This story was originally published by Verite News
Yana Sutton grew up between Hollygrove and Gert Town, and now, she spends nearly every day there to take care of her grandmother. But it was only in the past few years that Sutton realized how much the extreme heat in the neighborhood was taking a toll on her grandmother’s health.
“The heat is heaviest in the bedroom,” which is in the back of the Gert Town house, Sutton said. The neighborhood has far more concrete and buildings than trees than other parts of the city. The imbalanced landscape amplifies the amount of heat and humidity that passes into her grandmother’s house from a back room. The house’s central air conditioning couldn’t keep up.
Her grandmother thought she was resting, but her doctors said the high temperatures actually raised her blood pressure and exacerbated her pre-diabetes. Her grandmother also slept far longer than she intended.
“She says she’d wake up soaking wet,” Sutton said. “(The doctor) said when you get up in age, if your blood pressure is fluctuating and you’re in this tremendous amount of heat, your brain and everything is not signaling you to wake up.”
Sutton has since blocked the room to the limit the outside air seeping into the rest of the house, helping to keep her grandmother’s bedroom cool.
“ We see the difference because her blood pressure now is stable,” Sutton said.
As summer days and nights grow warmer, it’s harder for New Orleans residents like Sutton to keep their home cool with the cost of energy. That’s especially true when they live in the city’s concrete-laden hotspots like Gert Town, Hollygrove and areas in the Upper Ninth Ward.
“ Hollygrove is like a dome in a sense, where it’s trapping the heat,” she said.
A study published in the Journal of Urban Health in June found that even when New Orleans residents had air conditioning units, they struggled to keep the temperature in their homes under 80 degrees overnight.
Researchers from RAND and Johns Hopkins University collaborated with the team at iSeeChange, a crowd-sourced platform for reporting climate and weather observations, to track the temperature inside the bedrooms of 114 New Orleans residents during the summers of 2023 and 2024. The residents were recruited from five neighborhoods: Hollygrove, Dixon, Desire, Florida and Bunny Friend.
Past research had indicated that the neighborhoods suffered from worse heat than other parts of the city, amplified by the urban heat island effect. Sutton said it affects everything from seniors’ health to the integrity of their houses.
Hollygrove resident Deanna Simon helped map heat across the city on a single July day in 2025 during a study by the Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association. The temperature snapshot showed heat disparities across the city based on tree canopy, the concentration of impervious surfaces and proximity to the lake. It also recorded the hottest temperatures between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m.
“The heat kind of lingers for a long time. It has to be middle morning before you start feeling really cool,” Simon said, until the area reabsorbs the heat.
Several peer-reviewed studies have linked higher temperatures to worse sleep, which can place more stress on the body. Warm nights can be especially dangerous for people with chronic conditions, people over 65, low-income communities, communities of color and women. The heat can increase the risk of various heart problems, such as strokes or heart disease, and even lead to death.
By the end of the century, some researchers estimate that the risk of death from excessively hot nights will be six times more likely as a result of global warming, predominantly caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
New Orleans’ “unique heat risk”
RAND’s Lena Easton-Calabria, a co-author of the new study, said they chose to focus on New Orleans because it’s seeing some of the “most severe heat trends,” and high poverty rate.
“These are things that … come together and create a very unique heat risk and make the population very vulnerable,” Easton-Calabria said.
An analysis by the policy-neutral nonprofit Climate Central found that the average temperature in New Orleans, during the day and at night, has warmed by more than 4 degrees from June through August since 1970. The nonprofit also estimated that New Orleans residents lost an average of 61 hours of sleep per year from 2020 to 2025, in part due to climate change.
Not surprisingly, the June indoor heat study found that the hotter it is outside, the hotter temperatures can be indoors. But in a state like Louisiana, which has some of the highest energy costs in the country, the use of air conditioning varied in response to the temperatures and affected how cool the study’s participants could keep their homes.
Public health recommendations for sleeping temperatures can vary. One study in Boston found their participants slept best between 68 degrees and 77 degrees. Most cities that have passed cooling standards so far have required landlords to ensure their properties can remain under about 80 degrees, including New Orleans’ Healthy Homes Ordinance.
But even cooling the bedroom to 80 degrees can be challenging, according to the recent study. Unless participants had central air conditioning and reported that they ran the system most or all of the time, temperatures in the bedroom were expected to exceed 80 degrees if it was hotter than 90 degrees during the day. During the study, at least one bedroom heated up to 101 degrees overnight, while others maxed out at 65 degrees.
Most of the study’s participants were Black and made less than $50,000 a year, including the homeowners. Study co-author Jaime Madrigano, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins, said while most cooling standards attempt to protect renters, their findings suggest low-income homeowners also need help with staying cool.
Homeowners made up most of the study and more than half made less than the city’s median household income. At least in the recent study, the homeowners were more likely to report using their air conditioner only half of the time or rarely.
Air conditioning or medication?
In Hollygrove, Dorethea Parker saw herself in the study’s findings. She’s owned her house for about 35 years. Parker said she blasts her window air conditioning unit in the bedroom, turning it to 72 degrees. Even still, cooling her bedroom at night is often a losing battle against the city’s steamy summer heat.
“It’s extremely hot in my house,” she said. “I definitely wake up some nights because of the heat.”
She typically keeps the rest of her window units off to save on her energy bill. Part of Parker’s problem is that her walls aren’t well-insulated. Plus, she believes the cool air escapes beneath the floorboards of her elevated home.
Caroline Reed, another study co-author who worked with iSeeChange at the time, said while several studies, including this one, have shown that air conditioning is a life-saving tool during extreme heat, their study suggests that air conditioning alone won’t solve the problem.
Reed focused on outreach to residents and placing the temperature sensors in their homes. She said she often heard residents, especially those with ongoing health problems, talk about how difficult and expensive it was to cool their homes. People who ran their air conditioning all the time, to keep up with the heat, typically reported spending at least $200 more on their energy bills than those who saved on energy but had hotter houses.
Reed said some residents who limited their energy use or had window units that may have been less efficient at cooling couldn’t find relief from the heat outside when they came inside. Dealing with the persistent heat would add stress to their bodies and their finances.
“I think that, unfortunately, air conditioning, while it’s incredibly essential, still will always not be able to compete with other essentials in terms of your water bill, your food, or your medications,” Reed said.
The choice between running the air conditioning and affording medications can be deadly, Reed said.
“We know that exposure to extreme heat over short or long amounts of time is just really dangerous for folks,” she said. “When people are hospitalized, or in the worst case scenario, … even die from extreme heat, a lot of times they’re found in their homes.”
Investing in cooling
The researchers and iSeeChange team said they hope studies like this can help inform heat policies at all levels of government.
In New Orleans, Easton-Calabria and Madrigano said setting a cooling standard for renters establishes the concept of cooling — or maintaining a healthy temperature — as a right.
“It’s a good first step,” Madrigano said. But questions remain about how to implement and enforce the standard, and more would need to be done to ensure affordability doesn’t present a barrier.
“I think it is evident, from our research and others, that the cost of running AC needs to be accounted for when policymakers are trying to protect their constituents during extreme weather,” Madrigano said. “Access, alone, should not be the only consideration, and energy assistance programs are going to be crucial to saving lives.”
Currently, programs to help reduce the cost of energy bills, either as financial assistance or through energy efficiency, are limited.
The federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program is the primary source for public assistance with energy bills, but can only serve a limited number of residents. From April to September 2024, about 80,000 Louisianians received $200 to $800 to offset cooling costs. The Trump administration and U.S. House of Representatives have proposed cutting the program entirely next year, though a similar proposal in 2025 wasn’t enacted by Congress as the program has bipartisan support.
Housing advocacy groups in New Orleans have pushed for more funding toward programs to upgrade houses to seal them against the weather, also known as weatherizing.
This can include sealing the cracks in a building with foam to prevent from air leaking inside. Material known as weather-stripping can similarly be used for gaps around windows and doors to block drafts. Contractors can also install more insulation or repair holes in a house’s heating and cooling system.
But homeowners only have access to two programs: the federal Weatherization Assistance Program and Entergy New Orleans’ EnergySmart program.
Parker, who lives in Hollygrove, said the EnergySmart program had its limits. While her free home assessment was helpful, the company only installs insulation in the attic, not the walls or the floors.
Beau Tidwell, a spokesperson for Entergy New Orleans, said the company recommends for residents with needs beyond the scope of EntergySmart to apply for Weatherization Assistance Program. The federal program will install wall insulation, he said, and Quad Area Weatherization can help with applications. Though, the federal program often has a long waitlist and limited funding.
The latest proposal for addressing housing needs in New Orleans — created through a process called HousingNOLA — called for the city to invest about $3 million to weatherize and equip homes with solar panels and batteries to reduce residents’ energy burden, on top of improving the housing stock.
Reed said she believes dedicating more government resources to limiting extreme heat will be the main area for growth, as well as preventative care from healthcare providers.
“ Extreme heat is still a relatively emerging area,” Reed said. “People are trying to better understand the ways that it presents risks to our communities and what solutions are actually offerable, and then within those solutions, what’s actually affordable.”
Volunteers with the Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association plan to advocate for more tree plantings and other ways to reduce the heat island effect, possibly making it easier for cooling systems to keep up.
This study was the first in a series of publications looking at the effects of extreme heat in New Orleans. iSeeChange has also launched a new campaign inviting residents to share their experiences with heat.
Sutton said the neighborhood association also plans to present a proposal to the New Orleans City Council early next year using the research and community input to request more resources to address heat.