Bridging the Equity Gap: Tools for Floodplain Managers. Part 2
This is the second in a series of articles from ASFPM’s Risk Communications and Outreach Committee outlining insights, best practices, and lessons learned from the Bridging the Equity Gap: Flood Resilience for the Whole Community webinar series from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers San Francisco District and the National Flood Risk Management Program.
The goal of the webinar series is to begin bridging the equity gap by understanding the scale and complexity of the problem, identifying opportunities for change, and inspiring action. In this series of articles, the Risk Communications and Outreach Committee is working hand-in-hand with the Social Justice Task Force to bring findings, guidance, tools, best practices, and lessons learned to floodplain managers.
In the October 2021 webinar, Junia Howell PhD, an Urban Sociologist and Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, presented a truly eye-opening webinar on the impact of floods on wealth inequality in the U.S. Key takeaways from this presentation include:
- The federal response to flooding and other disasters is actually increasing wealth inequality in the U.S.
- We would expect that those that experience disasters would eventually end up at the same wealth level they were before the disaster occurred. However:
- Dr. Howell found that some end up with more wealth after disasters. This subset of people who end up with more wealth are much more likely to be college educated, homeowners, and white.
- Disaster sufferers who have a high school education, are renters, and are Black or Latino not only don’t experience a gain in wealth after a disaster; they actually lose wealth in the aftermath.
- These findings are only exacerbated with multiple disasters. Meaning that college educated, white homeowners are likely to experience further gains in wealth as they experience more disasters. On the flip side, high school educated, Black or Latino renters find themselves with less wealth after each subsequent disaster.
Dr. Howell weaves a complex story about how this occurs that combines historical housing policies with present-day housing appraisal practices, economics, and federal disaster policy to reveal a major gap and an opportunity for future change. Some of the factors that contribute to this inequity include decisions on where we build infrastructure. For example, flood protection measures don’t get built where the cost of the project is greater than the value of the buildings protected; where flood protection or other infrastructure is built, it can increase the property values to the already high-valued area. Other issues include criteria for assistance/government aid programs; whether private insurance was in place before the disaster; processes for determining aid and associated program allocations; and other factors.
Best quote from the chat:
“This is such a good reminder of how important it is to re-examine the tools and processes we have in place today, on multiple levels!”
Two Things You Can Do Starting Today:
- Create measures for equity in your programs and processes. Define what is meant by equity in terms of your program or area of focus, and push implementation of those measures.
- Ask yourself: What are we asking people to do to demonstrate their “deservingness” in the programs we implement? Do these hurdles favor one group over another?
Further Reading:
Check out Junia Howell’s website for the paper this webinar focuses on and lots of other research as well: http://www.juniahowell.com/publications
Take a listen to this short podcast from NPR about how federal disaster money favors the rich.
Check out Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg, which investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, including the isolation of seniors, the institutional abandonment of poor neighborhoods, and reductions in public assistance programs.
