David J. Phillip/AP
Blog by Margaret Ross-Martin, M.R.P. ’19
The 2017 hurricane season may be over, but the recovery has just begun. Initial surveys of the damage indicate that low-income communities and communities of color have been disproportionately affected. During Hurricane Harvey, 13 of Houston’s Superfund sites flooded, contaminating the predominately Black and Latinx neighborhoods on the city’s east side. In the wake of Irma, Miami-Dade County designated hurricane debris dumping sites in poor and minority communities. Following Hurricanes Irma and Maria, Puerto Rico continues to experience the longest power outage in U.S. history. It is no coincidence that the overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans are poor and Hispanic.
In the months and years to follow, residents of Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico will pick up the pieces and make their way down the long road to recovery. As we saw New Orleans post-Katrina, policymakers and politicians tend to view this period as a means to return to the way things were, or, more nefariously, to reinforce existing inequality—sweeping marginalized communities away and “revitalizing” to attract newcomers and develop a stronger tax base.
But in the aftermath of such storms, what if we did the opposite? The period after a major disaster is a unique opportunity to redress the inequity of the status quo, which is defined by a long history of racially discriminatory practices that concentrate poverty, limit economic investment and, in turn, diminish opportunity for minority groups. The physical destruction of unequal and racialized space is perhaps the best opportunity there is to implement a more equitable vision for our future cities.
Such an approach to disaster recovery would be unprecedented. New Orleans in particular offers well-documented and salient lessons for the ways in which policy surrounding disaster recovery is typically circumscribed by existing structures of inequality, and used to justify the displacement of “unwanted” communities. For evidence of this, look no farther than the city’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which proposed that certain neighborhoods should be rebuilt while others are converted into park land. The proposal was illustrated using the now infamous “green dot map,” which placed green circles atop of the neighborhoods that were to be demolished and naturalized as parks. The map presented itself as a neutral and objective plan for rebuilding, but it was in fact blatantly discriminatory—how else can we explain that it proposed to rebuild Lakeview, the wealthy, white neighborhood that sits more than four feet below sea level, and demolish the Lower Ninth Ward, the poor, black neighborhood, most of which is at or less than half a foot below sea level?
The racialized undertones of New Orleans’ recovery did not end there. The city also used the storm as an opportunity to close four of its largest housing projects despite the fact that these projects did not flood. As thousands of affordable units – people’s homes – were needlessly bulldozed to the ground, a congressman from neighboring Baton Rouge was overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” That it is impossible to imagine the city demolishing comparably water-damaged mansions on St. Charles Avenue underscores the degree to which race and class are inextricably tied with homeownership and deservingness, and ingrained into the policies that tend to drive post-disaster recovery.
The state and federal approach to New Orleans’ recovery ran parallel to the priorities of the local approach, advancing an uneven recovery that advantaged the city’s whitest and wealthiest residents. The State of Louisiana, in partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, developed the Road Home grant program that distributed money for residents to rebuild. But rather than distributing money based on the cost to rebuild, the program distributed money on the value of each applicant’s home. In a city where a home in a white community was typically appraised at a value higher than the same home in a black community, and blacks had median household incomes worth less than half of white median household incomes, the Road Home program effectively incentivized wealthy and middle-class white homeowners to return, discouraged poor blacks from returning, and deepened existing racial disparities.
This confluence of poverty and racially discriminatory policy panned out in a predictable way. Overall, the city’s economy is stronger than it was before Katrina, but the recovery has been to the benefit of whites and detriment of blacks. The data speaks for itself: According to the most recent census data, African Americans comprise 59% of the city’s population, compared to 67% in 2000. Meanwhile, the white population has increased from 27% to 31%. (New Orleans’ Asian American and Latinx populations have also increased.) Additionally, current black residents are less likely to be working than they were before the storm, and more likely to be living in poverty. Overall, black household incomes have fallen, and the racial gap between white and black incomes has increased.
As the example of New Orleans makes patently clear, disaster recovery can function as a machine for reproducing and reinforcing racial inequality. In his recent article, “Zoned for Displacement,” CityLab staff writer Brentin Mock explores this phenomenon in the context of Houston following Hurricane Harvey: “The people of these heaviest-hit communities are vulnerable to displacement,” he writes, “because of the injustices they lived with long before any floods and storms.” Storms like Katrina and Harvey add insult to injury for residents of color, considering that it was discriminatory lending practices and chronic disinvestment that confined many of these people to the lowest elevation neighborhoods to begin with.
On top of the policies that zoned blacks and Hispanics into flood prone areas in low-lying, coastal cities like New Orleans and Houston, these people of color are also much less likely to own their homes. This makes it harder for minority families to accumulate wealth over generations, and contributes to widening the racial wealth gap. According to a recent report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, a dollar of wealth for the median white American family is equivalent to fewer than 8 cents of wealth for the median African American family, and fewer than 10 cents of wealth for the median Hispanic family. This is to say that even in a scenario in which African American or Hispanic residents do not have their homes covered by green dots or bulldozed to the ground, the cards are still stacked against their favor as they are statistically far less likely to have the financial means to return home.
And yet, we continue to approach recovery without regard for this reality, or this history. In the aftermath of Harvey, eviction notices are being served to the residents of the low-income, African American town of Port Arthur in East Texas, as Houston is using FEMA money to raze homes in the equally vulnerable but much wealthier neighborhood of Meyerland. These patterns are also appearing in less visible and more insidious ways: A recent New York Times investigation revealed how rainwater bacteria like E. coli are significantly more concentrated in the city’s economically disadvantaged and minority neighborhoods.
These patterns are constructed, not inevitable. Often, politicians speak of a “silver lining” of disasters like hurricanes, floods, and fires. These events are tragedies, but they are also opportunities for bold visions and unprecedented collaboration. Instead of reinforcing a legacy of entrenched inequality, what if we took these inevitable tragedies as unique moments to address inequality and promote equity? To begin, we must acknowledge that no policy is produced in a vacuum; groups who have been historically marginalized and disproportionately affected by disaster must be treated differently than those who have experienced a relative advantage. Recovery strategies and policies should seize the small window that disasters offer us to challenge dominant structures of power and disrupt the reproduction of inequity. We can, and must, do better.