In Yuma, farmworkers' struggle with heat is worsened by inadequate housing

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YUMA — The way Carmen Laurent remembers it, the young man stopped one night at the end of a row and bent over as the celery packaging machine turned back into the field. He put down his machete and started to cry, said he couldn't continue doing this work.

Stationed nearby, Laurent asked the 23-year-old co-worker if he was OK, if she could help. Twenty years his senior, she knew his mother and daughter and felt a certain maternal responsibility for him.

That's when he lost consciousness and started foaming at the mouth.

At first, Laurent said, it didn't seem like their supervisor was taking the situation seriously, as if he didn't believe there was a real issue or thought the young man was faking it, hoping to be assigned an easier task.

But when the supervisor started doing CPR, Laurent knelt to pray.

He lived, she said. But he suffered a series of heart attacks related to the incident, which she now understands to have been a case of heatstroke, possibly combined with exposure to pesticides and taking pain pills on an empty stomach.

He never returned to work.

"It was the scariest thing I've ever seen," she said.

Laurent, who has been a farmworker in Yuma County for seven years, told this story during an interview about how local housing shortages affect those who labor day and night, often in extreme heat, to help produce the leafy greens for which this region of Arizona, near its borders with California and Mexico, has become known.

It's one harrowing account of how landing a job as a seasonal farm laborer can end. But it's not unique.

In July, in the middle of a record-setting heat wave, a 26-year-old farmworker and father of two collapsed while working in the fields in Yuma and later died from heat-related causes. The temperature that day in Yuma hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit and was already in the 90s at 9 a.m. when he succumbed to the heat.

Part of the problem, experts told reporters, was that Arizona lacks laws and regulations requiring employers to protect outdoor workers with scheduled breaks and access to water and shade.

But some of the vulnerability among outdoor workers to worsening heat extremes occurs between shifts, in the pursuit of indoor spaces that can provide restful and proximal shelter from the elements. It's another way the housing crisis and the climate crisis are colliding in the state, a slow-motion disaster The Arizona Republic has spent a year documenting, not only in urban areas but in rural and agricultural communities.

Dire affordable housing shortages in the Yuma area, The Republic found, have forced many Mexican and Mexican American farm laborers to choose between staying nearby in overcrowded, overheated, overpriced lodging, or making the long trek back to more restful accommodations across the border. With a growing population but insufficient development, military families stationed near Yuma also suffer.

'You have to have your ducks in a row'

Using federal and regional data, official documents and on-site interviews, The Republic investigated how shortcomings in Yuma County's housing inventory, development and quality are affecting workers and families, and why the availability of suitable shelter has fallen so far behind demand in this hottest corner of the state.

The 2020 U.S. census revealed that residents of San Luis, the fastest-growing city in Yuma County, were living 4.4 occupants to a unit, the most crowded out of 40 Arizona cities reviewed by The Republic.

Situated on the border with Mexico, this community of Latino farmworkers who anchor Yuma County's $3.4 billion agricultural economy has a per capita income of $16,690 and a 25% poverty rate.

About 20 miles north, Yuma, with an average income nearly double that of San Luis and, at 95,000, three times its population, is less squeezed at 2.3 people per household. But it lacks units for lower-income farmworkers and military families. This whiter, older community caters more to retirees who flee the borderland's sweltering summers.

That snowbird demographic might help explain why, between the 2010 census and the one in 2020, the Yuma metro area added little to its housing stock beyond about 4,500 single-family, detached homes and 1,100 mobile homes, the two least heat-friendly types of shelter.

Over the same time period, the three fastest-growing cities in metro Phoenix added 78,000 housing units, including many new apartments.

Compared to housing a growing population in denser, multifamily apartment-style units, sustainability experts say sprawling neighborhoods accelerate climate change by using up to 15 times more energy and resources to build and power, while directly warming surroundings through the urban heat island effect. Mobile homes are inefficient and offer inadequate protection from summer temperatures.

Census records from 2020 in areas with large transient populations are known to be flawed, since many residents changed their movement patterns during the pandemic. But no better data on Yuma's housing stock exists.

First in the heat + housing series: As Arizona builds to solve a housing crisis, will its homes withstand future heat extremes?

Even without solid numbers, every person interviewed for this story agreed Yuma County has struggled with suitable, sustainable growth, none more so than James Schuessler, former executive director of the Yuma Multiversity Campus Coalition.

In 2019, recognizing the Yuma area's housing issues, a collection of state and regional planning organizations recruited Schuessler as an economic development expert. With his help, the Greater Yuma Economic Development Corporation received a grant from the U.S. Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration to create an action plan for revitalizing Yuma's economy. They expected to complete it in nine months.

Years later, Schuessler, who has since moved on to work in San Diego, expressed disappointment in the corporation's follow-through.

"I can tell you, Yuma desires to have Maricopa success and Pima success, but it hasn’t gone about getting it," Schuessler told The Republic. "It says, 'We want these things.' But you have to go and get those things. You have to have your ducks in a row. You need to know what is the existing (housing) stock, what are the vacancy rates, what’s the turn rate. That data does not exist."

With development missing in action, Yuma planners become 'a victim of their own devices'

In 2020, the Yuma Association of Realtors decided to sponsor its own "Multi-family Housing Market Analysis," authored by data specialist Amber Shek, who is now chief innovation officer for the Greater Yuma Economic Development Corporation. The group developed a survey, which Shek told The Republic "didn't get a whole lot of information back."

"2020 was a very difficult time to try to get information from anyone," she said.

Motivated by concerns about adequate local lodging for military families, this one-time report received funding from the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma and Yuma 50, a veteran services agency.

"Then we realized the housing shortages were affecting a lot of other industries as well," Shek said. Gathering data on the agricultural workforce is complicated, she added. But farmworkers likely compete with military families for affordable housing in Yuma County.

More than 14,000 people have been recruited to work at Yuma's Marine Corps Air Station, the Army's Yuma Proving Ground, Yuma Regional Medical Center and the Yuma Union School District, Shek noted in the report, and another 1,000 Marines and their families are expected over the next five years. Some of these workers spend time outside in the summer heat. All of them need affordable, quality housing.

"The types of residences suitable for military housing are not widely available in Yuma County within the distance ratios allowed. This contributes to family separation, the disruption of family life and relationships, a decline in morale, and, ultimately, health impacts," Shek wrote. The report concluded that to better serve current and incoming residents, "we must provide more multi-family housing opportunities."

The Republic reached out to a dozen social media groups for military families stationed in this area to request comments, personal stories or details, but no one responded.

Schuessler, the economic development expert, called the Realtors' report another example of the Yuma area's confused messaging and lack of serious commitment to solving its housing problem.

"They definitely did it economically," he said. "They didn’t invest a lot of money and the data is very weak. I’m quoted in that document saying that when you have 5% vacancy rates you need to start building." The contradiction, he said, is Shek then cites a relatively high renter vacancy rate in Yuma of 7.3%.

"So the document says Yuma doesn’t need to build."

This measure of housing availability is likely inflated by the transience of snowbirds and farmworkers, who both flock to fill housing during the busiest planting and harvest seasons. But it's confusing.

Yuma still hasn't collected high-quality data on housing needs, as far as Schuessler knows. And Yuma-area officials ignored or did not have answers to many of The Republic's questions about housing data or recent trends. But in 2022, the city's housing market assessment reported an 8% increase in overcrowding among renters compared with the previous three years.

Driving through the region in 2023, the dusty Yuma skyline is notably absent the constellation of construction cranes that have characterized Phoenix's skyline for the past decade.

Second in heat + housing series: More homes mean more heat. Can new building codes help save metro Phoenix from disaster?

Schuessler told The Republic he spoke with a developer about two years ago who had exciting ideas for a three- or four-story multifamily complex in downtown Yuma, where there is opportunity for urban infill. But the project fell through, he said, because "no one from economic development came and supported him any step along the way."

“Yuma is a sad story because of weak economic development efforts. They did not take the developers they had by the hand and say, ‘What can we do to help you get this over the finish line,’ and that includes lining up lenders," Schuessler said. "I think they’ve been a victim of their own devices."

'It feels suffocating. It feels that there's no way to relieve the heat'

The lack of local housing suited for Yuma's warm climate and outdoor workforce means many show up for grueling shifts without having recovered physically from the last one. The cumulative heat effects become a risk for these laborers and for the area's economic reliance on them.

"If you can’t significantly cool down, that’s a real problem," said Pope Moseley, an intensive care physician based in Phoenix and an expert on heatstroke and heat adaptation. “All other things being equal, I would expect that if somebody did not have adequate cooling overnight that they would be at higher risk for heatstroke the next day."

Moseley was the medical expert on the Korey Stringer case, the Minnesota Vikings athlete who collapsed from heat on the football field and died in 2001. The incident generated a lot of attention and research on how high temperatures can sneak up on even the most tough and conditioned people, with disastrous consequences.

"Since heatstroke elevates your core temperature and mental status changes, you likely don’t know if you can push through and you make mistakes," Moseley said. "That’s why the Grand Canyon kills people."

Extreme heat's true death toll is likely vastly undercounted, often because related factors like heart attacks are listed as the official cause of death. Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, estimated that heat causes between 600 and 2,000 deaths among outdoor workers in the U.S. each year as well as 170,000 preventable work-related injuries. But the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration still lacks federal guidelines to mitigate these casualties.

Heat also affects farmworker performance and the national economy. A 2020 report on consequences of extreme heat across the U.S. projects losses due to drops in labor productivity to hit half a trillion dollars annually by 2050, and to disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic workers. A scientific review of heat's effect on labor published in 2023 found that farmworkers, particularly women, suffer a range of health ailments, reduced income and difficulty managing home tasks with an increase in temperatures.

Experienced farmworkers like Carmen Laurent adopt elaborate strategies for surviving the heat. When she works the cauliflower planting season in August, she makes a special drink concoction called "suero," a mixture of water, lemon juice, sugar, some salt for electrolytes and "lots of ice" to help her recover when she returns home.

During shifts, she does whatever she can to maintain the pace while keeping her core temperature down.

"It feels suffocating," Laurent said. "It feels that there's no way to relieve the heat. You find anything to use as a fan."

Medically, there is little room for mistakes. Despite working every $13-per-hour shift she could get for the last seven years, including one hand-harvesting grapes in Coachella, California, that required a 2.5-hour bus commute each way, Laurent said she's never actually qualified for employer-provided health insurance. That's supposed to happen after 90 days with a company. But when planting and harvesting seasons are treated as separate appointments, workers are often rotated into new positions before they reach that point.

She also sells handbags and food in the community. She and her husband, Arturo Ramirez, a former farmworker who used to cross the border for shifts every day, worry about keeping the house they rent in San Luis cool enough that she can get some sleep. He now works as an air conditioner repairman and can keep their unit fine-tuned, but summer utility bills can still climb as high as $321 a month.

The perils of manufactured homes

For low-income earners as well as people with health concerns or limited support and comforts, the effects of constant heat are compounded.

"Heat is a multiplier of their disadvantage," said Moseley, the physician.

He puts the risk of suffering heat illness at six to eight times higher in manufactured housing. But that's what is available to many farmworkers. The Republic reviewed estimates from the last two years of community surveys by the U.S. Census Bureau that show between 23% and 30% of housing units in Yuma County are mobile homes.

True to Moseley's assessment, these have been the site of a disproportionate number of indoor heat deaths across the state, according to Arizona State University researcher Patricia Solis.

"If you scan the top of a mobile home park, all the rooms are blue cold because the cooling is going out the top," Moseley said. "So it can be disproportionately expensive, and what may happen is people may often be choosing between food or medicine or cooling."

Maria Rosa Vega Murillo bought a run-down trailer in Somerton, between San Luis and Yuma, in 2017 or 2018 and has been slowly fixing it up. Most of that work has to happen between lettuce seasons, when she catches the bus from San Luis at 5:15 a.m. to spend long days thinning and weeding.

Inside, her windows are covered with reflective insulation to block the sunlight and keep heat down. Her cat, Onion, still prefers to nap in the shade outside. While talking with José Flores, a Yuma-based organizer with the United Farm Workers Foundation who also served as interpreter, Murillo gets up to turn on another fan, worried about her guests' comfort. The window air conditioning unit doesn't always cut it, and the one in the ceiling is broken.

She has been a farmworker in Yuma County since 2015, when she started with summer shifts cutting and harvesting green onions. At the time, she lived in Mexico and commuted each day, but that quickly became exhausting. Eventually, she found more regular work and moved to Somerton.

Like Laurent, Murillo has developed strategies for surviving long, hot days of physical labor in the fields. She wears a wide-brimmed hat, long sleeves and heavy boots to protect herself from sharp tools and sun exposure. She drinks a vanilla Ensure in the morning and plenty of water and electrolytes throughout the day (but not too much, she warns). When she arrives home, she sheds her outer layer of clothing on her shaded porch to avoid tracking pesticides inside, then turns her air conditioner on. She adheres to farmworker wisdom that you should wait until your body cools down before taking a cold shower.

"It's like when you put a heating iron into cold water, there's a bad reaction," Murillo said.

Both Murillo and Laurent expressed pride in their work and gratitude for the opportunities, their community of co-workers and the good fortune that's helped them avoid major medical concerns so far.

Many others aren't so lucky.

"Latinos make up 17% of the workforce, but they make up 75% of all crop workers," said Flores, the community organizer. "20% of heat-related deaths are farmworkers, but are often miscategorized as heart attacks."

Gaps in a government guarantee for a good night's rest

In the case of the young man who suffered a heat-caused heart attack in the celery fields, Laurent feels his collapse was exacerbated by the fact that he lived in Mexico and woke hours before his shift each day to cross the border, arriving for hard labor exhausted and not recovered from the previous day.

As a holder of an H-2A visa for temporary agricultural workers, he was supposed to have free housing provided nearby by his employer, with transportation to and from the fields and food for sale on-site. But there are few checks and balances to ensure the quality of these offerings.

"What is in the law and what happens is sometimes different," said Flores, who added it's uncommon for these living conditions to be investigated. When they are, they can be found to lack adequate protection from some of the most extreme heat in the United States.

A 2017 probe by the U.S. Department of Labor found "simply inhumane" conditions in H-2A farmworker housing provided by G Farms near El Mirage in Maricopa County. The "makeshift labor camp," as the Labor inspector called it, consisted of beds stacked "end to end" in converted school buses and semitrailers, with poor ventilation and indoor temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

An attorney for G Farms said the conditions were "out of necessity," after plans to house workers in hotel rooms fell through. The company was cited and flagged for future inspection.

But this level of intervention is rare. Tony Reyes, a Yuma County supervisor for District 4, which includes San Luis, told The Republic the quality of local employer-provided housing for farmworkers on H-2A visas has been difficult to regulate or even inspect. He tried to organize some county oversight of "these scams," as he called many of them, but it went nowhere.

"Whatever housing is provided by farmers, they're protected under the agricultural class, you can't touch them," Reyes said.

Laurent said her co-worker felt the housing offered by his employer was inadequate for his basic needs. He couldn't get enough rest in the crowded, hot conditions, and the food — often hot dogs or cold cuts on bread and cheap soda, according to Flores — didn't agree with him. He also missed his family.

So he chose to trek back and forth across the border each day. That didn't stop his employer from deducting $100 for rent from his paycheck every other week.

After the incident, Laurent said the man was pressured into signing a document releasing the company from liability. She chose not to share his name out of respect for his privacy and to not reveal their shared employer.

"Now he can't ever come back," she said.

Reyes thinks the lack of H-2A housing quality control stunts affordable development in Yuma County. When poor conditions motivate farm laborers like Laurent's co-worker to commute across the border each day, the U.S. agricultural industry is allowed to rely on Mexican housing infrastructure instead of building its own.

"It's because farmworkers are traditionally not the most recognized sector of society," Reyes said. "We become the lettuce capital of the world, but we forget somebody still picks it up. We use the labor that comes from Mexico, and then send it back to Mexico. And when we do that with farmworkers, we're relieving the pressure on farmers with a ready and willing section of society, and we don't have to worry about 'where's the house?' or any of that."

Deep pockets, shallow waters and a unique confluence of obstacles

The Republic spent months reporting on Yuma County's uniquely troubled housing market and found the situation fraught with politics and environmental concerns. In addition to missing data, lackluster economic efforts and predatory labor practices, the problem resembles a turbid confluence of power struggles and conflicting visions for use of land and water among local, state, federal and international representatives as well as private interests.

As producers of 90% of winter vegetables in the U.S., Yuma County growers divert surface water for irrigation from the Colorado River and are among the largest users in Arizona. Although Yuma irrigation districts hold some of the river's most secure rights, tense negotiations over water across the West have seeped into control of Yuma's groundwater, as part of a federal insurance policy for meeting treaty obligations to pass a certain amount of fresh water on to Mexico. Since turning desert landscapes into housing requires new water use, development raises new concerns.

But, in Reyes' view, water limitations are not the biggest issue holding back local growth.

Almost all of the region's land is locked away under federal or state control and not open to private development without zoning changes, administrative hurdles and bidding wars mandated by the sale of state trust lands, he said.

Reyes serves as executive director of a nonprofit community development organization known as Comite De Bien Estar Inc., which is based in San Luis and trying to make headway on affordable multifamily housing there. Since its founding by farmworkers in 1979, Comite has helped open about 100 subsidized apartment units in Yuma County to low-income families. But the waiting period is at least six months, and rising land prices have slowed progress.

"Nonprofits like ours used to be able to navigate the field and eventually get land and pass it on to the people that needed that help," Reyes said. "It has now become a large developer game where if you want to buy state land, you better be ready with deep pockets."

Certain zoning regulations that require most new builds to sit on minimum lot sizes of 6,000 square feet with a garage also keep Yuma County stuck in an unrealistic and unsustainable sprawling development pattern, he said. Local leaders have designs on turning the Yuma area into an upscale community with space for a pool in each backyard, he believes, and are pushing this agenda at the expense of the region's economic realities.

"The cities get involved in that process, they try to regulate lifestyles and salaries, desperately trying to become middle class when they're full of people with low income," Reyes told The Republic. "It's been a tough juggling act over the years to balance out what cities want to see, which is middle class, and what their reality is, which is low-income people, a lot of farmworkers, and the price of homes getting higher and higher."

Yuma city and county planning officials did not respond with answers to requests for context or comments on this.

How to launch a rocket ship

Arizona, notorious for its "hellscape" temperatures and rising heat-associated death toll, could address both its housing and climate woes at once by focusing construction on more sustainable multifamily units, experts say. But cities seldom obligate or incentivize this. Instead, an earlier investigation in The Republic's reporting on heat and housing revealed that legislators, city organizations, utility companies and private interests work to block zoning and building code changes that would facilitate more equitable home construction in some parts of the state.

In Yuma County, Arizona's hot, dusty corner where farmworkers are the demographic most at risk of rising temperatures and vanishing affordable housing, some of the same dynamics are at play.

The Republic reviewed building codes in 40 Arizona cities and scored them on sustainability measures. Yuma and San Luis both ranked at the low end with scores of 2 out of 5, largely because each only requires developers to adhere to outdated 2009 energy conservation standards. In some cases across the state, efforts to hold back adoption of stricter codes have aimed to facilitate cheaper home construction.

Climate scores: How is your Arizona city using building codes to combat climate and housing crises? Check our map

That does not appear to be Yuma County's story. Schuessler, the economic adviser, sees the region's failure to launch the needed housing development as more of a lack of local coordinated vision or initiative. He thinks Yuma dropped the ball. But he sees promise in San Luis.

“The time for Yuma to see its development of multifamily housing has probably passed for the foreseeable future," Schuessler said. "I actually see more success taking place in San Luis because of the growth there. They’ve already helped satisfy some of the demand for multifamily in Yuma County."

He praised efforts by San Luis City Manager Jenny Torres. When The Republic reached out to Torres to learn more about what housing development has happened on her watch recently, her team responded with statistics not captured by the 2020 census.

In the last three years, San Luis Development Services Director Jose Guzman wrote, the city has completed 86 apartment units and 12 townhomes. It has eight apartment units under construction and 60 more under review, along with 46 townhomes planned. San Luis also has rezoned 150 acres for future multifamily projects, though Guzman did not respond to requests for details on that process.

State support for sustainable housing development in the Yuma area also appears to be on the upswing. In 2022, none of the 806 completed, state-subsidized units were located in Yuma County. But in late 2023, the state housing agency announced funding for two projects that will add 180 subsidized units to Yuma County.

Meeting the remaining and ever-increasing demand will likely depend on how seriously future Yuma-area planners embrace the domestic affordable housing problem as their own.

"The demand is going to continue, plus we’ve got billions of dollars being invested in the expansion of the border crossing in San Luis, which is underway now," Schuessler said. "That area is a rocket ship.”

Julia Arin Cooper contributed to this report.

This story is part of a series by The Arizona Republic on the intersection of the housing and climate crises that has been supported by a journalism fellowship from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative and a climate justice grant from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com. Read more of her coverage at environment.azcentral.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Yuma's heat and lack of affordable housing put farmworkers at risk