Extreme heat is causing a Black suicide crisis in Phoenix. Urban farms offer a lifeline

LIKE THOUSANDS OF OTHER BLACK AMERICANS, Tiffany Hawkins’ grandparents, Earnest and Mattie Lee Johnson, left the Jim Crow South in the 1950s to pick cotton in Arizona’s desert. 

Many sought opportunities in cities like Chicago and Detroit, but the Johnsons chose Arizona, where their lives and those of their children — including Hawkins’ mother, Arlene — remained deeply rooted in the rhythms of rural life. Their backyard garden was the heart of their home in Phoenix, with its grapevines curling along the fence, an orange tree heavy with fruit, the rich, loamy soil Earnest turned with practiced hands. Grocery stores were sparse and often refused to serve Black people, so growing food was necessary. The Johnsons’ neighbors had gardens, too, and the family traded fruit for collard greens.

No one called it that then, but Earnest and his neighbors were building critical climate infrastructure. Urban agricultural spaces — neighborhood gardens — can reduce local temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and trees can lower the “real feel” temperature by up to 30 degrees. During the sweltering summers, the Black families leaned on each other.

Evenings brought a sense of camaraderie. Neighbors gathered on shady porches, swapping fans and opening their homes to people without swamp coolers. Fans sat in windows and cooled the dry air using water evaporation.

Arizona’s economy back then was defined by the four Cs: Citrus, copper, cattle, and cotton. It wasn’t until decades later that the fifth C — climate change — would change everything. A robust social infrastructure, such as the ones that Black families built, can reduce heat mortality risks during extreme weather by 40%, while the sharing of greens, legumes, and fruit sustained agrobiodiversity and wove social trust into the fabric of their segregated community. Their gardens created a healthy feedback loop: Diverse crops are critical for an ecosystem’s health, cushioning severe weather, while shared labor builds the crisis-response networks that are vital during heat waves. 

But over the last few decades, that loop was severed.

After Earnest died in 2012, his garden faded as well; the plants shriveled and withered, and soil, once teeming with worms and life, hardened with neglect. “He was their caretaker,” Hawkins explained. “When we are intentional, we build these bonds with the earth around us, but if we neglect it, there is no reason for it to support us.”

Its decline mirrored a deeper loss as the city around them transformed.

According to Hawkins, “Phoenix [has] completely changed” since she was born in 1994 — “from the heat, the sprawl, and definitely the relationships between us.” The amount of land covered by concrete in metro Phoenix has more than doubled since 1992, a rate rivaled only by its Sun Belt neighbor Las Vegas.

Across the western U.S., Black communities in cities from Los Angeles to Las Vegas face a similar struggle with rising heat and vanishing green spaces. Yet, in Phoenix, the convergence of relentless sun and rapid development has made the city a climate bellwether. Urban loneliness is rising everywhere, but Black neighborhoods across Phoenix see more deaths from depression, addiction, and hopelessness than virtually anywhere else, according to census data research by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University. Compared to the national average, Black people are twice as likely to die by suicide.

“Our elders had a better understanding of the earth than we do. It feels like they had a better understanding of each other, too.”

Tiffany Hawkins

---

Rebuilding relationships with the land might not only mend the community but also cool the city and reclaim its future from the heat. And new shoots are emerging from Phoenix’s cracked earth, even in Hawkins’ neighborhood, like Spaces of Opportunity, a 19-acre farm on a formerly hazardous lot. Could such efforts help save one of the first Western havens for Black Americans?

IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY, Arizona’s farms needed skillful workers who not only knew how to work with the earth but could also adapt to unforgiving heat and a deeply segregated state.

White landowners contracted Black realty companies to recruit thousands of Black sharecroppers and laborers from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma to transform parched red soil into farmland.

For many, this was a godsend, given the Jim Crow violence in the South. And as one of just seven states with no recorded lynchings, Arizona had a greater share of Black residents by 1950 than any Western state except California.

Black laborers followed Latinos and Natives, carving irrigation ditches into the sunbaked earth. Guided by generations of agricultural wisdom, they transformed barren desert into green fields. Beneath the vast cloudless sky, endless rows of lush white cotton bloomed in improbable abundance.

Farmers drew on Indigenous traditions, using climate-friendly and sustainable practices, cultivating drought-resistant crops like cotton, beans, squash, and agave shaded by native trees. They timed planting season to the monsoons, working with the sky and each other.

Before dawn, workers like Mattie Lee Johnson arrived at the fields with the tools of their trade: Their strong hands and the long burlap sacks that held the day’s labor. The children sat on thesack like a sled, and Mattie Lee dragged them across the dusty fields of the south side of Phoenix, her fingers scraped raw from prickly brown cotton bolls.

Black Americans like the Johnsons created self-reliant communities much like those they’d known post-slavery in the South. In South Phoenix’s Okemah district, families grew their own food — okra, watermelon, collard greens, and beans — and made their own clothes. The area had no water, electricity, or gas for decades, and Black folks were barred from entering most other parts of the city. But this isolated neighborhood was enough — until Interstate 10 was rammed through its heart, displacing the community.

Farmland and natural gathering spaces gave way to cookie-cutter housing developments, liquor stores, and parking lots. In a statewide survey taken right before the COVID-19 pandemic began, just 23% of Arizonans reported regularly talking with neighbors — the lowest rate in the nation.

And today, among states with more than 1 million people, Arizonans report spending less time with others and feeling lonelier during summer, outranked only by rural Mississippi and West Virginia.

“The heat, geography, environment and social differences here in Arizona that don’t exist in other parts of the country lend themselves to isolation for African Americans,” Jon McCaine, a therapist who’s spent 30 years treating Black Arizonans, explained.e

Those with enough money can retreat indoors, shielded from record-breaking heat by air conditioning while the desert grows ever more inhospitable, its rivers shrinking, skies clouded by smog, and the promise of opportunity shadowed by climate change.

A boom fueled by visions of affordable homes, driverless cars, and a desert tech oasis is colliding with the limits of the land itself, forcing residents to reckon with the cost of comfort in a place where survival depends on respecting the desert and its unforgiving boundaries.

“People just can’t go outside or be social in the summer unless you have the wherewithal and economic resources,” McCaine said. “It becomes lethal, either from the physical stress or the mental stress.”

Research confirms that rising temperatures are linked to increased suicide rates and mental health crises, especially for the most isolated and economically marginalized. For Black Americans, who nationwide report feeling more lonely than any other race, this can be fatal.

Yet the Black population continues to grow, not through sustainable roots in land stewardship or community camaraderie, but rather an influx of wealthier newcomers chasing Sunbelt luxuries: oversized homes and artificial lawns guarded by towering fences.

Since 2010, Phoenix has grown twice as fast as the national average, while its Black population has skyrocketed — a rate twice as high as the total growth. Fewer than half of Black young adults living in Phoenix grew up here, the lowest rate among America’s major cities. Today, only 30% of Arizona’s Black residents were born here.

For better or worse, owing to embedded segregation and historical white violence, the larger Black American community thrives in an insular fashion, scholars say. Instead of depending on larger interracial community systems or the government, Black folks rely on each other. However, with transplants now driving the culture, the community lacks the deep-rooted family ties and established networks that helped longtimers like Hawkins’ family stay connected.

Newcomers from the Midwest bring different hopes and histories than the sharecroppers of generations ago. Queer Black residents, single mothers, and entrepreneurs each navigate the city’s heat and isolation in their own ways. Their stories, layered and distinct, reveal the fractures that climate change can make deadly.

Last summer, Phoenix shattered records, with 70 days above 110. July’s average daily temperature broke 100 for the second time, following July 2023. With every broken record, more people die, the vast majority of them folks who lived alone or on the streets.

In 2022, Phoenix established a “cool callers” program, which allowed residents to sign up themselves or their neighbors for wellness checks on extreme-heat days. Very few signed up, however, said Willa Altman-Kaough, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Kate Gallego.

“I’m not sure government intervention is always the right thing to address issues like this” said Altman-Kaough, who’s focused on climate and sustainability.

Sometimes, governments and institutions even work against the community’s best interests, Silverio Ontiveros, an activist in South Phoenix, said. In one local park, unhoused people once gathered routinely under trees to beat the heat.

“It made sense,” until officials trimmed the trees so they would no longer congregate, he said.

Some residents wonder if the solution lies in returning to their grandparents’ lifestyle. “If every neighborhood could have their hand in the dirt, could come together to build food forests, natural shade, and gathering spaces, we could see everything about Phoenix grow,” Hawkins said.

ONCE THE OLD NEIGHBORLY BONDS FADED, Hawkins, like others, locked herself inside; there was nothing outside but sun beating down on empty streets. Then came the pandemic, the birth of her son, Zayne, in September 2020, and difficulties finding employment. In the sunniest region in America, she felt sluggish and brain-fogged — even suffering from a vitamin D deficiency.

“We isolate ourselves because we don’t have anywhere to go that is life-sustaining,” she said. “It is a mode of protecting yourself from the outside.”

When her grandparents first moved here, her community boasted Arizona’s most productive farmland. But by 2020, her neighborhood’s “nature score” of 8 on a scale of 0 to 100 — last in the state for access to green space and fresh food. Created by a dozen scientists and researchers, the score uses satellite imagery and data on dozens of factors like air and noise pollution, tree canopy, and park space to grade a community’s access to nature. The average American neighborhood has a score of 64.

That’s when — and largely why — Spaces of Opportunity was born. Two-story houses had been sprouting around Hawkins’ home for years, but one littered and abandoned 20-acre lot remained undeveloped. It was such a hazard — it lacked shade trees and sometimes drew drug-users — that Hawkins went out of her way to avoid it.

Just before the pandemic, a coalition of gardeners, educators, and neighbors gathered at the edge of the field, determined to revive it. With shovels and seeds, they transformed it into Spaces of Opportunity: a lush 19-acre pasture of 250 garden plots where, for $5 a month, residents now grow food, share culture, and reclaim their community, part of a movement to revive dead vacant, heat-trapping land. Every month, more than 1,000 locals spend time in this space.

It feeds the environment as well as the neighborhood. Arizona’s vast mega-farms of alfalfa and other crops use about 72% of the state’s water supply without feeding local communities. In contrast, community-scale farms use water-saving methods like drip irrigation and native plants to grow food where people live. By combining this with graywater — reused household water — the farm creates closed-loop systems that alleviate pressure on municipal supplies, offering a real response to both the water crisis and the social isolation caused by unchecked development.

I FIRST MET HAWKINS AT THE SPACES OF OPPORTUNITY’S FOOD FOREST, where she was harvesting elderberries on a spring afternoon. The faint sweetness of the crushed berries, reminiscent of dark grapes or wild plums with a fermented edge, rose from her hands as she worked, juice staining her palms a velvety purple.

It had taken us more than an hour to get here, zigzagging along the freeways that destroyed Phoenix’s first Black enclaves. I was with Darren Chapman, founder of TigerMountain Foundation, one of the five organizations that helped create the farm.

Chapman grew up traveling back and forth between South Central Los Angeles, where his grandparents lived, and South Phoenix, where his mother moved in the 1970s. Early on, he learned the sharp edges of gang territory, but also the joys of a neighborhood ecosystem where residents swapped sun-warmed tomatoes over chain-link fences. By elementary school, he’d fired his first gun, yet he never ceased remembering the earthy scent of the collard greens and tomatoes from his grandparents’ backyard garden. After eight stints in jails, Chapman found himself, just 25 years old, locked in another cell, longing for the days his people depended on — and nourished — one another.

Once he was out, he returned to South Phoenix and built TigerMountain, an organization dedicated to cultivating land and growing sustainable foods.

Over the past two decades, it has turned 30 acres of vacant lots into South Side community farms, where volunteers harvest sweet potatoes and chard, and deliver kale, eggs, and cactus to the local community.

“Whether it is South Phoenix or South Central, when you don’t have hope, when you don’t have opportunity, that’s when the violence creeps in,” Chapman said. “We’re trying to replace that with something positive. Instead of pouring a cement slab into the hottest heat index area of the country to make some money, we’re pouring into people and giving them something to care about.”

With housing prices having more than doubled since 2015, Black people make up nearly one-third of the area’s unhoused population, nearly five times the rate of white residents. Consequently, connecting to the land also meant financial stability. In this neighborhood, where the state spends more money on incarcerating people than it does anywhere else, roughly half of the TigerMountain community has been previously incarcerated, experienced substance abuse, or been homeless.

Anubis, who only goes by one name and is one of TigerMountain’s 30 employees, told me that homelessness had shadowed his adult life. The farm, the lifelong South Phoenix resident said, offered more than a paycheck; it brought peace.

“If I’m not going to rely on the government anymore to be my doctor, to feed me, and keep me safe, then I need to become my own doctor and protector,” he told me, his hands and face dusted with soil. Tending the land taught him to care for himself. His family calls him “crazy” for working under the relentless sun, he said, but “studying the land, different plants” makes him happy: “I found out how to avoid anxiety.”

By bringing Black people back into these spaces, Phoenix can reverse the effects that environmental racism has on their bodies and minds, Shawn Pearson, who runs the Zion Institute, explained. Her nonprofit supports Black-led Phoenix organizations that “provide resources, revitalize neighborhoods, and strengthen social bonds” for people like Chapman and many others.

Pearson herself was alone when she came here, a single mother who quickly slid into homelessness after losing the job that brought her to Phoenix. The isolation was brutal, especially during the first three summers, when she was hospitalized for heat sickness each year.

But she eventually found a creative solution: intentional relationship-building and meeting people at their point of need. “Black people don’t have access to capital or resources here, but what if we created it for each other?” she said. Her work has ranged from supporting early childhood education and interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline to helping young farmers access capital and establishing weekly balance-and-yoga classes for elders.

But it isn’t always easy, as other Black farmers, such as Dionne Washington, the co-founder of Project Roots, have been forced to realize.

Washington, whose grandparents came to work the farms after World War II, started her farming journey young, inspired by summers spent with her grandfather in Flagstaff, planting and harvesting vegetables. Later, she helped her grandmother grow collard greens across farms in South Phoenix. 

“It was a huge process, from the ground all the way to the plate, and my grandmother made sure that I knew how to do all those things,” she recalled. “How to go out and pick vegetables and then take them home, wash them and soak them. How to then fold them, strip the leaves off, and cut them.”

Washington channeled these memories into action as an adult, co-founding Project Roots in 2019. With the help of both philanthropic and federal support, she transformed schoolyards into living laboratories, where children grow lettuce and herbs in water-efficient tower gardens despite the soaring desert heat. “We are using less water to feed more people faster,” she explained, doing so out of a mix of innovation and necessity. The project has distributed over 500,000 pounds of food, addressing food insecurity in an attempt to revive the communal spirit of her childhood.

Yet, despite her successes, Washington has faced persistent barriers. Funding for community farms has dwindled over the past year, and the once-vibrant Black farming community continues to fracture under the pressure of gentrification. All this, she said, has led her to make the difficult decision to leave Arizona, moving to Seattle this summer in search of a place where Black folks have a deeper connection to each other and the land. Outside LA, Seattle is the largest destination for Black Phoenicians who leave Arizona.

In Phoenix, she found Black culture fragmented and the physical and mental health of those around her fading in the face of gentrification and rising costs. Last year, more than 75% of Arizona residents reported participating in group events less than three times a year.

“This place isn’t created with us in mind,” she said.

This is why, Hawkins told me later that day, it’s so important to plant the seeds of regeneration in Phoenix.

Now, every morning, Hawkins stoops in her backyard, hands deep in the soil her grandfather once turned. Her vision for the future is both radical and restorative. Where her grandfather’s grapevines and orange trees once flourished, tomatoes, wheat, and beans now thrive, tended by Hawkins and her 4-year-old son Zayne, who delights in stuffing his mouth with strawberries and elderberries until his face is stained magenta.

Her afternoons are spent in community with other locals under the shade of the fruit trees, chatting about the books she’s reading while Zayne eagerly digs his feet into the soil and plays hide-and-seek in the bushes. Hawkins yearns to heal generational disconnection and ensure that Black children like Zayne grow up knowing how to cherish, tend, and reclaim the Earth — “I want him to grow up knowing that we have a right to this land.” It’s this vision that keeps her in Phoenix.

Hoping to expand her garden into a nonprofit, she recently participated in a free agroforestry class conducted by Arizona State University. She wants to distribute food boxes to families who need them and create a space where Black residents can gather freely: “No barriers, no prohibitive costs, just shared abundance.”

Research and experience show that such spaces do more than feed bodies; they restore mental health, foster intergenerational connection, and empower communities to define their futures in the face of climate change and gentrification.

If Phoenix is to become livable for all its people, its salvation may well be found in these backyard plots and community gardens, “where Black hands, young and old, turn the earth not just to survive, but to thrive together,” Hawkins said.

The post Extreme Heat Is Causing a Black Suicide Crisis in Phoenix. Urban Farms Offer a Lifeline appeared first on Capital B News.

This post was originally published on this site