Gradual Disasters

The racial and geographic inequities that Hurricane Katrina exposed were shocking. Commentators around the country wondered how conditions could have deteriorated so quickly in neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward, where both natural and man-made factors - along with years of neglect, disinvestment, and abandonment - converged to produce disastrous consequences for most of New Orleans’s neighborhoods of color. Tragic as the events were and are for New Orleans, the storm seemed to open the country’s eyes to the gross disparities that existed there. But what many people still fail to recognize, more than a year after Katrina, is that it shouldn’t take a hurricane to expose the slow-moving disasters that are happening in other cities around the country.

Some 80,000 houses were destroyed in Orleans Parish alone when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. But in 2005, there were an estimated 90,000 vacant or foreclosed parcels in the city of Detroit, where there has been no hurricane at all - just decades of disinvestment, dwindling population, and neglect. The population of New Orleans was 171,000 as of June 2006 - just 35 percent of its pre-storm population. While the decline in Detroit’s population has occurred over a longer period, the numbers are just as dramatic: since its peak of 1,850,000 people in 1950, Detroit shrunk to a population of 951,270 in 2000, and by 2004, the estimated population was 900,198.

Unemployment rates in the New Orleans region hit a high of 7.2 percent in June 2006. But that is normal in metropolitan Detroit, where the unemployment rate - 7.9 percent - is one of the highest in the nation. And while the news media swooped in to ponder how New Orleanians would make a living with thousands of businesses out of commission and no tourism dollars to speak of, not many national newspapers ran stories about a study released earlier this year that found that nearly a third of Cleveland’s residents - 32.4 percent - were living below the federal poverty level.

The reasons why certain white neighborhoods in any city fare better than impoverished, mostly black communities has deep roots in history. It can best be described as “spatial racism,” a phrase coined by Francis Eugene Cardinal George of Chicago five years ago. We have used space, land use planning, and infrastructure investment to do the work of earlier Jim Crow laws that the country formally repudiated. During the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement, blacks and later other racially marginal groups moved to the city in search of opportunity. But at the same time, federal, state, and local governments were incentivizing the movement of white Americans to new suburban space, defined by its physical distance from the inner city and status distance from blacks and other people of color. This wasteful development pattern was and is about race, space, and class. The use of federal dollars for highways, sewers, and infrastructure, with the addition of tax abatements for the new and disinvestment in the old, is not just our history. It is the template that continues to define our cities and the current dynamics of racialized sprawl that give meaning to Cardinal George’s observation. These policies and practices are wasteful in at least three regards: they are wasteful to the environment, wasteful of human lives, and wasteful in loss of productive creative capacities. We are enabling and quietly witnessing the sorting of people by race and space, while the constant shift of infrastructure investment (and private investment) from the city to the suburbs continues unabated.

There has been modest change in recent decades as some middle-class blacks, Latinos, and Asians have begun moving to the suburbs in greater numbers. But this movement is usually to suburbs where opportunity is once again limited, and the federal government continues to promote this racialized pattern with less money for older suburbs where these pioneers are likely to settle. Thus, despite their efforts, they are likely to find opportunity just out of reach.

In most cities, poor people of color are exposed to long-term disadvantages, such as underfunded public schools and inadequate health care facilities, physical isolation from vibrant commercial centers, and diminished environments. Katrina exposed not just poor disaster response and planning in the short term, but long-term neglect of low-income communities and irresponsible planning practices that isolate poor people of color from the wider advantages of a region. The segregation of people from opportunity is a growing disaster of a magnitude wider and more cumulative than the terrible devastation wreaked by Katrina.

Ironically, at a time when addressing poverty and social inequity should be at the forefront of our public policy agenda, we are pulling away many of the critical resources needed to save not only New Orleans, but our cities and metropolitan regions across the nation. While some resources have begun to flow into Gulf Coast reconstruction, the federal government is reducing its commitment and funding to other key programs, such as community development grants in struggling cities like Detroit and Cleveland. Reducing support for these programs will further heighten the isolation and vulnerability of our inner city communities of color, in the Gulf Coast and across the nation.

Just understanding the challenges facing cities like New Orleans, Cleveland, or Detroit will not address the racial and social inequities plaguing our nation’s cities. We need solutions to adequately address both the thinning of opportunity for all and the intense segregation from opportunity for some. While this may look like two problems, it is really one problem with two fronts. How can we address this opportunity isolation? Connect more affordable housing to areas of opportunity in our metropolitan areas. Bring targeted investment and resources to our isolated impoverished communities. Fix the inequitable policies that fuel sprawl and bleed our cities dry of critical resources and human capital. All communities, not just a few privileged ones, should afford people life-enhancing opportunities, such as sustainable employment, public transportation, high quality education, and childcare; quality accessible health care; and safe and stable neighborhoods. Until we work to ensure that all people are afforded the right to live in healthy, safe, connected neighborhoods, we are risking the lives and life chances of millions of Americans, with or without a compounding natural disaster.