A group of six outreach workers carefully negotiate their way through a dusty field in North Las Vegas, the site of a small homeless encampment. As they approach each tent, they call out a greeting, and the residents, seeing their distinctive neon yellow shirts and hats, emerge from their shelters.
It’s 10 a.m., and the sun has been up for four hours already, marking the start of the ninth consecutive day of 110 degree-plus temperatures in Southern Nevada. Just a few days before, the city broke its all-time high of 117 by three degrees. This day’s forecast won’t be much better — it’s projected to hit 118. At 109, it’s already oppressive. In unshaded areas, like the encampment, the heat radiates from the sun above and the sand below.
The risks of such extreme weather explain why the yellow-shirted team is out. They’re with Help of Southern Nevada, a Vegas-based homeless outreach agency, whose crisis teams venture onto the streets nearly every morning with water and resource lists to distribute to the city’s unhoused.
The organization’s crisis teams director, Louis Lacey, says he’s seeing the impacts of the city’s longer and hotter summers on the unhoused, which commonly manifest themselves as dehydration, heat stroke, and burns. UMC’s burn center reported 23 cases of pavement burns this June — already half of last summer’s total.
“I personally know of a homeless person that fell out, got third degree burns on her leg, and she lost her leg,” Lacey recalls. “That happens. Also, if you are intoxicated and you fall out or pass out in the sun, and there’s nobody there to wake you up, you’re going to die.”
Mario Lopes, one of the unhoused individuals Lacey’s team meets on this day’s trip, knows the danger of heat-related illness all too well. Lopes has lived on the streets on and off for 30 years. He used to be a member of the Navy. Now, he says, his summer days are spent trying to stay cool.
“I’m a disabled vet,” Lopes says, “so I’m trained to survive under any condition.”
He’s already had one heat stroke this week, at the beginning of July’s heat wave, which he treated by putting ice under his arms and lying down until it passed. But, with temperatures staying high, he’s worried about having another, since it’s not uncommon to witness people rapidly succumb to the heat.
“I’ve had a few friends die out here,” he says. “In their tents, not coming out of their tents … It gets really hot, and no one ends up checking on them. And they end up dead.”
Lopes is currently 67 years old and is a member of what Lacey calls Vegas’ “silver tsunami” — a reference to the city’s growing population of people older than 64 who live on the streets. This trend comes with troubling consequences: Since heat tolerance is known to decline with age, Lacey is already seeing extreme weather’s devastating impact on the elderly.
“We had an 81-year-old out there in the heat, laid out in her encampment,” Lacey says. “And the dogs that she had were laid out in the encampment, and they were dead. That was yesterday. And we got her to a shelter and got her some help.”
Lacey’s clients are all part of the nearly 7,000-member unhoused community in Las Vegas, a cohort which has grown by almost 30 percent since 2021, a year after Nevada’s pandemic unemployment rate soared to double the national average at the time. This steadily increasing unhoused population is relying on more resources from the valley’s few dozen local outreach organizations like Help of Southern Nevada.
Another, Caridad Las Vegas, was founded by Merideth Spriggs. She says the extreme heat has changed the way these local services operate. “Places like Catholic Charities or Salvation Army would normally have people go out in the daytime,” Spriggs says, “but (now) what they will allow them to do is sit inside so they can cool down.”
However, Lacey says, it can be a struggle for his aid workers to convince people to accept transport to any of the area’s shelters or cooling stations, because unhoused individuals are hesitant to leave their communities.
“‘My resources are here on this side of town, my familial connections or whatever are on this side of town,’” he says, recalling previous conversations with unhoused clients. “‘I really don’t want to go on that side of town.’”
It all paints a dire, but predictable, portrait: Unhoused people paying an unthinkable price for living in the second-fastest-warming city in America.
Meanwhile, Caridad and Help of Southern Nevada do what they can, which, today, is being out on the streets, passing out supplies in 109 degrees, hoping to save lives.
