Two Cities, Four Neighborhoods, Same Heat 

In late June, you would expect a place like San Antonio, Texas, to be hot already. At least, hotter than the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions. But the last week of June in 2024 brought with it a dangerous change of pace: a heat wave made its way across the I-95 corridor, bringing triple-digit temperatures to New York City, Washington D.C., and other highly populated areas of the Northeast.  

As one of the hottest cities in the U.S., San Antonio is very familiar with severe heat—95° Fahrenheit is standard for this time of year. The Washington, D.C. area, on the other hand, typically sees June temperatures averaging 80-85° Fahrenheit. For D.C. to experience the same temperatures as San Antonio is a city-wide emergency—and that heat is not felt equally across the city.  

Two American Forests staff visited neighborhoods in both San Antonio and Washington D.C. on June 26 during a sweltering afternoon, using Tree Equity Score to locate areas with high and low scores. Tree Equity Score measures how equitably distributed the tree cover is across a city or region. A score of 100 means an area has enough trees. The lower the score, the greater the canopy need. Trees help cool city streets during extreme heat but are often distributed unevenly. Due to decades of redlining, restrictive zoning, and other inadequate or discriminatory policies, trees are often sparser in neighborhoods with more low-income residents and people of color. Advancing Tree Equity means reducing gaps in tree cover across the city to deliver the critical services that trees provide, starting with areas with the greatest need for investment—an approach made accessible to anyone through Tree Equity Score. 

While Tree Equity Score measures an area’s tree canopy, the total score also weighs climate, health and socioeconomic factors. These factors tell a more holistic story for every urban neighborhood in America and help identify areas where residents are likely to be disproportionality affected by extreme heat, pollution and other environmental hazards which could be reduced by the benefits of trees. Here’s what our staff found in each city: 

San Antonio

Tori Jowers, Digital Marketing Manager, grew up in San Antonio. She remembers a childhood of long summers and staving off the heat. Recently though, the hot summers are introducing more and more threats to the city’s 1.5 million residents: 

*Defined by the US Census American Community Survey as the percentage of people living below 200% of the federally designated poverty line. 

If every neighborhood’s Tree Equity Score was increased to 100 in San Antonio, the additional tree cover could bring ecosystem services for the city valued at $14.4 million annually, including carbon sequestration, air pollution removal, and stormwater absorption. And most importantly, it would mean that all individuals and families have adequate infrastructure to support safe commutes to work, outdoor exercise, and safe enjoyment of all that San Antonio’s outdoor spaces have to offer, regardless of their postal address. 

Washington, D.C. Metro Area 

Neveen Shawish, Social Media Manager, grew up in Northern Virginia. Locals refer to D.C. as a “swamp” when they think about the metro area’s humid summers. 

Nationally, areas with higher poverty rates and larger populations of people of color tend to have less tree cover. Even in one of the more diverse and multicultural cities in America, Alexandria, Virginia follows this national pattern. In neighborhoods with higher poverty rates or more residents of color, there is roughly 20% less tree coverage than more affluent or predominantly white areas of Alexandria. 

A lot of the neighborhoods in Alexandria have high Tree Equity Scores but in between these beautiful tree-lined streets, there are pockets of smaller neighborhoods with low scores and less tree cover. These neighborhoods also heat up hotter—reaching higher maximum surface temperatures in the summertime relative to the Alexandria area as a whole.    

When thinking about the difference between the two neighborhoods, Neveen couldn’t help but think about the people living in Seminary Towers: 

Building the case for Tree Equity

Tori and Neveen urge you to try their experiment. Tree Equity Score is more than a data point—it’s a measure that can be viscerally felt on a hot summer day anywhere. It reflects real variation in lived experience across communities, cities and states.  

Tree Equity Score captures the effects of disinvestment and racist policies such as redlining across decades and provides a powerful tool for anyone to make an urgent case to reinvest in communities like Seminary Towers and downtown San Antonio. It’s part of the broader Tree Equity movement that American Forests began and has been leading for years. We helped unlock the $1.5 billion in funding for urban and community forestry in the Inflation Reduction Act and secured $50 million of this public funding to deploy to the highest-need communities and cities. We also formed the Tree Equity Alliance with GreenLatinos, Groundwork USA and 1890 Universities Foundation  to catalyze our nationwide movement for Tree Equity.

Ultimately, we want city leaders and advocates to reimagine their cities as greener more equitable places to live – placing communities that have been left out of the conversation into the center.

Tree Equity Score is available and free-to-use across the U.S. with coverage for all urban areas. 260 million people have access to information for their own neighborhood that can help them build their case for Tree Equity. Go take a walk in your area—how do trees, or a lack thereof, make your neighborhood feel on a hot summer day? See what Tree Equity Score can show about your community and those surrounding yours, and where Tree Equity could make a difference today. 

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