As a third-year medical student at the Miller School of Medicine, I had the opportunity to participate in our school’s Street Medicine rotation this past March. It is a month-long rotation aimed at providing multidisciplinary care and support to our unhoused and/or uninsured population through a variety of different medical and social service initiatives.
During my time there, I made a comment about the gloomy weather and how we hadn’t seen the sun for a couple of days. One of the patients responded, “This is actually great. I don’t know how we are supposed to survive the summer.”
What started as small talk suddenly became a lingering question I have had ever since: How is our unhoused population supposed to survive the summer months in Miami?
A quick Google search left me with more questions.
Throughout Miami-Dade County, there are 87 total cooling centers. At first, that may seem like a sufficient number; however, I noticed that as I searched southward and westward, fewer cooling centers appeared.
Entire neighborhoods are deprived of an area designated for safety from the harsh heat we experience in our city every summer. I was shocked to see that not a single cooling center was available in Florida City. The nearest cooling center is over 40 blocks away from the northernmost part of the city, a distance far too great for someone without reliable transportation to travel by foot in extreme heat.
When I opened up the interactive map, a pop-up appeared saying that some libraries will be closed during the summer for renovations, but no information was provided about which specific locations would be affected.
How are those who require these cooling centers for safety reasons supposed to know where to go?
In a city where the heat can threaten the health of individuals, access to cooling areas should not be a commodity, it is a necessity. Miami needs more designated cooling centers to protect vulnerable residents from the dangerous effects of extreme heat.
Cooling centers include parks and libraries, meaning that creating more cooling centers often simply requires designating spaces that already exist. Expanding cooling centers allows for the individuals who are dealing with extreme heat to have access to safe, air-conditioned environments and water. Perhaps the best part of this proposition is how inexpensive it would be for our county.
The extreme heat in Miami is not a seasonal inconvenience, it’s a true public health emergency. Our unhoused population needs more designated cooling centers to be able to survive the extreme heat and its harmful effects on the human body.