Tampa ‘heat playbook’ outlines plans to revamp east city neighborhoods
Every day in East Tampa, people walk, bike and wait for buses along busy N 22nd Street. Some carry groceries or head home from jobs on foot because they don’t own a car.
There’s hardly a tree to shade them.
Tampa is dotted with places like this, corridors with little relief from the broiling Florida sun. Many are located in or around the city’s poorest neighborhoods, according to Tampa’s new Heat Resilience Playbook. With the playbook’s release, Tampa now has a plan for relief.
The playbook aims to promote several strategies to fight extreme heat in East Tampa and beyond, such as planting trees and building shade structures like pavilions to provide an escape. To demonstrate, the city hosted an event Friday inviting people to walk up and down N 22nd Street and visit booths with water misters, bottle refill stations and potted trees, where city staffers talked about how to stay safe during the summer heat.
Resident Regina Polite regularly walks down N 22nd Street to a community garden she runs, and for several blocks, there are no trees in sight, she said. There is some shade near the garden, and she tries to get her neighborhood to pick up fresh produce and take cooking classes she organizes there, but attendance drops during the summer, she said.
“It’s too hot,” Polite said. “They don’t want to come out. We’ve got to get the space correct for them to hang out. And they’ll come, but that needs to happen.”
She hopes the city’s new focus on her community’s struggles with the heat will lead to direct implementation of some of the strategies in the playbook, like more tree planting.
The Heat Vulnerability Index, a tool developed for the playbook by the University of South Florida, indicates which areas are most in need. It looks at factors relating the amount of heat exposure in a given area with access to places to cool down. Several sections of East Tampa scored as “most vulnerable” on the index, said Whit Remer, Tampa’s sustainability officer.
The Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council projects 242 yearly heat-related deaths in Tampa through 2030, and that number will likely continue to rise as the decade progresses, Remer said. Tampa’s hottest July on record was just last year. The average high was 2.7 degrees above normal at 93, and the average low was nearly 80, limiting Tampa’s ability to cool off at night. The city’s heat management studies aim to look at East Tampa first to provide support for its predominantly Black neighborhoods that lack many forms of infrastructure, according to the playbook.
“These are preventable deaths,” Remer said.
According to the playbook, courses of action the city could take for those heat vulnerable areas include installing covered bus stops and water fountains. It won’t just be the sustainability department working on mitigating extreme heat, Remer said. If other city projects, like pipe-laying, can incorporate tree planting into their plans, then they will, he said.
Taryn Sabia, a USF assistant dean of architecture research, helped write the playbook. She said the city can also look at building air conditioned spaces like community centers within walking distance of at-risk neighborhoods.
“Those are really key features,” Sabia said. “That way we can get them a cool corridor from their neighborhood to the library, or the shopping center they go to frequently. That’s what we want to make sure we’re addressing — these everyday needs.”
