Some of the oldest neighborhoods in Corpus Christi are also the city’s hottest, new Deceleration research reveals—but a rising interest in community care could help shift that.
Gaige Davila
For years a park on Maple Street in Corpus Christi—in what we now know is one of the hottest parts of this coastal city—sat overgrown, unused, and neglected.
After the City of Corpus Christi said it was going to sell parks to address a budget shortfall, a grassroots organization called For The Greater Good adopted the park in 2019, transforming the mostly dead patches of grass into a community organizing space for District 2 residents and beyond.
Carroll Lane Park now has newly planted trees, shaded playground equipment, and an irrigation system to water the food garden and native plants on site. People pick berries from bushes and walk through a butterfly garden built in memory of Mimosa Thomas, a community organizer from Corpus Christi who died in 2020.
When the group began working on the park, neighbors were supportive: they offered plants, their bathrooms, and their labor. It was a project rooted in community building, in a city whose residents often feel their needs come second to those of the industries that call Corpus Christi home.
But those born and raised here, like Autumn Hensiek, an organizer with Texas Campaign for the Environment and District 2 resident, have noticed how the city’s heat has changed through their lifetime.
“We didn’t have AC in the car, we barely ran it in the house. I walked to the store to get my mom a pack of Diet Pepsi. It was manageable, you know?” Hensiek said. These days residents contend with what Hensiek called “a different, more insidious type of heat.”
Rising temps and humidity have been hitting Corpus hard. And while ultimately Carroll Lane Park was not on the list of parks the city planned to sell, the threat of losing any of the last heat-dissipating green spaces in the community made it emblematic of the deep need for better relations with the land. New research shows that residents around this park are being hit by more than their fair share of the heat.
An analysis by Deceleration released this month shows that District 2 has 11 of the 20 hottest Census tracts of Nueces County. District 1, where the northernmost neighborhoods and a slew of petrochemical plants are, had 5 of the hottest tracts. District 3, which borders District 2 to the west, had 4 of the hottest tracts.
This is thanks to the urban heat island effect, where roads, buildings and infrastructure absorb the sun’s heat and reflect it back. This effect is especially present in areas with no bodies of water, trees or plants to absorb that heat. In other words, as described by the Environmental Protection Agency, some urban areas can become “‘islands’ of higher temperatures” when compared to outer, less urbanized areas.
The phenomena can be even more pronounced in certain areas of a city over time. One study in San Antonio found temperature fluctuations can be up to 14 degrees higher in some of the city’s urban areas. Just as that heat is not felt equally across the city, it disproportionately affects Corpus Christi’s most disadvantaged populations.
The posh, historic neighborhoods of Corpus Christi’s Ocean Drive are included in District 2, but they are nowhere near as hot as the poorer neighborhoods that are just blocks away. This is partly due to the amount of trees in those neighborhoods. Ocean Drive and the tracts immediately surrounding the road have more trees and are much cooler compared to the tracts closer to the edge of the district. The neighborhoods closer to La Palmera Mall in the city’s South Central area can be up to 6 to 8 degrees hotter.
District 2 is the heart of the city, said Sylvia Campos, the district’s City Councilmember, with some of the its oldest neighborhoods. Some of these areas do have trees, such as the neighborhood near Collier Park, but more have little canopy coverage, according to Tree Equity Score, an online mapping project of American Forests dedicated to highlighting the “damaging environmental inequities in tree distribution” in U.S. cities.
Corpus Christi does have a tree ordinance, Campos said, which prioritized tree building after losing some to hurricanes, but only for new developments.
It’s not just a lack of good landscaping that is making the bayside city hotter. Nueces County is home to several petrochemical industries, most of them in the aptly named Refinery Row in District 1 on the north, predominately Black and brown part of the city.
Those industries are next to District 1’s Hillcrest neighborhood, also one of the hottest Nueces County census tracts, and are contributing to climate change. They also seem to be a priority for the city to maintain, according to organizers and residents Deceleration spoke with, taking precedence over the city’s own infrastructure. That dynamic is on stark display in the struggle over desalination since much of the city’s own potable water already has been passed along for industrial uses.
Isabel Araiza, co-founder of For The Greater Good and a sociologist at Del Mar College, says the city has largely deferred to the interests of these industries and disinvested in the community. This is particularly true in District 2, which has seen a history of disinvestment after white residents left its neighborhoods in the 1970s. Those white residents left for the south side of town after the city integrated schools with Latino/a and Black students. Corpus Christi continues to sprawl south.
“I feel like the city doesn’t see the cultural capital that does exist in that community and doesn’t see us as being worth the investment,” Araiza said.
Hensiek points to the high turnout at city and Port of Corpus Christi meetings as proof of people wanting more investment into neighborhoods. This summer, to address the heat, the city opened cooling centers and distributed fans during heat advisories.
While these offer some relief from the heat, they do not address the heat’s presence itself, which could be dissipated by more trees creating shade canopies. Trees can limit heat island impact by keeping heat-trapping sources like asphalt and concrete from overheating in the first place. D2’s Campos said she explained the tree canopy concept to her grandson using her own neighborhood, having him stand under a tree then stand in the direct sunlight.
“You can tell, just a few steps away, how just having trees, as simple as that is, is a luxury for some,” Campos said.
Campos came to office riding a Clean Sweep campaign with a slate of candidates committed to environmental justice principles. Fellow Councilmember Jim Klein secured a seat alongside her in that race. Their success has in turn inspired the movement that put them in place even as extreme weather driven by climate change becomes increasingly hard to avoid—especially at this port community where more than half of all US oil exports flow out to the world.
Campos said that repairing heat island impacts in this era of rising heat should be a priority for the city.
“We just need to move with the times, we can’t ignore what is there,” Campos told Deceleration. “And I think that’s what happened to District 2. Because a lot of these areas were developed a long time ago, [when] we did not require landscaping. There was just too much parking lot requirements and it’s not as necessary. It’s old; it’s outdated.”
Many of those rewilding Carroll Lane Park are likely to agree with that sentiment.
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Gaige Davila is a freelance journalist based in the Rio Grande Valley. His reporting has been published in Texas Public Radio, MySA.com, the San Antonio Current, NPR, the Guardian, Mother Jones and more. Contact him at gaigedavila.com.
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