When Farwa Ali and her family wanted to buy a larger home, Mountain House, California, seemed to check all their boxes.
The fast-growing community, just 40 miles inland from where they lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, offered good schools, a diverse population and dozens of large homes for sale within their budget. It seemed to be a perfect match – at least until their first summer, when the scorching temperatures of California’s Central Valley arrived.
“We never thought it would be this hot,” Ms. Ali said Tuesday as she walked through a supermarket parking lot where temperatures were well above 40 degrees.
Mountain House, about 60 miles east of San Francisco, became California’s newest city on Monday after voters in the spring agreed to let their bedroom community be run by a full-fledged government with a mayor and city council. What started as a small development in the suburbs has been propelled in recent years by a wave of homebuyers priced out of the Bay Area.
Inland cities have been attracting residents from coastal California for years, but the migration accelerated after the pandemic hit, when many workers were able to work from anywhere and families wanted more places to live.
One of the downsides of moving inland has been the oppressive heat waves that are rarely felt near the California coast. As a result of climate change, hot areas are becoming more intense and more and more newcomers are being exposed to extreme temperatures.
The latest test came this week, as the first extended heat wave of the summer gripped the state’s interior. The extreme heat is expected to last for days; in Mountain House, temperatures were expected to reach 110 degrees on Wednesday and could remain above 100 degrees well into next week.
As the sun began baking Mountain House this week, the newly incorporated town canceled youth practices for tennis, golf and flag football. Construction workers, landscapers and garbage collectors shifted their schedules to earlier in the day. Most residents hunkered inside.
The name Mountain House may suggest an elevated spot in cooler air, but the city gets the same scorching heat as the rest of the Central Valley in the summer. It sits at the foot of the Altamont Pass, which commuters have traversed for decades to reach workplaces in the Bay Area, passing giant wind turbines that are part of California’s efforts to harness clean energy.
Mountain House was founded in 1996 on former alfalfa fields. In 2008, falling home values during the financial crisis made Mountain House “the most underwater community in America,” The New York Times wrote at the time.
However, California home prices have soared since then, and a new wave of people moving to Mountain House has brought young families and greater ethnic diversity to the community. About half of the city’s 25,000 residents identify as Asian American. according to a 2022 census survey.
Andy Su, the new mayor of Mountain House and an emergency room doctor, said the heat is not an overwhelming concern at the nearby hospital where he works, Sutter Tracy Community Hospital. Although he has seen an unusually high number of patients with kidney stones due to dehydration, he doesn’t see many other heat-related illnesses, he said.
“When people move here, they make the decision, they know what they’re getting into,” said Dr. Su. “It’s warm, but we adapt our lives to it – just like when you live in Alaska, you adapt your life in the winter.”
Kevin Costa, a solar energy technician, outfitted his Mountain House home with large overhangs and dark window screens. During weeks like this, he turns on the fans, turns on the air conditioning and avoids the garage, which “is like an oven,” he said.
On the hottest days, he said, he puts a wet towel on his neck or dips his shirt in cold water before leaving the house. Even then, he said, “it feels like a hair dryer, constantly blowing hot air at you.”
Some Mountain House residents said this week they were used to the similarly warm weather in their hometowns in India, Pakistan or the Philippines.
When the heat hit, Ms. Ali, who is originally from Bangalore, India, said she changed her family’s diet and made traditional dishes that help them stay cool. Her warm-weather recipes include yogurt, okra and gourds, and exclude red meat and chicken. “I’m still not sure if it really works in this extreme heat,” she said.
For some residents there is little recourse.
Daniela Soto and her two sons moved to Tracy, the next city east, in search of cheaper rent after living in the bay-adjacent city of San Leandro, California, and in New York. She still can’t afford to turn on her air conditioning, she said, so she took her boys to a splash park in Mountain House on Tuesday.
She said she would like to move to a cooler city in California, but that option seems increasingly out of reach.
“They’re going to be expensive no matter where you go,” she said. “It’s almost like you’re trapped in this hot bubble.”
Judson Jones reporting contributed.
