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Saturday, September 02, 2017

Class Differences in Catastrophes

"Hurricanes don't care if you're rich, poor, white, or black—but that doesn't mean that every person is equally vulnerable to a storm," observes Jeremy Deaton of ThinkProgress. "Low-income families are more likely to live in flood-prone areas with deficient infrastructure."

Neil deMause notes in an analysis for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), "nearly 600,000 Harris County residents live below the poverty line," yet "one had to read carefully between the lines" to find their stories told in any detail.

Texas's minority and low-income communities have been disproportionately harmed by Hurricane Harvey. It is low-income and minority communities that always bear the brunt of natural disasters. but you wouldn't know it from the coverage of America's mainstream media outlets. The national media has consistently shown its "blindspot for low-income victims," deMause concludes.

Robert Bullard, professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston explained that "low-income communities and communities of color don't get the necessary protection when it comes to flood control. Generally, the way that the city has grown and the way that the housing and residential patterns have emerged have often been along race and class lines... the result of policies designed to "perpetuate segregation." , Dr. Bullard concluded that "when we talk about the impact of sea level rise and we talk about the impacts of climate change, you're talking about a disproportionate impact on communities of color, on poor people, on people who don’t have health insurance, communities that don't have access to food and grocery stores."

Houston spends more on infrastructure in wealthier neighborhoods.

Not only do these communities lack the some of the protective components of their rich counterparts. As Neena Satija and Kiah Collier of The Texas Tribune have noted, they also lack a social safety net to help them cope with the aftermath of the storm. "Hundreds of families have been displaced from city-owned public housing complexes that flooded in the wake of Harvey," Satija and Collier write, citing an adviser to the Houston Housing Authority. "Rebuilding will be a long and painful process for people with so few resources."


Adding to these concerns is the fact that low-income communities in Houston are often also the site of major oil refineries and chemical facilities. Oil-industry facilities spewed thousands of tons of toxic chemicals into defenseless communities, despite ample warning about hurricane risk to this area.
"For decades, Houston has been home to an immense concentration of chemical and plastics plants, oil and gas refineries, Superfund sites, fossil fuel plants, and wastewater discharge treatment plants," Sierra Club has observed. "The overwhelming majority of these facilities were constructed in communities of color, only adding to the burden felt from this disaster. Now, in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, the threat posed by these facilities has been magnified."

Of course, the media are “blind” to poor people and communities. In a capitalist political economy, the purposes of poor people (and most of the rest of us) are to provide low-cost labor 


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