Photographs by Mikayla Whitmore
On any other day when the high was forecast to be 108 degrees, Susie Tyson would not have left her Las Vegas apartment. The stroke she’d had at 30 made her sensitive to the heat, she found; at 67, going out during Nevada’s hottest months would make her dizzy, nauseous, and, in her words, “hurting everywhere.” But on June 17, she had no choice. That morning, a Clark County constable came to evict her and her daughter Shelby from the apartment they’d lived in for nearly 20 years.
The three-bedroom unit was in a stuccoed two-story building, the generic type found in suburban Vegas’s gated complexes, with a spindly olive tree out front. In the summer, they cloistered the place, hanging blankets over their blinds to make the apartment darker and save on the energy bill. Sometimes, they skimped on air-conditioning. Susie and Shelby had wanted to stay in their apartment, and had cleared their clutter enough to pass a housing-authority inspection in June. But that month, their landlord had terminated their lease, saying they’d violated it by leaving the apartment in disrepair and letting their personal property become a fire hazard.
During the weeks that followed the eviction, Susie and Shelby scrambled to find housing, trying not to think about their worst-case scenario—that they could be forced to live outside during a heat wave.
In Las Vegas, heat is the backstory to every summer. It kills car batteries, skyrockets energy bills, makes steering wheels hot to the touch. Heat can make a good day bad, and a bad day worse, for anyone, but some people bear more of its burden than others. For people who are old or work outside or don’t have a stable place to live, the heat is particularly dangerous. When a person’s core temperature gets too hot, their organs can fail, and they can go into cardiac arrest. In recent summers in Vegas, hundreds of deaths have been attributed to heat; one study found that in recent years half of all deaths of homeless people in this county were heat-related.
People have lived in the area that’s now Las Vegas for thousands of years, but only in the past century have they lived like this—tethered to air-conditioning, reliant on year-round shelter. The increasing temperatures threaten to render the city inhospitable. The summer of 2024, which featured one record-breaking 120-degree day, was the city’s hottest ever, and about 400 people in Clark County died of heat-related illness.
In mid-July, when Susie and Shelby had run out of money to pay for the weekly rental where they’d moored themselves for the time being, the temperatures were ticking up to 114 degrees. They could handle the heat or the housing uncertainty, but facing both stresses at once felt impossible. An urgent question loomed: In the middle of a Las Vegas summer, where would they go?
This city was not Susie’s first choice of hometown. Originally from Buffalo, New York, she had lived in California and Oregon before she landed in Las Vegas. Her brother was here, her parents were coming, and she could use child-care help after leaving her husband. The stroke had made her right side weak and, in combination with back issues and a degenerative disc disease, made it necessary to use a cane. She couldn’t work much, and her health issues made driving difficult, in a place where a single errand might send a person a dozen or more miles from home.
Immediately after the eviction, Susie had Ubered to a hospital; the heat and stress had made her sick. Then, she Ubered to Arizona Charlie’s, a casino hotel 10 miles from the apartment, where she and Shelby stayed six nights and paid about $50 for each one. After bouncing for four more nights between two other casinos, they ended up at Siegel Suites, a weekly rental studio, the cheapest option they could find. Even that cost them $1,000 a month more than the rent they’d been paying.
The studio was also more than an hour’s journey via rideshares and buses to the Macy’s and Target where Shelby, who’s 32, worked part-time, and more than 20 miles from their old apartment. According to Nevada law, they had 30 days to collect any belongings remaining there. On an oppressive July morning, Susie and Shelby took an $8 Lyft to a U-Haul facility near the weekly rental, where they met up with Mia Kells, a woman from a local mutual-aid Facebook group. Susie’s parents and brother had died years earlier, and without family to help, she and Shelby had enlisted Kells as a driver.
Susie was talkative and apologetic, and quick to smile; Shelby was quiet and firm. During the school year, Shelby taught as a substitute teacher in the Clark County School District and had recently started a bachelor’s degree in early-childhood education, on a scholarship. The two were close—so close, Susie said, that the radio psychic Gary Spivey once told them they were bound together in a past life, but in that reality Shelby was the mother and Susie was the daughter. In this life, Shelby was Susie’s primary caregiver, helping her walk and sometimes dressing her. They were rarely apart.
Even with air-conditioning, their apartment was stuffy inside. As they sorted through cups, coats, Christmas ornaments, dresses, dolls, DVDs, makeup, and old schoolwork, they moved with a detached sense of purpose, their apartment of two decades no longer feeling like home. In anticipation of the eviction, they’d found a new apartment close to Shelby’s retail jobs. But now they’d lost their housing voucher—public-housing programs can revoke assistance after lease violations—and couldn’t afford the rent.
Susie collapsed into the couch to sip water. She was winded, and the small fans she’d plugged into the wall were still.
“The air doesn’t even seem to be working,” Shelby said. She, too, suffered in the heat, especially when her legs swelled and she couldn’t wear the knee braces that helped her manage the pain of her scoliosis.
“I’m melting, literally. I’m sweating,” Susie said.
By 1 p.m., it was 107 outside. It felt, said Kells, like 107 inside. Their faces were shimmering and flushed, and the mood was grim.
This was just the beginning of a week of accounting and logistics, during which they would attempt to reinstate the housing voucher and request a social-services payment to cover housing in the next weeks. Their costs were mounting, and the 10 nights in casino hotels, along with the weekly rental—paid only through July 18—had used up Susie’s monthly disability and Social Security checks. At one point, after they’d trekked to the regional housing authority, then been sent to a legal-aid office, an aid worker from another group called to say that they’d been approved for temporary housing—if they could be ready within two hours. But getting back to the rental they’d just paid for and packing up everything they’d be able to bring seemed too tall an order.
A few days later, their best chance of staying even in temporary housing was a friend from social media who had offered to pay for an extra week in the Siegel Suites, Susie said. But the friend’s payment wasn’t going through.
Susie and Shelby took a paratransit bus one last time to the old apartment, to gather jewelry, clothing, and a few pieces of family memorabilia. They couldn’t take anything else.
“Doesn’t it feel strange to even be here now?” Susie asked Shelby.
A little after 1 p.m., a staffer for the complex locked the apartment. It was 106 degrees out.
Two days later, the heat had broken; the temperature was in the 90s. Shelby took a $9 Uber to a bus stop, so that she was 40 minutes early; sometimes the buses came early, too. In the sky, dark clouds were billowing: The summer monsoon season promised some measure of relief. When the bus arrived, Shelby took a seat near the front. The bus passed her middle school, then the Strip, and then, more than an hour into the trip, climbed to the wealthier area of town, Summerlin, where she worked.
After the exertion of the week, her mother was unable to stand for more than five minutes before her back started hurting, a stabbing pain. Still, Shelby was feeling hopeful, at least about the next couple of weeks. The online friend’s payment had gone through, so they could stay at Siegel Suites through July 25. Using a payment plan—$40 a month for 12 months—Shelby reserved the studio until August 1. When Susie received her monthly disability payment, they could use that check to pay for a few more weeks and hope to sort out the housing voucher before running out of money again.
Shelby arrived at the mall before her shift started and looked for a place to do her homework; school took her mind off things. She chose a seat in the outdoor plaza. The more forgiving temperatures didn’t change the fact that she and her mother were still unhoused. Nor did it change the long-term outlook for Las Vegas. The city was in drought, and Lake Mead, the reservoir that fed the city—along with millions of other people in Arizona, California, and Mexico—was projected to hit a record low within a month. Most people in Las Vegas could avoid the heat by hunkering down in air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned buildings. But low lake levels could threaten the power supply of much of the Southwest—and the region’s water supply, too. Drought is hard to escape.
The next day, July 18, Shelby and her mother would celebrate Shelby’s recent birthday by seeing Ed Sheeran at Allegiant Stadium. They’d bought the tickets back in October, on payments, before they were worried about eviction. When she was younger, her mother had made a habit of calling into radio programs in order to win concert tickets, restaurant gift cards, even a cruise to Ensenada. This would be their first concert in ages. It was difficult to think much further ahead than that.
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