Coming Home after Disaster

Multiple Dimensions of Housing Recovery

Alka Sapat, Ann-Margaret Esnard, Alka Sapat, Ann-Margaret Esnard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315404240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Post-disaster housing concerns and dilemmas are complex, global in nature, and are inextricably intertwined with social, economic, and political considerations. The multi-faceted nature of housing recovery requires a holistic approach that accounts for its numerous dimensions and contours that are best captured with multi-disciplinary, multi-scalar, and multi-hazard approaches. This book serves as a valuable resource by highlighting the key issues and challenges that need to be addressed with regard to post-disaster housing. By featuring a collection of case studies on various disasters that have occurred globally and written by scholars and practitioners from various disciplines, it highlights the rich diversity of approaches taken to solve post-disaster housing problems. C oming home after Disaster can serve as an essential reference for researchers and practitioners in disaster and emergency management, public administration, public policy, urban planning, sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, architecture, and other related social science fields.

Key features in this book are:

• Addresses a wide range of dilemmas such as differential levels of social and physical vulnerability; problems related to land tenure, home-ownership, property rights, planning, and zoning; and political and legal challenges to housing recovery.
• Discusses the role played by public, private and non-governmental organizations, the informal sector, financial institutions, and insurance in rebuilding and housing recovery.
• Features global case studies, incorporates relevant examples and policies, and offers solutions from a range of scholars working in multiple disciplines and different countries.

Section II
Understanding Housing Recovery in the United States

6 The Texas Experience with 2008’s Hurricanes Dolly and Ike

Shannon Van Zandt and Madison Sloan

CONTENTS

6.1 Introduction

6.1.1 Housing for Vulnerable Populations

6.1.2 Cases

6.1.2.1 Approach

6.1.3 Inequities in Long-Term Housing Recovery

6.1.3.1 Lower-Value Homes Receive More Damage, and the Effects of Damage are Long Lasting

6.1.3.2 Renter-Occupied Single-Family Housing and Housing Types More Likely to be Occupied by Renters are Even Slower to Recover

6.1.3.3 Socially Vulnerable Residents, Including Those Who are Lower-Income and Minority, have More Difficulty Accessing Benefits

6.1.4 Failures of Recovery Policy

6.1.4.1 The National Statutory Disaster Recovery Scheme is Not Set Up to Handle Catastrophic Regional Disasters

6.1.4.2 Lack of Federal Guidelines, Poor Data Availability, and Waivers of Federal Program Requirements Increase the Probability that Aid will be Misallocated at the Federal, State, and Local Levels

6.1.4.3 Multiple Administrative Layers at the Different Levels of Government Could Hamper Efficient, Effective, and Timely Use of Disaster Recovery Funds

6.1.5 The Future of Housing Recovery

Acknowledgments

References

6.1 INTRODUCTION

Disasters occur when hazards interact with the built and social environment (Mileti 1999). Texas is one of the most at-risk states in the United States, experiencing higher than average levels of almost every type of disaster—hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, drought, wildfire, and technological disasters from hazardous materials (Masterson et al. 2014). Further, the population continues to expand rapidly along the Texas coast, placing increasing numbers of both people and goods in harm’s way. For example, although the Texas coastal counties account for only about 6% of Texas’ land mass, they are home to one-quarter of the state’s population—more than six million residents (US Census 2010).

In the fall of 2008, Texas’ Gulf Coast was struck by two hurricanes. Dolly struck the southernmost tip of Texas on July 23, 2008, home to one of the most impoverished regions in the United States, Texas’ Lower Rio Grande Valley. Approximately 2 months later on September 13, 2008, Ike made a direct hit on Galveston Island, one of the most urbanized barrier islands in the nation. These storms followed the 2005 hurricane season that included Katrina and Rita, both of which also impacted Texas. Together, these four storms caused more than $38 billion in damage in the state (Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs [TDHCA] 2011).

The process of recovery from Dolly and Ike has highlighted what many other states have recognized in the aftermath of record storms: that natural disasters expose pre-existing inequalities within the affected communities. Poor and minority households often live in areas most at risk of being impacted by natural disasters, and have the least ability to withstand the impact (Highfield et al. 2014). These same communities are often excluded from the recovery process, despite having received the highest levels of damage. While disparities based on race and income in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters have been extensively examined, much less attention has been paid to inequities in long-term disaster recovery—the process of rebuilding homes, infrastructure, and whole communities. Inequities may be related to household characteristics, housing type, housing tenure, and/or housing value (Peacock et al. 2015). Federal, state, and local systems for recovery tend to reinforce these inequalities in the rebuilding and recovery process.

This chapter first lays out social factors that mitigate or exacerbate vulnerability to disasters. Using the two cases, we then illustrate how these factors mattered during the experience of Hurricanes Dolly and Ike. Tracing the recovery process, we identify specific obstacles to recovery for vulnerable populations and offer recommendations for overcoming them.

6.1.1 HOUSING FOR VULNERABLE POPULATIONS

Impacts from disasters are due to interactions between hazard exposure, physical vulnerability, and social vulnerability. Hazard exposure is the probability that extreme events (e.g., flooding, wind, surge, etc.) will occur, while physical vulnerability refers to the potential damage to the built environment, especially housing (NRC 2006). More recent perspectives have expanded vulnerability to consider social vulnerability, which refers to characteristics of a subpopulation that create variability in vulnerability to disasters* (Van Zandt and Peacock 2012). Social vulnerability factors include income or poverty, race/ethnicity, gender, household composition, age, housing tenure, and education levels, among others. Frequently, these factors exist in combinations (both poor and black, for example), which may compound vulnerability (Morrow 1999).

Socially vulnerable populations are not randomly distributed throughout communities. They are spatially distributed based on the availability and location of appropriate housing that they can afford. Consequently, these populations become concentrated in predictable patterns characterized by concentrated poverty and segregation. Housing markets, for example, are characterized by a sequential process of “filtering” in which successively lower-income households inhabit single-family homes and neighborhoods as they deteriorate physically (Grigsby 1963; Myers 1975). Poor and minority households dwell in older and poorer quality homes in less desirable and potentially more risky neighborhoods (Foley 1980; Bolin 1986; Bolin and Bolton 1986; Logan and Molotch 1987; Phillips and Ephraim 1992; Massey and Denton 1993; Phillips 1993; Peacock and Girard 1997; Charles 2003; Peacock et al. 2006; Van Zandt 2007). Older homes are typically built to less rigorous standards, use lower quality construction materials, and are less well maintained (Bolin and Bolton 1983; Bolin 1994; Girard and Peacock 1997; Bolin and Stanford 1998).

In addition, lower-income households may find homeownership out of reach completely and instead are constrained to renting more affordable housing types, such as condominiums, townhomes, or apartments. These housing types are often regulated out of more desirable areas through large-lot or low-density zoning and building permit caps that limit the availability of affordable housing options (Pendall 2000). What affordable housing is available is typically isolated in areas where large proportions of low-income and minority populations are already located. Evidence suggests that these practices exacerbate income and racial segregation (Pendall 2000; Pendall and Carruthers 2003; Dawkins 2005; Talen 2005). Further, these housing types may be more likely to be located in low-lying or flood-prone areas.

Renting itself introduces an additional source of vulnerability. Renters, particularly those that are low income, have lower levels of housing security, personal efficacy, and privacy (Rohe et al. 2001) and have fewer resources (lower incomes, less job stability, and less savings) with which to address maintenance, repair, and recovery (McCarthy et al. 2001; Van Zandt and Rohe 2011). Further, renters have almost no control over the decision to rebuild, and are at much greater risk of temporary and permanent displacement (Burby et al. 2003).

The interactions between household characteristics, housing type, housing tenure, and housing location means that socially vulnerable populations have increased hazard exposure AND increased physical vulnerability. Further, they have fewer resources—social, economic, and political—with which to repair and rebuild, leading to longer recovery trajectories which may not achieve restoration to pre-storm conditions at all. In the next section, we examine how these factors played out in the cases of Hurricanes Dolly and Ike.

6.1.2 CASES

The Lower Rio Grande Valley is located at the southernmost tip of the state (see Figure 6.1). It is comprised of three of the poorest counties in the United States: Cameron, Willacy, and Hidalgo. With economies based on seasonal agriculture and to a lesser extent, manufacturing, these counties are also heavily Hispanic, with low levels of education and low levels of civic capacity, as seen in Table 6.1. Much of the housing stock in these counties is of poor quality, and is inadequately served by public services, including storm water management (Henneberger et al. 2010). When Hurricane Dolly struck, it was primarily a rain event, dropping up to 16 inches of rain, and leaving standing water in many areas—mostly the low-income, underserved colonias*—for more than a month, due to the impermeability of soils and the inadequacy of drainage solutions. The standing water caused widespread moderate damage in addition to disruption of normal routines for these households.

FIGURE 6.1 Location of the Houston–Galveston and Lower Rio Grande Valley regions of Texas (With permission from Michelle Meyer, unpublished.)

TABLE 6.1
Demographic Characteristics of Study Counties (Year 2010)

Source: US Census Bureau. 2010. Year 2010 US Decennial Census. htt­p:/­/ww­w.c­ens­us.­gov­/20­10c­ens­us/­dat­a/ (accessed February 29, 2016).

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Galveston Island, just south of the Houston metropolitan area, is the site of the historic 1900 storm that killed more than 6000 people; it is still the most devastating natural disaster in US history. Hurricane Ike took a very similar path to the 1900 storm, and stands as the third most costly storm in US history behind Katrina and Sandy. Ike struck Galveston as a Category 2 storm based on wind speeds, but maintained a Category 4 surge. This discrepancy between wind speeds and surge levels has resulted in a revision of the Saffir–Simpson scale to better reflect the relationship between these two factors.

Galveston has a tourism-based economy, with additional significant segments of the economy also stemming from its port, and a large medical facility on the island. Galveston’s full-time population has been declining for the past three decades due to the relative strength of Houston’s economy, the risk associated with its exposure to the Gulf of Mexico, and limited economic opportunities on the island. While summertime daily populations can swell to 250,000 or more, the year-round population of the island was at 50,000 prior to Hurricane Ike, but dropped below that due to population loss from the storm. The permanent residents are largely low-wage, tourism workers who cannot afford to live on the mainland and drive to the island daily. More than a third of residents are minority community.

6.1.2.1 Approach

We have followed closely the recovery of both Galveston and the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Our work in Galveston is based on a 3-year longitudinal study funded by the National Science Foundation, including data collection and empirical analysis of primary surveys and damage assessments of over 1500 properties, along with analysis of secondary data on all residential parcels on Galveston Island and advocacy for low-income residents with state and federal agencies. Our work in the Lower Rio Grande Valley is based on observation and analysis of administrative data, and the involvement of the authors in advocacy for low-income residents to state lawmakers.* Our Galveston analyses highlight the factors associated with different trajectories of housing recovery, while our Lower Rio Grande Valley analyses offer insight into the policy responses and failures in addressing the unevenness of recovery trajectories. We integrate these...