Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
The aftermath of Hurricane Ian is seen in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, September 30, 2022.
“We have a long road ahead of us rebuilding entire communities from the ground up,” President Biden said Wednesday during his visit to southwest Florida to survey the damage from Hurricane Ian. Florida can expect billions of dollars in assistance as the storm-weary residents try to put the pieces of their lives back together. But while rebuilding is a first step in post-hurricane recovery, the acceleration of the climate crisis should bring new considerations, and a new urgency, to the response. Governments at all levels should reform disaster funding to reduce the inequities baked into current assistance programs and ensure that people restart their lives in safer places that are less vulnerable to rising seas and severe storms.
In their new book, Soaking the Middle Class: Suburban Inequality and Recovery From Disaster, sociologists Anna Rhodes of Rice University and Max Besbris of University of Wisconsin–Madison investigate how Hurricane Harvey’s 2017 floods affected residents in the Houston suburb of Friendswood, Texas. They discuss what those experiences may signal for the hardest-hit southwest Florida communities.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Gabrielle Gurley: The coastal and inland communities in Florida hit by Hurricane Ian are slowly emerging from the search-and-rescue period. What concerns do you have about the recovery phase once the television cameras have moved on?
Max Besbris: You’re going to see more inequality both across and within communities in Florida after Ian. This inequality isn’t just going to be those neighborhoods that were already pretty disadvantaged and left behind; that’s almost certainly going to continue to be the case. What Friendswood really illuminates is that within some well-resourced places, there’s going be homeowners and renters who do well and homeowners and renters who do very poorly. Inequality within communities is only going to grow in the wake of Ian.
Gurley: What can the experience of Friendswood, a predominantly white, middle-class suburb of Houston, tell us about recovery from disasters?
Anna Rhodes: One of the key takeaways from what we learned is that even in communities that have best-case scenarios for recovery and resilience—they are relatively well resourced, have a strong network of social institutions that can support people and majority-white homeowners who typically receive high proportions of available aid—even in that kind of place, we see growing inequality in the wake of disaster.
Gurley: What may happen in communities like Fort Myers, Florida, which is more diverse and less affluent than Friendswood?
Rhodes: What we would expect to see is an even deeper amplification of pre-existing inequalities in more racially and socioeconomically diverse places. There will likely be a broader range of financial starting points for households, and past research would suggest that we may see greater differences in access to FEMA aid and other forms of assistance across racial groups and between renters and owners.
Essentially, we would expect an even starker example of the disaster “Matthew effect” —with already advantaged households becoming increasingly advantaged and the disadvantaged falling further behind over the course of recovery.
Gurley: There are usually problems involving flood insurance, who has it and who does not.
Rhodes: There’s a tenfold difference in the financial resources that were available to Friendswood households, depending on their insurance coverage. Only about half of the folks that we spoke to had flood insurance coverage before the storm, about maximum of $350,000 in insurance. [Compare that to] $33,300—that was the maximum amount you could receive in Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance under Harvey. That is a key factor in affecting the financial resources households have to spend toward preparing their properties.
There were a few other key factors that also mattered [such as] social network connections. One older resident whose brother had a lot of experience in construction was able to foot the costs for construction materials and actually help her rebuild her home through his own labor. She was one of the first people to return to the neighborhood, even though she didn’t have insurance.
There’s a lot of variability across residents to the extent to which they’re tapped into different networks through church or schools or community organizations, and whether they might have access to additional resources through those connections.
Gurley: How should policymakers think differently about these financial incentives to rebuild after a storm?
Rhodes: As residents were making decisions about what to do, almost everything that they had access to in terms of financial assistance or resources was geared toward repairing properties. That’s true for flood insurance [and Small Business Administration] loans, which was another important factor in the Harvey recovery. Sometimes the uninsured could apply for an SBA loan. But again, that’s a tool that’s designed to be spent on repairing a home and a person has to report back about having spent those dollars.
Even the FEMA assistance dollars that people get after their homes are inspected [are for repairs]. That’s directly tied to what the FEMA inspectors observe in terms of damage to the property and the idea that those dollars are going to be spent to work towards repairing that property.
The structures that are in place for leaving a community are buyouts, that’s a very long process full of bureaucratic red tape. People have to put their house on a list for a buyout grant. Middle-class households don’t have the resources to continue to pay their mortgage on a flooded property that they cannot live in, while also trying to rent somewhere else to live that’s safe and habitable in the meantime—and then wait 18 months or more to determine whether or not they’re even going to get the buyout.
Besbris: What we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that eviction moratoria work. But, in addition to that, we need programs that offer mortgage forbearance for some period of time, so homeowners and renters can have the financial leeway to be able to make alternative decisions as opposed to just having to focus immediately on returning. We have to make these programs universal. They can’t be means-tested to the extent that only some people are eligible. In general, programs that are available to everybody absolutely reduce the apprehension that people tend to have for reaching out when they’re in need.
Gurley: Perhaps even more difficult is persuading residents in risky places that returning and rebuilding may not be in their best long-term interests. How do communities begin having conversations about managed retreat?
Rhodes: We need to start meeting people where they are, providing information to households that would allow us to open up that conversation: What are the things that are most important about where I live, and then what are those things that could be replicated elsewhere in a less vulnerable place? [In] Friendswood, even those people who talk about forever homes mentioned that should their homes flood again, they’re not sure they’ll stay.
Managed retreat is going to depend on equitable investments in things like public schools across metropolitan areas. We need to be supporting the kinds of things in communities that matter to residents if we’re asking people to consider moving away from places they’ve chosen. There’s a balance here of encouraging people to consider moving and then also building the strong communities across our less vulnerable spaces—and really investing in that—so that when the next disaster comes, people can pick their heads up and say, you know what, yes, I can imagine my family living in a different, less vulnerable place and I can see the place that will meet our needs, somewhere we can be happy living.
Gurley: What happens in Florida, a place that despite the climate crisis always attracts new residents?
Rhodes: There’s a need to be careful about managed retreat in Florida in particular. There will be some instances where we see the rebound and recovery of home values quite quickly in whiter neighborhoods and communities—and whiter and wealthier places in particular. If people start to think about moving away from those [wealthier] places, they’re going to be able to sell properties without taking a huge financial hit. But as they start to buy homes in more inland communities that have previously been perhaps less desirable, we run the risk of gentrification and displacement of nonwhite communities and poorer communities that have been in those places.
Besbris: One of the positive aspects of managed retreat is that it could involve a more democratic understanding of planning. Right now, we plan for real estate interests, short-term interests for profit: It’s really partially an issue of making sure that when we are trying to move people away, it’s not for the real estate industry that is bent on continuing to build no matter what the risk, but really thinking about what it is that people and communities want their places and spaces to look like.
Gurley: Moving people out of threatened mainland areas is one concern, and then there are places that are ecologically fragile, like barrier islands. How should conversations about barrier islands like Sanibel, Captiva, and Pine Islands unfold?
Rhodes: There’s a difference between there’s some version of managed retreat where you have a checkerboard of buyouts and a retreat where all of the properties in a place are being bought out where we’re not rebuilding again. Barrier islands are places where those conversations need to be actively happening and the community needs to be engaged in those conversations.
Besbris: This is an effort that requires investment buy-in from state and federal governments because local municipalities will always have an interest in keeping the residents in place. This is true of municipalities that are barrier islands or areas that we know are just going to be underwater in the next 10 to 20 years.
This isn’t just about collectively understanding that there’s a risk. It’s actually about spending some money and making sure that these communities can leave en masse, whether it’s through housing counselors that find them another place to live, whether it’s through FEMA block grants, that can basically help them rebuild their towns and in less risky places. They just need to be scaled up at a massive clip.
Gurley: What should national and state leaders highlight in their public recovery messages?
Rhodes: The way that resources are available to people are based on returning and rebuilding, especially for homeowners. We need policy structures in place at moments like this to say there are multiple pathways available to you. In some instances, it might be repairing properties, and in others, it might be resources that you can use to move into a less vulnerable place. [But] we don’t have the structures in place to make it easy to say, here’s an alternative option.
Besbris: One thing that could be discussed is to start saying we will rebuild in safer places, less risky places—it’s not just going back to where you were that was just destroyed. You can envision a future where you can have the same quality of life, just not somewhere that is going to be flooded over and over again.
The idea of rebuilding is appealing in the immediate aftermath of the storm because we want to demonstrate that we are strong and capable and that recovery is possible. However, the fact that neither the Biden administration nor Gov. DeSantis’s office has really mentioned anything about managed retreat is disheartening, revealing a poor understanding of how we can effectively respond to a storm like Ian and how storms like Ian are going to continue to happen.
Gurley: President Biden said in Fort Myers that “the one thing this has finally ended is the discussion about whether or not there is climate change.” What immediate problems lie ahead in the political arena?
Besbris: The conversation more broadly is shifting in the right direction. The problem, if I were to name one, is that there’s really a lack of leadership, political will, and just backbone from politicians more generally, in terms of advocating for policies that we know will work right in terms of equitable distribution of aid or mobility away from vulnerable places on the one hand— that’s understandable because politicians don’t want to be the ones to say that this town needs to move. But on the other, it just does not reflect the reality of the climate crisis that we’re in right now.
