Roseanne Aldama has had to be creative this summer to make things work. Want a cake? Bake it in a propane grill. Don’t have a carrier to hold your cat on a day when you are cleaning or moving? Put her in a ferret cage.
She’s applied that to surviving the extreme summer heat of Tucson in her complicated living situation.
Aldama lives with her two daughters, both in their early 20s, in an outdoor storage container. It has no internal heating or cooling, but between escaping the heat in a pool in the yard during the day and running a window air conditioner at night, they are trying to making it through.
“Sometimes you feel like you don’t want to do anything, because we are so weak,” she says. “It has really taken a toll.”
As the scorching intensity of Tucson’s summers ebbs and flows into the first hot weeks of fall, one key tool to get through the many months of the year when the sun beats relentlessly down from a cloudless sky for months on end is to go inside and be in an air-conditioned space.
And yet thousands of people in a range of communities around Tucson, from a mixture of circumstance and economic hardship, live without this crucial tool.
For Elise Otto, a researcher at the University of Arizona who studies heat hazards, what can make someone comfortable in their home is complicated and at times contradictory.
Access to air conditioning technology is key, but then a resident must be able to afford that cool air. “It’s not just about having that technology, it’s also about having access to being able to maintain that technology and purchase the energy to maintain that technology,” says Otto.
The gap between the cooling people can access and what they need carries stakes that can be uncomfortable, dangerous — and deadly. So far in 2025, 97 people in Pima County have died of heat-related causes. Sixty percent, or 58 of those people were outdoors; 39 people died indoors.
Resources
Mobile home residents with high bills should put their complaint in writing to their landlord, file a petition with the Arizona Department of Housing or contact the AG’s office in Tucson at 520-628-6648, Phoenix at 602-542-5763 or 1-800-352-8431.
Cooling center locations in Tucson are open through Sep. 30
Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program helps pay heating/cooling bills
Get help with rent or utility bills in Pima County
See the suggested power outage emergency plans from residents and organizers
Contact Tucson-based organizers Poder Casas Móviles at podercasasmoviles@gmail.com
Contact the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home Owners at info@aamho.org or 480-966-9566
Pima County’s heat deaths have surged over the last several years at an unprecedented rate, coinciding with a sharp rise in prolonged summer heat. A University of Arizona analysis found the trend pushed Pima County’s heat-death rate close to Maricopa County’s in 2023 — even though the north county is hotter.
Otto’s research involves comparing the heat experience of people who live in manufactured housing, public housing and low cost apartments, and seeing what tools they use to keep their homes cool on a daily basis. That can mean choosing between coolness and housing stability, at times.
“What types of daily activities people do to not just maintain temperature in their home but just to ensure they have housing can be very contradictory,” says Otto. “You have to make decisions about whether you are going to repair an AC or pay rent when it’s increased.”
In 2024, Tucson had 112 days of 100 degree-plus heat, more than any year on record so far, according to the National Weather Service. This year, Tucson hit 100 degrees April 11, more than a week earlier than the previous record of April 19 in 1895.
Altogether, says Otto, this means heat resiliency is an urgent issue.
Arizona Luminaria spoke to three Tucson residents on the front lines of the heat crisis: a mother evicted and grieving her brother, a woman rotating between shelters and her car, and families in a mobile home park where the power kept going out.
Roseanne Aldama
To keep cool during the day, Roseanne Aldama fills a blow-up pool with water. Her daughters splash around and as the water evaporates it cools them off. She sits with her feet in the water. “It’s nice and cool. We stay there for hours,” she says, “just messing around and everything.”
At the end of each day, when night falls, Roseanne and her two daughters plug in a window unit that rapidly cools their home.
“At night we get AC around 10 p.m. until around 7 a.m.,” says Aldama. “It feels good because once you get out of the pool you are cool, and then you go in and it’s nice and cool.”
She and her daughters also only eat once a day and nap when they aren’t in the pool. “They don’t feel like moving,” she says. “They have to water down our cat.”
Despite figuring out a way to get through the day, the difficulties of the housing system and extreme heat have left a sharp rending through her life.
This year, her family was making it through the summer, until tragedy struck. Her brother, who lived behind her house in an RV without electricity, died on Aug. 7 of environmental heat exposure. “We were really tight. We grew up together. He was always helping me raise my children,” she says. “The day that he died he was no longer himself no more.”
Aug. 7 reached 112 degrees, the hottest day of that month, according to the National Weather Service.
At the same time, momentum is building for accountability in manufactured home communities.
Aldama was evicted from the Tucson mobile home she was renting in October 2024 over five years of allegedly unpaid utility bills. And in the years since, organizers have brought attention to the issue of erroneous utility bills in manufactured homes in Pima County. Skyline, the company that owned Aldama’s park, was ordered to credit residents who were overcharged by up to $1,000 for water.
“Don’t ignore people that are in need,” she says. “We need resources.”
Jeneen “JP” Paxton
For JP Paxton, surviving each day in Tucson’s extreme heat means leaning on all of her skills: as a nutrition advisor and as a former Army wife tasked with keeping up the morale of military families.
When she gets food from a food bank, she’ll avoid the baloney, chips or other overly salty foods. “All of this is going to pull moisture out of the body, right?” she says. “There is no colorful replenishment. There is no lettuce, no carrots.”
To get access to that colorful replenishment, Paxton keeps fresh fruit and vegetables, like a head of lettuce, in a small cooler she packs with ice from Circle K.
She also sleeps during much of the day to avoid the heat of the sun. “I have to find somewhere to be from 10 in the morning until 4 p.m. in the afternoon.” If she needs to be out, she’ll take a sponge bath. “I have the things that I need to wash up real quick and cool my body off,” she says.
And, while she is surviving, Paxton runs a business where she brings cannabis to people living outside to help them find a healthy way to stabilize their moods. “I believe in cannabis first as my business model,” she says. She offers people use of her phone, of the internet, coffee or cigarettes. “These are all the things that people outside are missing,” she says.
Paxton has learned to live outside, but she sees the need to do it, and her difficulty finding stable housing, as a sign of a bigger social problem.
“If you ask me, the people of this country gave up on this damn country,” she says. “The people stopped caring.”
Redwood residents
Nearly every day in June, it was like clockwork, says Miryam Palafox. At around 3 p.m., the electricity would go out at her home at Redwood Mobile Home Park. With the summer heat quickly making the temperature soar, Palafox would quickly gather up her daughters and take them into the car for air conditioning or to her mother’s house nearby.
“I think I recorded 87 in the trailer with a thermometer,” she says. “My 4-month-old can’t speak. She can’t tell me: Hey, Mommy, I’m hot.”
Her neighbor, Paul Lopez, also worried about the heat.
Lopez had a kidney transplant several years ago and takes a cocktail of medication every day.
His partner Laura Lahr worries it makes him more vulnerable to bad health effects when exposed to fluctuating heat extremes.
“We’re burning up over here. It’s hot! And then when it goes out it takes a lot longer to cool back down,” Lopez says.
Redwood park residents haven’t been alone: following over a year of organizers bringing attention to the danger of power outages in mobile home parks, Attorney General Kris Mayes stepped in on their behalf.
In the past several weeks, Mayes ordered the south side mobile home park to restore power and air conditioning, saying repeated outages put residents’ lives at risk.
In a statement to Arizona Luminaria, Josh Court, central regional leader with The BoaVida Group said the office did not have a comment beyond that “we have been in touch daily with the AG’s office and continue to work to ensure the system is used as designed.”
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Mayes has since sued the park and warned other landlords that poorly maintained parks are against the law.
“Mobile homes heat up incredibly fast. These conditions aren’t just dangerous — they’re deadly. And I won’t stand by while landlords take advantage of mobile home tenants by failing to provide a habitable living environment,” said Mayes in a statement. “Electricity and AC are life-saving necessities in this heat, particularly for seniors and infants. Mobile home landlords must follow the law.”
In particular, Mayes said, parks must share information about electrical or other issues in parks in order to comply with the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act, which protects consumers from fraudulent business practices.
Even as she continues to deal with outages amid extreme heat, Palafox has found the experience of fighting back a hopeful one.
“For me it’s my kids. That’s why I spoke out and I think you know everytime somebody comes and asks us questions is because I want our voices to get out there and have somebody else to come and support us.”
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