise topic and wrote a great article about it in march of this year. so dylan, can you please introduce yourself, your connection and motivation to environmental justice, and why the interest in this topic?

dylan basescu: sure, marzia. like you said, my name is dylan basescu. i’m a double alumni of george washington university in the gw law school. i’m currently a lawyer in the environmental law space. and my reason for looking into environmental justice issues is because i had previously written a different published work about renewable energy production in the state of california. and one of the things that i wanted to look into as part of that process was environmental justice concerns.

and as for that specific topic, i wrote about that because as an undergraduate in dc, i studied physics, and one of the very early exercises that we did was more about learning how to use lab equipment, but going out and measuring the albedo and temperature of various surfaces in the district of columbia to generate graphs of temperatures based on surface type and time of day and things like that. and that was a very interesting exercise, but one of the things that it noted for me is that there’s not just a little bit of heat coming off of one place.

there is an enormous amount of heat coming off of the built environment. and where that heat is concentrated, it’s very well understood that it’s concentrated in cities, because cities have more asphalt, they have less permeable surfaces that absorb water into the ground and cool it down, they have darker surfaces.

what’s less well understood is where in cities that happens. because you would think that a city is just one big hot zone, and it’s really not. even within a city, you have places that are more built up and less built up, and built with more environmental sustainability measures in place and fewer environmental sustainability measures in place.

and those patterns are not just even random in cities, and they aren’t just, you know, hot downtowns and cooler outer lying areas. they do follow patterns of social demographics and economic demographics that are fairly troubling when you consider what sort of impacts the heat and environment can have on human health and well being.

mz: absolutely. and can you explain just briefly how, in dc, specifically, these zones are called, and how it, you know, varies depending where you live.

db: sure. so a lot of people would think based on what i just said, that, you know, of course, what i’m alluding to is often race and income, that people who are poor are going to be in hotter environments, because those are environments that are less desirable to live in, and that people who are black or hispanic are going to be more likely to live in these environments.

and that is sort of true. and what’s actually interesting is that if you look at dc, what’s true is that where environments are the hottest, where heat builds up the most, is not exactly where poor or black and hispanic people lived today. it is where poor and black and hispanic people lived 50 or 60 years ago in the district of columbia. and in that time, the demographics of dc, and where in dc various demographics of people live, have shifted a fair degree. dc has gotten more white and more hispanic and less african american.

and where those populations live, since the end of de jure segregation, has shifted significantly in the district of columbia. for example, in central dc, around the northern part of dc, that area used to be very, very heavily african american. now it’s a very mixed neighborhood. it doesn’t have a definable demographic majority along the lines of race, but it still has the same infrastructure.

and so i guess one of the sort of dark ironies that i like to point out is that, in this case, gentrification actually reduced the amount of racial disparity in exposure to the heat island effect, because you had more upper income and white residents moving into housing and moving into neighborhood environments that are still left with very poor infrastructure that’s often a holdover from periods of segregation.

mz: i wanted to touch on, really quickly, the health effects of this heat that we find in certain places of dc. so you mentioned that, in the article, that extreme heat has long term health consequences, particularly for pregnant women and children. can you talk about what these health impacts look like, especially in the hottest neighborhoods in dc?

db: sure. so obviously, when we’re talking about extreme heat, you can talk about extreme, acute extreme heat events, and those are the sorts of things that happen during heat waves, and those are the, you can suffer from heat exhaustion and heat stroke. and while i’m not a medical professional, obviously, if you’re in temperatures of 95, you know, 100 degrees or more, if you’re elderly, or you’re a child, or you’re in a condition where your body is already being strained by pregnancy, it’s possible that your body just overheats and cooks from the inside out, and that can be fatal.

you know, you see, in some environments, you can see thousands of deaths, concentrated among the elderly. when you see drastic heat waves where it’s getting above 105, 106 degrees in some parts of the world, those events are, unfortunately, for a myriad of reasons, going to become more common, and more common especially in densely populated urban areas like the district of columbia.

so really, when we’re talking about these health risks, we’re also, in addition to these acute injuries, talking about more long term effects. so even if you don’t die from being exposed to extreme heat, being sustainably exposed to somewhat hotter temperatures, you know, it’s consistently above 80 degrees or above 90 degrees.

and again, we’re talking about situations where the ambient temperature in a less built up part of dc, maybe to the west of rock creek park, might be 75 degrees, and in the more built up parts, it’s 91 degrees. just imagine what that difference feels like. go outside on a 75 degree day, and then go out on a 91 degree day, and you will immediately feel how impactful that difference is, and the health effects it can have are that it makes you more likely to develop cardiopulmonary issues, more likely to develop heart disease. it also has a number of indirect effects.

for example, you are less likely to go and exercise outside, you’re more likely to be sedentary, you’re more likely to suffer increased exposure to air emissions because you’re more likely to be running air conditioners and other devices that produce localized emissions. you’re more likely to drive to places rather than to walk to places, which means that you’re more likely to be exposed to air pollutants on the road. all of these decisions, in addition to just the impact the heat itself has on stressing out your body and causing you distress in that moment, it also affects every other sort of way that you engage in life, and those are going to have knock on effects on what your eventual health outcomes are.

and so it’s not surprising that we see these issues exacerbated in a lot of places where it’s hotter, where people are less able to access services and less able to access facilities that would naturally lower the temperature, and those are things like green roofing and green spaces and parks, because green material reflects and does not absorb quite a bit more light than blackened sort of asphalt and paving material would.

so really, that’s why i focus on a number of the strategies that dc has implemented, and hopefully could implement in the future, or could fine tune to address this issue in the places where it’s most impactful. because if you think about, you know, lowering the temperature one degree in an area where it’s not so hot already is not nearly as impactful as going to be lowering it a degree in a place where the problem is already severe.

mz: exactly where we’re going to touch next. one of the big ones is the permeable surface rebate program. can you explain how this one works and why you think expanding it is key to addressing the heat islands?

db: so as a little bit of a background, a permeable surface just means a surface that when you pour water on it, the water can absorb and trickle through. so think like a towel is permeable because water seeps into it. whereas, you know, a piece of wood is not very permeable, it’s a little bit permeable, but it’s not very. dirt is fairly permeable, concrete is not very permeable.

now, what dc has done is created a program called the permeable surface rebate program, or psrp, which what it does, essentially, is, if you own a home, you own a piece of property, you can go to the dc government and say, “look, my property is covered in non permeable surfaces, but i would like to repave it. that, however, costs a lot of money, and it’s eaten out of my own pocket.”

and maybe they’re doing it for aesthetic reasons, maybe they’re doing it because they’re personally environmentally conscious, but whatever it is, it still costs a lot of money. and so they go to dc and they say, “i would like a rebate. i’d like you to give me some money back on what i’m spending on this project.” and right now, dc’s program grants up to $4,000 per property for replacements of impermeable surfaces, at a rate of five to ten dollars of rebate per square foot, depending on what you’re replacing it with.

they offer a greater reward, for sort of more environmentally friendly surfaces, five dollars for a little bit less. so you have a set of options, but the $10 ones are, of course, a little bit more expensive on the market. the problems are twofold. one, you have to own your property to make this decision, because it only kicks in if you own a piece of property and decide to renovate it. you know, if you’re a landlord or a personal property owner, you’re the one making that decision, whereas, if you’re a tenant, of course, tenants typically don’t have the authority to renovate, you know, street and paving services and building services around them, and so they are the ones physically stuck in this environment, often with very little choice to ameliorate that.

so i propose a two fold reform for this. first, that that $4,000 cap should be removed. you know, you still won’t have the entire amount covered because naturally, these rebate projects can cost more than five to $10 per square foot, often around maybe 30 or $40, but still, it means that you get a discount on the entire cost of the project, not on only the chunk of it. as far as $4,000 of discount goes.

the second fold effect that i would propose reforming is that if you have a group of tenants in a building, that those tenants should be allowed to compel landlords, through some fashion, to renovate their properties in this way. essentially, on the premise that the landlords in most of these situations are not the ones living in those spaces, and the tenants are left in a position where they have very little say over whether those renovations go on.

and of course, if they’re of financial means, they can move out and maybe select their housing if they prefer that sort of feature and they’re willing to pay for that. but very often, you see people in these situations who are in poverty, or they’re in rent controlled units, or they just don’t have the financial means or the circumstances to move right now.

and so they’re suffering worse health outcomes as a result of, like i said, legacies of discriminatory housing and residential segregation practices that you know, even while populations have shifted, still disproportionately affect african american and hispanic residents today, particularly in areas like anacostia and the northern central part of the city.

mz: thank you so much. i think we’ve covered pretty well the solutions part as well of your article, and that’s all the time that i think we have.