Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable. - The Washington Post

"When the skies opened over Houston, some of the worst flooding rose in Greenspoint. The low-income neighborhood off Interstate 45 — south of George Bush Intercontinental Airport and home to a namesake mall known for crime and vacant stores (its “days are definitely numbered,” DeadMalls.com noted in 2005) — is situated along Greens Bayou. The area’s black and Hispanic residents live mostly in multifamily, three- to five-bedroom apartments, in complexes built in not only floodplains but floodways , which the Federal Emergency Management Agency defines as channels or land reserved for discharging floodwaters. In a time-lapse video filmed Saturday night, a residential parking lot in the neighborhood goes quickly from damp to puddle to lake, until sunrise reveals a brown sea that has swallowed the first floor of the adjacent apartment buildings and half a dozen cars.



A resident, Exavier Blanchard, set up the camera as the storm rolled in. “I heard the area floods,” he explained to HuffPost.



He heard right. Just over a year before, much of Greenspoint was inundated under several feet of water in what Houstonians call the Tax Day Flood, an intense storm that dumped 17 inches of rain on the city. Residents were still recovering from that deadly deluge — dealing with moldy apartments and fighting with landlords who had pushed them out with nowhere to go, or who were forcing them to keep paying rent on damaged homes — when Hurricane Harvey came calling.



To some extent, Greenspoint’s back-to-back disasters were just an unlucky draw: The neighborhood had fared better than other parts of Houston in the equally deadly Memorial Day floods of 2015, and then in the flooding that killed six more people across the city that October . But the odds were stacked against it. As a growing body of research has shown, disasters tend to be worse for poor and minority communities — to a limited extent at the moment they strike, and to a far greater degree in the hard months and years that follow.



Low-income communities frequently sustain more damage in storms because they tend to be built on cheaper land that is often more flood-prone, said Shannon Van Zandt, an urban-planning scholar with Texas A&M University’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, who spoke with me by phone recently. It can also be harder for poorer people — who may not have cars, may be more afraid to leave their possessions and jobs, may not speak English or may fear immigration authorities — to evacuate before disasters.



That’s not to say that only the poor have suffered in the rain. As many major disasters do, Harvey assaulted the homes of the middle class and the wealthy as well. Houstonians are only now starting to get a picture of the extent of the damage across a metropolitan area nearly 10 times larger than greater Washington."



Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable. - The Washington Post