{"id":409927,"date":"2026-07-23T21:27:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T21:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/409927\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T21:27:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T21:27:10","slug":"san-francisco-is-feeling-the-heat-but-infrastructure-isnt-prepared","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/409927\/","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco Is Feeling the Heat, But Infrastructure Isn\u2019t Prepared"},"content":{"rendered":"

A public hearing on the city\u2019s extreme heat preparedness comes as San Francisco recorded its hottest July day on record in more than a decade this month. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

People relaxing in the grass at Dolores Park in San Francisco.\u00a0(Lonely Planet\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

As average temperatures around the globe rise, extreme heat events are growing more common, even in temperate coastal regions like San Francisco<\/a>. But the city is lagging behind on infrastructure upgrades needed to keep up with dangerous heat waves, especially for the many residents who live in buildings without air conditioning.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s according to health experts and city officials tasked with preparing the city for extreme heat events, a sustained period of abnormally hot weather, who spoke at a public hearing on Thursday. The discussion comes as San Francisco recorded its hottest July day on record in more than a decade this month.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is going to get worse, and while we plan for climate change, we are living it,\u201d said Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the Department of Emergency Management. \u201cWe are in the crisis. We are in the eye of the storm. We are going to continue to have these events and it is important that we prepare.\u201d<\/p>\n

San Francisco has seen rising temperatures in recent decades and an increase in extreme heat waves, according to Carroll. In March, the city hit a record-breaking 90 degrees Fahrenheit \u2014 the highest temperature recorded that month in the past 152 years.<\/p>\n

\"\"A person sunbathes at Ocean Beach in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.<\/p>\n

During a heat wave over Labor Day in 2017, 14 people died in the Bay Area, including six in San Francisco alone. Hundreds more people went to the hospital.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the city is \u201cplainly under-investing in our infrastructure needs in a host of ways,\u201d said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who called for the hearing. \u201cAs a city, we\u2019re blowing it on building for our future and investing in the physical structures of our future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heat is the leading cause of death from extreme weather events in the U.S. and can often trigger health issues associated with chronic heart or lung diseases. The issue is particularly dangerous in dense neighborhoods like South of Market, the Mission and the Bayview, where it can be 15 to 20 degrees hotter due to urban heat island effects, which amplify temperatures due to things like asphalt absorbing heat or a lack of vegetation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Extreme heat can also trigger an increase in 911 calls for a variety of issues stemming from ways people try to get cool, like swimming at the beach, and safety threats that ramp up during heat waves, such as domestic violence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen more people are going to the beach, we see increased drownings. We have issues with children falling out of windows when windows get left open,\u201d Carroll told KQED. \u201cSo we really try to get ahead of things and make sure our public is aware when we see heat coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Low-income residents, particularly renters in buildings without air conditioning, as well as seniors and people with disabilities, face some of the greatest challenges to responding to extreme heat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFor many of the seniors we serve, preparing for extreme heat is not as simple as staying cool or going to a cooling center. Many live alone, have mobility limitations and depend on caregivers,\u201d said Winnie Yu, chief programs officer at Self Help for the Elderly. \u201cMany experience homelessness or live in single-room occupancy hotels without air conditioning, elevators or private kitchens and refrigerators. As renters, many cannot install air conditioning or make home modifications even if they wanted to.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city has 86 locations city-wide for people to gather at during extreme heat, but 25 still lack air conditioning. The city also lacks money to scale the model to the nearly 100 other locations that have applied for funding to upgrade their cooling capacity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The city is not looking to build out new pop-up cooling centers, however, after past attempts found that few people turned to those spaces, according to Carroll. More people will turn to existing public spaces that they know, like community centers and libraries, and she said the city is focused on increasing access to cooling infrastructure in those places.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The city has also worked to increase its climate resilience, such as an effort to plant 3,500 street trees to increase the shade canopy and improve air quality, but Mandelman said tree planting alone isn\u2019t enough.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"People enjoying the sun at the Palace of Fine Arts as a heat wave rolls through San Francisco on July 11, 2024. <\/p>\n

San Francisco is also working to implement the Heat and Air Quality Resilience Project, a cross-departmental initiative to address medium- to long-term extreme heat and wildfire smoke resilience strategies as well as short-term emergency response. The 2023 plan for the project<\/a> includes strategies to adapt both buildings and the natural environment for a changing climate, and to identify funding resources for upgrades.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unlike some other major cities in areas with historically warm weather, San Francisco was largely built with its foggy, temperate climate in mind, and many older buildings do not have air conditioning or other modern adaptations for warmer weather.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brian Strong, who oversees the city\u2019s capital improvement projects, said efforts to modernize the city\u2019s built environment have been thwarted by funding cuts from the federal government.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to have to take care of ourselves and can\u2019t rely on the federal government,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s not enough resources there to really address the problems.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He said the city has shifted its thinking about infrastructure redevelopment over the last decade, as climate change has presented issues for residents far beyond just heat, including flooding, sea-level rise and the ballooning housing crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are building capacity and thinking about these things in combination. A lot of the heat resilience work at libraries is related to seismic work, unlike 10 years ago,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen we put together the [last] 10-year capital plan, that was taken with events happening at the time and heat was not considered, the housing crisis was not considered \u2026 Now, we\u2019re going to need to think more long-term.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A public hearing on the city\u2019s extreme heat preparedness comes as San Francisco recorded its hottest July day…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-409927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}