LANSING — Big buildings, concrete and roads paint Detroit, just as they do other cities across the country, and the city’s temperature also tends to be hotter than in nearby communities.

Cities are prone to the heat island effect, a phenomenon in which urban areas experience more heat than rural or even nearby suburban areas due to the concentration of infrastructure.

And although summer is still six months away, experts say there’s ample reason to worry about the problem because of how cities are built.

“Impervious surfaces like pavement or asphalt absorb the sun’s energy and then re-radiate it out as heat, sometimes even hours later,” said Robert McDonald, the lead scientist for nature-based solutions at the Nature Conservancy. “That can mean 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit differences between the urban environment and the rural environment.”

On average, Detroit’s urban areas are at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than nearby rural locations.

Within the city, certain neighborhoods experience even greater temperature disparities. Around 3,160 residents live in intra-urban heat islands where temperatures are at least 10 degrees hotter than other nearby areas.

For the most part, these intra-urban heat islands disproportionately affect communities of color and lower-income communities, studies show. This inequality is structural, McDonald said.

In most U.S. cities, wealthier households left urban centers and moved toward the suburbs, particularly during the “white flight” period in the 1950s and 1960s, McDonald said.

Wealthier, predominantly white, suburban households now have significantly more tree cover.

“Our neighbors in the suburbs have on average about 30% more tree cover canopy than we do here in the city,” said Lionel Bradford, the president and executive director of Greening of Detroit. “So, you look at some of the more affluent neighborhoods — their tree cover canopy is a lot greater than that of the poorer neighborhoods.”

According to McDonald, areas with more tree cover can be considerably cooler than areas that don’t.

“Surface temperatures can change a lot when you have that shade. So, you’ll hear stories of, ‘It’s like, oh, 15 Fahrenheit cooler on the pavement under the shade than not,'” McDonald said. “Differences in air temperatures for a row of street trees are more modest — 2 to 4 Fahrenheit is pretty typical.”

The disparity in tree cover, therefore, means that neighborhoods that are predominantly populated by minorities and lower-income households are more likely to be exposed to hotter temperatures than predominantly white or wealthier neighborhoods.