Melted shoes, migraines: Street vendors battle Los Angeles’ worsening heat
By Rachel Parsons
Most weekends, Patty Archuleta, an ebullient Los Angeles street vendor, can be found negotiating deals with shoppers checking out the clothing and collectible toy cars she sells in the city’s Historic South Central neighborhood.
“Barato, barato!” - Spanish for “cheap, cheap!” - she yells from her patch of sidewalk on San Pedro Street.
But at the peak of a scorching heatwave in August that hit 96 degrees Fahrenheit (35.5 degrees Celsius), Archuleta instead sat in her car next to her tables of merchandise, wearing a mask to limit her exposure to traffic pollution and holding an asthma inhaler.
The 66-year-old said the heat had triggered an asthma attack and she was also suffering through a bout of bronchitis during one of L.A.’s hottest spells of the year.
She is one of more than 50,000 street vendors in sprawling Los Angeles County who work outside through brutal Southern California heatwaves that have become more frequent, intense, and long lasting.
Both their health and their incomes are being affected, they say.
“We’re struggling to make money and when the heat comes the merchandise gets ruined, plus our health,” Archuleta said, noting she was “getting scared”.
One thing that might help, she suggested, is access to affordable insurance, to help protector vendors from financial losses, including products damaged by extreme heat.
That may soon be available in Los Angeles, after an international collaboration in September announced plans to pilot an extreme heat insurance policy for vendors in the city.
Modeled after a similar program in India, the insurance plan is a partnership between Climate Resilience for All and the Los Angeles advocacy organisation Inclusive Action for the City.
The new partnership builds on an existing collaboration between Inclusive Action for the City and global reinsurer Swiss Re with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
It will offer subsidised low-cost insurance that pays out automatically when heat passes a pre-set temperature threshold, giving sweltering vendors quick cash that can help them replace spoiled goods, pay a doctor or just stay home on a day when heat makes working dangerous.
more heat, less money
For street vendors like Archuleta - who is one of about 200 sellers in her area who offer everything from clothing to tools, electronics and food, she said - blistering sun can slash incomes.
It drives away buyers, fades clothing, melts the soles off of shoes, ruins hand tools with rubber or plastic parts, and forces food vendors to throw away boxes of produce.
On good days, Archuleta said she can earn $250 selling her goods. On the hottest days, though, she may only make $100 - and sometimes she has to give away sun-damaged clothing that she can’t sell.
According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, temperatures in Archuleta’s neighborhood soared past 90 degrees (32C) for 13 days in August, close to half of the month.
Sidewalk-level temperatures in Archuleta’s neighborhood - a blend of industrial and low-income residential buildings with little shade and lots of concrete - can be even higher.
heat illness
A few stalls down the sidewalk from Archuleta, another woman selling clothes said she is also losing money as her products are scorched by the heat. But her biggest concern is increasingly for her own health.
Claudia, 46, has high blood pressure - a risk factor for heat illness - and said that exposure to extreme heat also sets off migraines. (She said she could only give her first name because of another threat in Los Angeles this summer: federal immigration raids that have used racial profiling to target their Hispanic community.)
Women can be particularly vulnerable to extreme heat because of higher body fat percentages, hormonal changes and less effective sweating, health specialists say.
Women Archuleta’s age are at greater risk of heat-related illness because older adults don’t sweat as much as younger people and - like young children - have a harder time regulating their body temperature.
Symptoms of heat illness can include dizziness, nausea, headache and rapid heartbeat, the latter being especially dangerous for people with high blood pressure.
In the United States, extreme heat causes at least 1,500 deaths per year, more than any other severe weather event, according to a 2021 study published in Nature Communications.
Heat is also a leading cause of declining labor productivity, with global productivity losses from extreme heat expected to hit $2.4 trillion a year by 2030, according to a March 2025 estimate by the World Economic Forum.
REDLINed areas LESS GREEN
With its paltry tree cover and glut of pavement and concrete, Historic South Central struggles with the urban heat island effect, in which city infrastructure - such as buildings and roads - absorb heat during the day and then release it at night, leading to hotter conditions than in surrounding greener areas.
In Historic South Central, trees cover just 12 percent of the district, nearly 6 percentage points lower than the Los Angeles average, according to data from Los Angeles County.
Experts say that’s in part because of a history of “redlining” in cities, in which investment was directed away from racial and ethnic minority neighborhoods starting in the 1930s.
Although redlining was outlawed in the 1960s, areas nationally where it happened are on average 2.6 to 7 degrees Celsius (4.7 to 12.6 degree Fahrenheit) hotter today, and have 2-3 times less tree cover, researchers have found.
“Temperatures… are going to be a lot hotter in those historically redlined neighborhoods,” said Vivek Shandas, a researcher at Portland State University who has advised the City of Los Angeles on its heat resilience planning.
Los Angeles city forest management officials said in an email they are preparing an urban forest management plan that will include neighborhood-level tree canopy coverage recommendations, but did not provide a timeline for the plan.
State, county and local governments in California are working on climate legislation that explores protections for outdoor workers like Archuleta but changes can take time and officials are enthusiastic about the use of private-sector tools such as insurance.
“This is very exciting,” said Marta Segura, Chief Heat Officer for the City of Los Angeles. She is developing the city’s first heat action and resilience plan that may include suggestions for street vendors and outdoor workers.
She has also advocated for an insurance plan for the vendors. Without such protections, “who’s going to pay the bills?” she asked.
“In the event there’s a two-week heat event, they can’t work out there,” Segura said.
RISING HUMIDITY
This summer in Los Angeles was particularly humid, which can increase heat illness risks and make working miserable even on less dramatically hot days.
On a humid Sunday in September on San Pedro Street, Archuleta was sweating even though temperatures had only hit 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27C). She began closing her stand an hour and a half earlier than usual, with the sticky conditions driving away her customers.
“A lot of people do not want to come out when it’s hot,” Archuleta lamented. She said she felt the same.
“If this (work) was not necessary, I would be home,” she said.