Expect More Katrina Scale Displacement

by Leigh Graham

categories: Cities, Federal, Government, Gulf Coast, Housing, News, Race Ethnicity Class & Gender, States

Published July 15, 2009 @ 05:20AM PT

This is what we get when we attempt to shrink government so much we could drown it in a bathtub (filled with gin, preferably): California issuing IOUs in the face of a 60% budget shortfall, or, 100,000 people left stranded in New Orleans to drown amidst toppled levees.

It's definitely too soon after the disastrous 8 last years of government (and their Reaganite prelude) to think we'd have tidily and efficiently expanded government services to weather us through moments of severe crisis.  But after the travesty that was our response to Hurricane Katrina, we hear now that we haven't even managed to improve in one very specific area after four stark years of opportunity to do so: providing housing after severe disasters.

According to the Dept. of Homeland Security Inspector General last week:

Nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed or damaged 300,000 homes on the Gulf Coast and led to billions of dollars of waste in the diaspora that followed, federal homeland security officials could face a repeat scenario if another storm struck a major coastal city or a high-magnitude earthquake hit population centers in California or the Midwest...

My emphases.  Can you imagine if we witnessed something like Katrina's aftermath again??  I know we have epic crises of homelessness, incarceration, unemployment, etc. unfolding all across the country, but it's rare that as a nation we come together around such explicit, widely televised trauma.  Hurricane Katrina's impact on New Orleans* stopped us in our tracks and knit us briefly together in our collective shame and resolve to do better by our fellow poor and minority Americans.  Money poured in, speeches were made, and volunteers still traipse down to the region to lend a hand in the recovery.

But despite so much civic do-gooding, we've also grown tired of the story, gone back to our own problems, and completely lost track of the fact that our government has gained nothing in terms of expertise or preparedness for something like this to happen again.  And building on the IG's remarks, Racewire reminds us that it is the poorer neighborhoods, the majority of them communities of color, that will be hit the hardest and most likely to be permanently displaced from their homes.  With this testimony, we are basically being told to expect exactly that outcome.

If you weren't yet building your social movement for tenant rights or racial justice or economic equity, I suggest you start now.

*As troubling and unifying as the coverage of New Orleans was, it completely overshadowed the reality that Katrina devastated a region the size of Great Britain, upending communities from TX to FLA.

(Photo by author of damage in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, January 2006)