The 108-Degree Eviction - The Atlantic
Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:0011:11
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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Mikayla Whitmore for The Atlantic<br>Susie Tyson moves her belongings from the apartment where she and her daughter lived for 20 years.
Mikayla Whitmore for The Atlantic<br>Shelby and Susie Tyson’s home on July 15, 2026
Mikayla Whitmore for The Atlantic<br>The two women were given 30 days to move out and packed what they could.
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.<br>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.<br>Mikayla Whitmore for The Atlantic<br>Shelby and Susie, on the last day they had access to their home
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...