The (In)Equities of Superstorm Recovery
Ian Liberty
20 September 2013
Soon after the initial shock of largest hurricane to ever hit the Jersey Shore began to dissipate, scholars, reporters and advocates began to look deeper at the implications of the disaster. Like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy exposed fundamental inequities in our society that resulted in frightening racial and economic disparities between those devastated by the storm, and those less affected. We learned from Hurricane Katrina that “outsiders who wonder why residents ‘chose’ housing susceptible to flooding disregard the legacy of laws and hostility that excluded most African Americans from surrounding suburbs.”
Hurricane Katrina was transformative not just in the damage that it inflicted. As another commentator explained, “Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.”
While, perhaps, not to the extent as New Orleans, New Jersey suffers from its own unique landscape of inequality. A history of “home rule,” sprawl, and opposition to affordable housing has turned New Jersey, and particularly the Jersey Shore, into a checkerboard of racial and economic segregation. The devastation that results from natural disasters such as Hurricanes exploits the particular vulnerabilities that result from this inequity. New Orleans demonstrated that the concentration of underemployed, uneducated, impoverished individuals in an area with insufficient resources, infrastructure, and transportation opportunities puts individuals at a heightened state of vulnerability to natural disasters. As in New Orleans, some of the most affected communities in New Jersey were those most in need prior to the storm.
It is not enough to simply point out these inequities, however. The State’s disaster recovery plan must reflect an understanding of, and adequately account for, these inequities. It must recognize what the landscape of inequity in New Jersey was like prior to the storm, it must consider the factors that increase individuals’ and communities’ vulnerability to the effects of natural disasters, and – most importantly – it must be implemented to both address the needs of the vulnerable and remedy the systemic inequities that created the vulnerability in the first place. Manuel Pastor explains that:
Achieving regional equity means considering both people and place. A competitive and inclusive region is one in which members of all racial, ethnic, and income groups have opportunities to live and work in all parts of the region, have access to living wage jobs and are included in the mainstream of regional life. It is also one in which all neighborhoods are supported to be vibrant places with choices for affordable housing, good schools, access to open space, decent transit that connects people to jobs, and health and sustainable environments.
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