Post-Disaster Housing Woes

Its been three years since Hurricane Katrina and the FEMA has finally issued a much-awaited draft of a new disaster housing strategy, commissioned by the Bush administration. This proposed strategy is much overdue, and so I read it eagerly when it came out.

What an utter disappointment.

I was hoping for some innovative ideas to address the significant problems we've all seen in relation to post-disaster housing. Research on housing-related policies and outcomes after numerous U.S. natural disasters documents consistent disparities based on race, class, and gender. Peacock and Girard (1997) found that racial and ethnic minorities tended to receive insufficient insurance settlements because they are less often insured by major national carriers. Blanchard-Boehm (1997) reported that financial constraints reduce the likelihood that African-Americans made structural improvements so their houses could withstand natural disasters, resulting in more serious damage to the homes of African-Americans. Enarson (2008) pinpoints elderly women as more vulnerable during disasters. Similarly, temporary housing put in place after a disaster is often not designed with the needs of women and children in mind.

More recently, we've all heard a long string of exposes on the significant social and health costs associated with FEMA travel trailers issued to Hurricane Katrina and Rita survivors. Formaldehyde levels in the trailers caused respiratory problems and made many inhabitants sick. Trailer camps were often far away from commercial and residential centers making it nearly impossible for inhabitants to find employment or other housing. Cramped conditions, isolation, and post-disaster depression created a toxic mix. Domestic violence, mental illness and suicide skyrocketed. As a nation, our approach to post-disaster housing seems to be on-par or worse than the primitive tents and survivor camps in mega-disasters overseas.

So, with all of these problems, what did the 2008 Disaster Housing Plan recommend? Almost nothing new. The plan is basically a description of a mixed-plan approach based on the rental voucher and trailer solutions used in the past. While they have now put a 6-month limit on travel trailer occupancy, they have pushed the ethical and legal issues to the states. Now it is the states who have to determine acceptable levels of formaldehyde and bear legal responsibility if anything goes wrong. More significantly, the plan leaves many of the big challenges to a currently unformed housing task force. They have left the important equity and recovery questions posed by Congress to an even later set of annexes. I'm unimpressed.

If you want to read and comment on the proposal, you can to FEMA's press release here.

On a brighter note, four students in our Practical Applications of Emergency Management class and over two dozen students in a complementary design class tackled the issue of post-disaster housing this Spring semester. A draft policy brief based upon their work is available on the IGCR website, here, including a few innovative conceptual alternatives to travel trailers and FEMA camps.

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End of Katrina Trailer Parks; New FEMA Expectations?

Here's a poignant and pointed story by the NYT on the shuttering of the last FEMA trailer parks and the still-vulnerable people who are struggling to leave. The tone that reporter Shaila Dewan takes in this story with respect to FEMA is an appropriate one -- painting them as an highly imperfect agency (who isn't?) that has had egregiously unfair expectations put on them.

FEMA, which ultimately is a disaster-response agency, not a social service department, endured years of blistering criticism for its failure to understand that many New Orleans residents needed more than just a roof over their heads after the hurricane. The agency now is quick to admit that other agencies are better equipped to handle persistent social ills. Its job in cases like that of Ms. August, FEMA officials say, is limited to getting her housed.

Now I'm the first to criticize our country's (over-)emphasis on emergency preparedness and emergency management, rather than social vulnerability reduction and sustainable development. However, I think a lot of the specific criticisms of post-Katrina/Rita FEMA were unwarranted. First, it wasn't FEMA that made cuts to itself and made it a small fish in a ginormous Department of Homeland Security pond. Second, as the above quote hints at, FEMA is an *emergency management* agency. It should be supported in this role and not overstretched to meet public demands that can be met better by other agencies and perhaps even the private sector. The point ultimately is that we as a government and society need to mainstream disaster risk reduction and sustainable development (two sides of the same coin).

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Homeless in New Orleans

Disasters are most disastrous for those on the "margins," whether it be a business struggling with debt or an individual struggling with chronic illness and poverty. That seems obvious. But the thing that folks don't often think about is how the "margins" expand with each disaster if we don't work to reduce their everyday vulnerability.

Here we see that the homeless population has nearly doubled in New Orleans post-Katrina while the efforts to deal with homelessness have not.

By one very rough estimate, the number of homeless people in New Orleans has doubled since Katrina struck in 2005. ...

New Orleans had 2,800 beds for the homeless before the storm; now it has 2,000...

So what happens after the next hurricane or heat wave in New Orleans?

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