There's this pattern in how cities talk about heat response: they describe cooling centers and coordinated protocols like infrastructure is the answer, when the actual problem is that the people who need protection most don't trust centralized institutions enough to use them.

By 2035, cities will need to decide how to allocate heat response funding. We're about to invest millions in expanding professional systems that will fail in exactly the same ways they're failing now. Not because the infrastructure is inadequate, but because we're trying to solve a relationship problem with a building problem.

What the Data Actually Shows

Even when cooling centers exist, even when they're placed near vulnerable populations, they're often underutilized. The CDC reviewed cooling center implementation and concluded their effectiveness is "unclear"—they have "major limitations because of accessibility concerns, the lack of things to do for visitors and certain stigmas associated with the centers."

We keep building infrastructure that people don't use, then act surprised when heat deaths keep climbing. Maybe the issue isn't that we need more cooling centers. Maybe we're treating heat response like it's about providing a service, when it's actually about reaching people who are isolated and vulnerable.

Think about who doesn't go to cooling centers: people who don't trust institutions because institutions have failed them repeatedly. People who can't leave their homes because of mobility issues or pets. People who don't know cooling centers exist because they're not connected to official information channels. People who feel unwelcome in institutional spaces. Research shows many people see cooling centers as places "for poor or old people", and some cooling centers located in police stations actively discourage people from visiting.

These are often the most vulnerable people, the ones who need protection most. Centralized professional systems keep missing them.

What Community Networks Actually Provide

During the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, when temperatures hit 116°F in Portland, institutional systems completely failed. Emergency rooms were overwhelmed. Cooling centers ran out of capacity. In neighborhood after neighborhood, it was informal networks (people checking on elderly neighbors, community groups distributing water and fans, mutual aid networks coordinating wellness calls) that kept people alive.

This wasn't random. Research shows that interventions addressing social isolation during heat waves significantly reduced mortality, with a 56% lower death rate in areas where these interventions existed compared to areas without them.

Community networks reach people before crisis hits. They're built on ongoing relationships that make it possible to know who's vulnerable and check on them when temperatures spike. They don't require people to travel to unfamiliar locations or ask for help from strangers or trust institutions that have never been trustworthy.

During COVID-19, community organizations like Boston's Mutual Aid Eastie scaled up rapidly to deliver 5,000 meals weekly at peak. After Hurricane Ida, Imagine Water Works redirected more than $90,000 in donations within a week. These weren't professional emergency management organizations. They were community networks that already knew who needed help and how to reach them.

The Problem With Centralization

Investing heavily in centralized professional infrastructure assumes what vulnerable populations need is more institutional access, when what they actually need is trust and relationships.

Cities keep building cooling centers that require people to travel, often to unfamiliar locations, often during hours that don't match when heat is most dangerous. They assume that if they build the infrastructure, people will come. That's not how vulnerability works.

The people most at risk during heat emergencies are often socially isolated. They're not connected to information networks that would tell them about cooling centers, they're not comfortable asking for help from institutions, they don't have the mobility or resources to get to cooling centers even if they wanted to. Professional systems treat these as individual problems to solve, rather than recognizing that isolation itself is the problem.

Professionalization can create distance in ways that matter. When cooling centers require formal intake processes, when they're staffed by people who don't know the community, when they're located in buildings that feel institutional rather than welcoming, these design choices make sense from a professional management perspective but create barriers for people who are already wary of institutions.

What We Should Be Building Instead

By 2035, cities will face a choice about where to invest heat response resources. We're about to make the wrong choice, pouring money into expanding centralized infrastructure that replicates the same patterns that already fail vulnerable populations.

What if cities invested in supporting the community networks that already exist and already reach the people institutions miss? Not as a substitute for institutional support, but as a different model for how that support flows. Distributed rather than centralized, relationship-based rather than service-based.

Vancouver's Resilient Neighbourhoods Program documented how this works: community organizations extended hours during heat events, made wellness check calls, connected neighbors through buddy systems, and worked specifically to reach underserved seniors in residential buildings. This wasn't crisis-only response. It was relationship-based care that reduced social isolation, which itself is a major risk factor for heat mortality.

Supporting community-led heat response would mean funding community organizations to do the work they're already doing: making wellness calls, distributing cooling supplies, connecting neighbors. It would mean supporting the infrastructure that makes mutual aid possible (communication systems, transportation networks, resource hubs in neighborhoods rather than centralized cooling centers).

It would mean trusting that communities know who's vulnerable better than any centralized system can, because they're already in relationship with those people.

What We're Actually Risking

Can community networks sustain this work year after year without burning out? What about people who aren't connected to any community? These are legitimate concerns, and I don't have neat answers.

If cities invest billions in centralized professional infrastructure that looks impressive on paper and fails in practice (more cooling centers that people don't use, more early warning systems that don't reach isolated individuals, more coordinated protocols that don't account for why people don't trust institutions), we'll have infrastructure that protects people who are already connected, already mobile, already comfortable accessing institutional resources. We'll keep losing the people who aren't.

Maybe investing in relationships is more sustainable than building infrastructure that people won't use. Maybe the most vulnerable populations need ongoing connection, not crisis-only services. Maybe community networks aren't a stopgap until professional systems arrive. They're a fundamentally different model for reaching people that centralized institutions have never quite figured out how to reach.

When heat becomes routine rather than exceptional, what might matter most isn't whether cities have cooling centers. It's whether vulnerable people are connected to someone who will notice when they're in danger and has the capacity to help. You can't build that through professionalized systems. What happens to people who fall outside any community network? That tension doesn't resolve cleanly.