Racist housing policies have created some oppressively hot neighborhoods
Decades of redlining and other discriminatory practices reshaped urban landscapes in Minneapolis and elsewhere, leaving some areas 10 degrees hotter than others.
The blacktop burned Melodee Strong’s feet through her sneakers as she stood at the corner of Plymouth and Penn Avenues in North Minneapolis, gazing at the 250-foot-long “Black Lives Matter” street painting she and other artists were working on.
It was mid-July and brutally hot. By late morning, temperatures had soared to over 100 degrees. The paint dried so fast that Strong could watch as it crinkled into place, wishing she had worn thicker-soled shoes. “Unless we had astronaut shoes, or fireman’s boots, I don’t think anything would have worked,” she said.
Two months earlier, just a few miles south, George Floyd had been killed by a Minneapolis police officer. In response, Strong and the artists decided to paint the mural, and
