The Burton Barr Central Library cooling center closes briefly each morning for cleaning. In October, people waited outside during that hour, sitting on the concrete in the darkness, because going home meant turning on air conditioning they couldn't afford to run.
Jaqueline Lopez had been sleeping there for two weeks. She told city workers she'd known about the respite centers for a while but only started using them in October. Not because she was newly homeless—she'd been walking around in the hot sun for months. But because she'd finally done the math on what it cost to exist in Phoenix and decided the library was cheaper than the alternative.
The center occupies what used to be a cafe in the library's back corner, a small auxiliary room next to the parking lot with capacity for 50 people. No beds, no showers, just air conditioning and water and bathrooms and a place to charge your phone. Between May and October, 20,000 people came through. The city spent $3.8 million on 24-hour cooling centers and extended library hours this year. Phoenix now budgets for keeping people from dying of heat the way other cities budget for snow removal.
Ninety-two percent of the people who used the extended-hour and overnight cooling centers were experiencing homelessness.
That other eight percent tells you what's happened to the economics of living here.
The Math of Survival
| Living Situation | Monthly Summer Cooling Cost |
|---|---|
| Phoenix apartment | $200-$250 |
| Phoenix house | $400-$450 |
| Portion of total energy bill | Over 50% |
People make calculations. An elderly woman who uses the Salvation Army cooling center told staff:
"Her air conditioning is just so expensive to run. So she comes to the Salvation Army and stays for a few hours, socializes with other people, and then goes home when it's not as hot."
She has a home. She just can't afford to be in it during the day.
Katie Martin, who works with the Foundation for Senior Living, said "most of the seniors we serve are keeping their thermostat at 80 F to save money." Eighty degrees. In houses that turn into air fryers when the cloudless sky combines with temperatures over 100. Models from Georgia Tech show that a single-family home with a flat roof heats up by over 40 degrees in a matter of hours without air conditioning. You either run the AC and don't eat, or you spend your days at Burton Barr.
Autumn Williams uses the cooling centers regularly, especially at night. But in August she told reporters about the barriers:
"Now that they have security purposes and metal detectors. Some of us don't like to go in there."
She explained that metal detectors trigger PTSD from jail and other traumatized events. Rachel Milne, director of Phoenix's Office of Homeless Solutions, describes the center as "the lowest barrier entry. We want anyone to come in. The whole purpose of this site is to keep people from dying on the street due to heat."
Low-barrier still means barriers when you're asking people to walk through metal detectors to access air conditioning.
The center isn't a shelter. You can't really sleep there without being bothered by the lights and the people coming and going and the volunteers checking on everyone. But you can sit. You can charge your phone. You can exist in 72-degree air instead of 95-degree air.
Caroline Fon, the city's homeless liaison, spent seven days a week there all summer, connecting people to housing resources and utility assistance and job placement. The wraparound services exist because the city understands that people showing up to avoid heat death probably need help with other things too.
Kevin Tilles and Devon Coleman brought their young daughter to Burton Barr in the summer. They were experiencing homelessness and came to get care that would help them get off the streets. Tilles said "that decision was the best decision." The cooling center became a gateway to other services. Infrastructure for survival becomes infrastructure for maybe getting out.
The city's moving the 24-hour operation to a 20,000-square-foot warehouse downtown for next summer. Burton Barr goes back to being a regular library during regular hours. The new location is at Central and Jackson, accessible by bus and light rail, designed specifically for this purpose instead of carved out of a flood-damaged cafe. Phoenix is building permanent infrastructure for climate refugees who aren't refugees—they're just residents who can't afford to be home during the day.
Heat deaths in Maricopa County dropped from 645 in 2023 to 602 in 2024—the first decrease in a decade. The city calls this progress. And it is, in the sense that fewer people died. But 602 people still died from weather, in a major American city, in 2024. The cooling centers kept some people alive who would have died otherwise. That's the standard now. Did you survive the summer?
Lopez had spent two weeks sleeping at Burton Barr by October. During the day, she often walks around in the hot sun. Then she comes back to the cooling center. This is adaptation on the ground—a woman doing the daily math of where she can exist without dying or going broke.
Phoenix operates 95 cooling centers now, plus respite centers and hydration stations. The network has developed over nearly 20 years. Every year it gets bigger because every year more people need it. The economics are simple: it costs less to run a warehouse with industrial AC than to subsidize home cooling for everyone who can't afford it. So the city builds infrastructure for people to leave their homes during the day, and calls it heat relief.
Here's a room with air conditioning. Try not to die.
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Las Vegas's different approach: While Phoenix runs 24/7 cooling centers year-round, Clark County only activates daytime cooling stations when the National Weather Service issues excessive heat warnings, yet both regions experienced over 500 heat-related deaths in 2024.
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The 911 call spike: Emergency calls near Burton Barr Library jumped from 235 in 2022 to 950 in 2024 after the cooling center opened, with trespassing and suspicious persons calls being most common.
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Energy burden research: A 2023 academic study found that elderly and low-income Phoenix households face energy burdens nearly 5 percentage points higher than their counterparts, with disproportionate impacts on Hispanic, Black, and Asian residents.
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Peak pricing pressures: Arizona utilities charge 20-30 cents per kilowatt-hour during peak hours from 4-7 p.m., doubling the cost of afternoon air conditioning and forcing residents to ration cooling during the hottest part of the day.