Jacksonville’s historic Downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods find themselves in the top 2% of our nation’s neighborhoods. Sounds like something we can boast, but in this case, a high score is not a winning score. High scores—think the game of golf—will find you in the doldrums, especially during the nitty-gritty dog days of summer.

Once again, we’re talking about heat.

Dangerous heat

According to the federal Department of Health and Human Services’ Heat and Health Index, heat levels in ZIP code 32202 are dangerous to your health. Hotter than 98% of other American ZIP codes, 32202 is bounded by the St. Johns Northbank, from Brooklyn to the stadium district, and includes Brooklyn, LaVilla, historic Downtown, the Eastside, and parts of Springfield.

Full of heat-absorbing and heat-radiating excessive impervious surfaces and few trees, the area is virtually uninhabitable in “the summer months,” whose beginnings and endings keep expanding.

Talk about the Lovin’ Spoonful’s no shadows and people “looking half dead.”

These are geographic areas, mostly, that Downtown Investment Authority considers its special purview, and the object of its development and redevelopment efforts. We will rue the day we ignored heat trend-lines as an organizing principle.

The long and short of It

It hasn’t always been this way: 32202 is hotter than it used to be (and presumably could get hotter, for longer), but that future is not a given. It’s not inevitable.

We can — and we should — do something about this.

The short-term

According to a recent Florida Times-Union story and the city of Jacksonville’s website, the Deegan administration understands excessive heat to be a health emergency and is aggressively taking action to protect local folks. Stay Cool Jax, the administration’s response, instructs folks in how and when we may access emergency “cooling centers,” along with pools and splash pads, and offers precautions to protect ourselves, children, and pets, and how to recognize and respond to the physical dangers of heat exposure.

We should be grateful Mayor Deegan and her folks get this and see their proper role as serving and protecting our interests.

The long term

That said, we must understand that heat emergency days will only increase in number and intensity over the long-term. That reality and that horizon require us to think long-term, and to act long-term. Not next year, and not next decade. Now.

Act now because our very lives depend upon our doing so.

We cannot be satisfied with having adopted a countywide resiliency strategy. We simply must get on with it — aggressively design and redesign our neighborhoods, making them the coolest and safest places possible. We’re equipped with incredible data and mapping tools, giving us no excuses. We cannot say we did not know.

Which brings us back to our deadliest ZIP, 32202.

Parks, parks and more parks

It seems Riverfront Parks Now and historic Downtown advocates are not the crazy ones after all. These folks know open expansive parks and tree canopies matter. Among their many benefits, abundant shade trees populating streets and parks provide humans a respite from summer heat and will help ensure Downtown Jacksonville becomes the vibrant heart and soul of our city that the DIA says is its raison d’être, its singular reason for being.

Among recommendations Riverfront Parks Now made to the Deegan administration in a statement titled “Do it Right, Do It Now, Do It All” are these:

• “Expand” new portions of the Downtown Riverwalk, especially those bordering the former Landing site, to 50 feet from the St. Johns River, allowing for “multiple paths with double rows of trees for shade, beauty, and comfort”
• Do not build a mid- to high-rise commercial development on the Landing site’s northeast corner

Would that these exceptionally bright and committed citizens were in charge.

Together, these two actions alone would have an outsized positive effect on the deadly nature of ZIP 32202.

Should we want, as DIA and City Council say we do, a vibrant central Downtown Jacksonville, do we mean for only six months a year? At nighttime only? Or do we mean most of the time?

Wonder how cool our Downtown future might be if 32202’s design principle could be its tree canopy.

For fun

Hard to muster up a sense of humor or personal energy for much of anything when summer heat stifles. However, play around with the federal government’s Heat and Health Tracker. It’s easy fun, and you might just learn something.

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This column is published in partnership with The JaxLookout.