‘Hotlanta’ is even more sweltering in these neighborhoods due to a racist 20th-century policy

On a warm September afternoon, Mona Scott sat on the front porch while her home baked like an oven. As she ran a frozen water bottle across her forehead and arms, Scott told CNN her air conditioning broke 10 days earlier and had not yet been fixed. “The windows are painted shut,” Scott said. “We come outside at night to sleep because it’s too hot inside.” Like Scott, residents in the low-income communities across south and southwest Atlanta are struggling to cope with the hottest summer since the Dust Bowl period of the 1930s.”It’s just so hot,” Scott said as she wiped sweat from her brow.