Hunts Point’s primarily black and brown residents live near heavy industry that fulfills two city-wide necessities: bringing food in and getting waste out. It is home to the largest wholesale produce market in the world and hosts more than a dozen waste-transfer stations. (The South Bronx handles almost a third of New York City’s waste.) As a result, a neighborhood with 13,000 people has one of the highest concentrations of truck traffic in the Big Apple. And those vehicles pipe in hot exhaust to the already sweltering community—contributing to higher rates of asthma linked to pollution.

Hunts Point has long been a part of the city with one of the lowest parks-to-people ratios. But over the past decade, locals have pushed to develop more green space along its riverfront. “Traditionally, this community has been understood by the City of New York as an industrial area in nature,” says Angela Tovar, director of community development at The Point CDC. “So there was no prioritization of street trees, of any sort of mitigation to be able to bring down the temperatures in the community.”

Indoor temperatures in large city buildings are often even hotter than outdoor ones, especially at night. So people without air conditioning, senior citizens, and anyone who has difficulty getting out and about to find a place to cool down are especially vulnerable during a heat wave. People with chronic medical, mental health, or developmental conditions are also at greater risk.

According to the city’s Office of Emergency Management, a majority of heat-related deaths occur in homes without AC. In all twelve New York neighborhoods with the highest heat vulnerability, between 21 to 34 percent of residents are living below the city’s poverty threshold. In Hunts Point, the average median household income is slightly more than $22,000; after paying for rent and food, many residents don’t have enough left over to buy an air conditioner or pay for the extra electricity needed to power it.

According to an NYC Environmental Justice Coalition analysis, more than half of the city’s public housing residents live in its most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods. And there are additional barriers for people who want to install air conditioners in public housing: Residents must apply for approval and pay an annual fee for each air conditioner they put in their homes.

A 2016 Columbia University study projected that by 2080, up to 3,300 New Yorkers could die each year from intense heat made worse by climate change. So the city is in a race against time to stem the trend of steadily rising temperatures and save residents’ lives.

New York City is one of the cities in the developed world that is most vulnerable to the dangers of urban heat, says Kurt Shickman, executive director at Global Cool Cities. Part of the reason is its large immigrant community. Recent transplants coming from hot, rural regions may not be prepared for what they’ll face in a crowded city.

“Those can be some of the most vulnerable populations,” Shickman explains. “In many cases, they’re sort of thinking about heat in the context of where they came from rather than how it affects New York.”

During a heat wave earlier this month, with temperatures reaching 96 degrees Fahrenheit, local nonprofits voiced concerns about how effective the city government was in making “cooling centers” available to the public. These are often neighborhood libraries, recreation centers, and senior centers that are repurposed during heat waves to offer the public access to air conditioning.

During this most recent heat advisory, the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance called around 50 different cooling centers in the city to survey how they were operating. They found that 35 sites were functioning as intended, but more than a dozen were not properly identified as places where overheated residents could seek refuge. Another dozen sites were not open for a variety of reasons, including construction and broken ACs. Some operators were unaware that they were city-designated cooling centers.