The Historic Westside is getting hotter. Trees could cool it down

“You see how that knuckle, that ball right there looks like it’s got a fungus? That tree is being eaten on the inside, so it’s slowly dying,” 57-year-old Timothy Hicks said while pointing to a withered tree in front of a house.

Hicks is a lifelong resident of the Historic Westside, one of Las Vegas’ oldest communities. Nowadays, a lack of trees makes the Historic Westside also one of the hottest neighborhoods in Las Vegas, which climate scientists consider to be the nation’s second-fastest warming city.

In addition to providing shade, trees cool surroundings by releasing water vapor. Foliage also blocks sunlight from hitting concrete, where it gets absorbed before being released throughout the day and night.

Midwestern cities in the U.S. usually have around 20 percent tree cover, while Western cities hover between 13 and 19 percent, said Marco Velotta, chief sustainability officer at the city of Las Vegas. The Historic Westside has less than 9 percent.

Hicks said that when he was growing up in the neighborhood, there was much more vegetation, especially trees.

“I grew up with a garden right here in Vegas,” he added. “We used to have tomatoes and onions and squash, and along the fence that surrounded the garden, we raised snap peas and butter beans.”

Hicks remembers the neighborhood’s trees being cut down over the decades, he said. A pollen crisis was brought on by mulberry trees, roots were torn up to look for water and some trees got in the way of power line construction.

In the city’s conversion to prioritize desert-adapted plants, too much greenery was replaced with “rock and pavement,” he said. It’s a common complaint among longtime residents of Las Vegas, and some find the removal of so-called “nonfunctional” grass mandated by law to be an overreach of government.

“Now, the city is hot,” Hicks added. “It’s like a hotbed now, with all this desert landscaping.”

As for the many dying trees in the Historic Westside, Hicks and other residents blamed overbearing water restrictions. They said the cost of water plus limits to how much and when they can water prevent them from caring for their trees adequately.

Bronson Mack, public outreach coordinator at the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said these restrictions shouldn’t prevent homeowners from keeping desert-adapted trees alive and healthy with drip irrigation systems. The problem is many trees initially planted in the valley can no longer survive due to climate change.

“It’s getting hotter; it’s getting dry, and as a result of that, our environmental conditions, our climate conditions here in Las Vegas are changing,” he said. “And it’s changing in a way in which, trees that worked well before the climate zone started to shift, those trees now are beginning to struggle.”

Mack said other factors could be responsible for the dying trees. The Southern Nevada Water Authority has a program where it rebates properties that remove turf and grass under certain conditions. It’s possible that people could have unknowingly damaged tree roots while remodelling, he said.

Why trees?

Many households in the U.S. plant cool-season grasses such as tall fescue in their lawns. These species are adapted to colder environments and typically require more water, as opposed to warm-season grasses such as Bermuda grass, which are the opposite.

With exceptions for schools, parks and cemeteries, Las Vegas properties constructed after 2022 are banned from installing “grass and spray irrigation systems,” according to the Las Vegas Valley Water District website. Single family homes constructed between April 5, 2022, and 2003 cannot have grass in their front lawns. This even applies for warm-season grasses.

“I don’t care if it’s Bermuda grass or fescue grass; it’s all very water-intensive,” Mack said. “And it’s appropriate to have grass on properties where there’s a recreational value, where you can go out and kick the soccer ball and throw the Frisbee and have a picnic.”

So, the focus has been on trees and other vegetation. But a major problem is supporting plants in the hot environment of the Las Vegas Valley, especially at night.

With a lack of greenery, man-made structures spend the whole day absorbing heat, which is released back into the air at night, keeping temperatures high.

“The asphalt is releasing heat; the concrete is releasing heat; the buildings are releasing heat, and so it’s getting warmer and warmer at night,” said Dale Devitt, UNLV professor and director of the Center for Urban Water Conservation. “That’s really the biggest challenge for plants, these warm nighttime temperatures.”

One way to help these plants and keep nighttime temperatures down is to plant more of them, he added. Trees block sunlight from hitting man-made structures, which then release less heat at night.

They also cool the environment through a process known as “transpiration.”

“Trees transpire, so there’s a phase change when water goes from liquid to vapor,” Devitt explained. “There is energy that is absorbed. So that’s a cooling effect as well.”

Tree plantings across the city

Neighborhoods lacking tree cover such as the Historic Westside face higher temperatures. In the valley’s scorching summer heat, this can affect quality of life and cause serious injuries or even deaths.

At least three people have already died in Southern Nevada this year with heat as a contributing factor.

Desert-adapted trees are being planted in the valley though, with an emphasis on the Historic Westside and other underserved communities.

Devitt helps lead a UNLV “urban forestry initiative” alongside other professors. With a $5 million federal grant, they are training arborists and planting trees in neighborhoods with below-average cover.

The program aims to plant around 3,000 trees total and educate community members on how to care for them.

“We recruit from the same economically depressed neighborhoods to become arborists in the future, and we put them in this kind of civilian conservation core,” Devitt said. “We have a team of faculty and staff that teach them all about how to grow and care for trees.”

The city of Las Vegas also aims to plant 60,000 trees by 2050, Velotta said. Around 1,200 trees were planted in 2024.

Like with the UNLV program, a large focus is being placed on communities lacking tree cover, especially parts of east Las Vegas and the Historic Westside, he added.

The city planted dozens of desert-adapted trees along D Street and Jackson Avenue about a year ago. They line sidewalks next to each road, connected by underground irrigation systems marked with blue paint.

“These are relatively new, but as they mature, we’ll have a more walkable, inviting environment,” Velotta said.

Twenty percent coverage for the whole city is the eventual goal, he added.

The trees planted by the city should be able to withstand temperatures as the climate changes further. When rebating renovated properties, the Southern Nevada Water Authority requires people replace their grass with similarily desert-adapted vegetation and drip irrigation systems.

“We have gone from being a city in the desert to being a desert city,” Mack said.

Marco Velotta is the son of Review-Journal reporter Rick Velotta.

Contact Finnegan Belleau at fbelleau@reviewjournal.com.