"If we show you a map of tree canopy in virtually any city in America, we're also showing you a map of income," says Jad Daley, president and CEO of the nonprofit American Forests. "And in many cases we're showing you a map of race and ethnicity."
That lack of tree cover can make a neighborhood hotter, and a joint investigation by NPR and the University of Maryland's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found just that: Low-income areas in dozens of major U.S. cities are more likely to be hotter than their wealthier counterparts, and those areas are disproportionately communities of color.