CHAPTER 5
Social Capital in Crisis
Basically, the local community ran it all before. . . . When people came here it was a place of warming. Just knowing there was someone around, especially someone that was from the community. That was lending a hand to them despite the trauma they went through. It heals what they might have been going through. . . . People to talk to.
—Merissa, thirty, Eastviller, local volunteer, unaffiliated
In this chapter, I discuss how social capital, the informational and resource value of informal social ties, becomes nonfunctional and inaccessible. My conversations with the local disaster survivors and local volunteers in Westville and Eastville illuminate what happens to social capital during a disaster. However, I argue that when the utility of traditional stores of social capital gets lost, there is an emergence of what I am calling “crisis capital” in disaster-impacted communities.
How Eastvillers Lose Pre-disaster Social Capital
Disasters affect the access and mobilization of social capital that is typically available in routine life. Several racially minoritized disaster survivors whom I spoke with or learned of through neighbors or responders had experienced displacement due to Sandy. In Eastville many economically deprived Black men lived in single-room occupancies (SROs). Several of these men lived in three-quarter houses or outpatient clinics in the heart of Eastville. Sandy displaced and dislodged them from their social connections. Jordan, a six-foot, three-inch forty-year-old outpatient resident worker, who also survived the storm surge, talked with me as he dragged a soaked mattress out of a displaced resident’s room. Jordan explained that as an in-residence clinic worker, he “basically helped residents with their drug addiction and help[ed] with whatever they needed.” When I asked what happened to the former residents as a result of the storm, Jordan answered, “Some of them are at shelters, at friends’ houses, some are on the train. Homeless. Some of them are homeless!”
Jordan also mentioned many of the former residents came back to seek him after the storm. They had asked him for information and advice about seeking disaster assistance. He told me he gave them information to apply for various disaster relief and recovery programs. However, on my later visits to Eastville, the building was tagged, condemned, and vacant. Jordan would no longer be a contact for these men who may have wished to reconnect with him. Ricky, who was a former resident from the three-quarter house across the street and was now homeless, told me that many other residents from other buildings in the area were displaced and moved to hotels in an entirely different borough. Unknown to him at the time, several months later he, too, would follow.
Another compromise to racially minoritized disaster survivors’ access to pre-disaster social capital was social network resource deflation. This deflation of network resources was due to the stripping away of social resources from long-standing social ties. The social networks of the economically deprived and racially minoritized were concentrated within the same apartment, building, or block. This meant that social ties were equally affected by the storm surge and could not provide housing, monetary, or food assistance. This stripping away of meager resources held by these social ties made them unavailable for providing disaster support.
Among the few who had familial ties outside the neighborhood, some mentioned that these once close ties were severed even before the storm. For example, Ricky mentioned that he and his sister, who lived in New Jersey, were estranged and that he would not ask for her help. He explained that she had a drug problem, and since he had been clean for seven months, he was not “tryin’ to do that.” Others talked about family rifts that could not be mended despite their predicament.
Even for those with friends in other states, the resources of these ties still proved unusable several months after Sandy. Rose, a sixty-three-year-old African American disabled former lawyer with ties in California, explained this to me:
My birthday was Christmas, and well-meaning people were actually sending me checks. . . . and I said, “There’s no bank. Where could I possibly put this?” They say “Well, is there a check cashing?” I say, “Dear, there’s no electricity. [Laughs]
Even in cases when economically deprived residents had unimpacted social ties within a reasonable distance, they quickly exhausted the resource-conferring capacity of these social ties. George, an economically deprived Italian SRO resident, explains why he returned to his room despite having no heat or electricity:
Oh yes, I’ve been to the shelter. But how long can you stay in a shelter? [Spreading his hands out, shrugging his shoulders] I’ve been with my niece for three weeks. You know, she doesn’t want me there no more. [Shrugging his shoulders, indicating that this was also reasonable]
Several racially minoritized and economically deprived Eastville and Canarsie disaster survivors who stayed with family or friends initially moved out from these homes only to sleep in cars, return to extremely cold and dark rooms, or move from shelter to shelter. Harold and Henrietta, a retired sixty-nine-year-old and seventy-three-year-old Black married couple living on a fixed income, discussed their multiple displacements and moves induced by the storm. Harold, who is from Jamaica, explained:
That time, when the hurricane hit, I wasn’t with my wife. My wife said I must come with her [to her daughter’s house]. I said, “No, I’m not coming.” So, I went down by my sister and stayed there, and then the water started coming into the basement. Then from there, we started to bail the water out, and the hurricane started, and then when the hurricane passed through, then the water started to dry out. Don’t see no more water. Then I went down by my house. Yes, when I went back home, the first thing I opened the door, and I looked in there and I said, “Oh my God. Somebody was in here.” The fridge was on the back. The bed was flipped around like that. When I looked in the next room it was full of water. I came home and went to my wife and that was it. Then, without nowhere to sleep we have to sleep in the van one night and like the gas was bad too. We weren’t getting any gas, so we went by the gas station in the line and sat in the line till I got gas, and by the time I got gas went back home. From home to the hotel, from the hotel back home. From the hotel you go back home; from home, we are over [at the Westville center] now. So, it’s not really saying, it’s not one place. We went back and forth, back and forth. It’s a good thing I got the truck too, like when I tell my wife, “I’m not coming.” She says, “Why you not coming?” I say, “No Honey, I’m not coming. You go.” And that’s the only way I could save that truck from water flowing. When I park it at my sister, look through the windows and see water start to come up. I run out and I move it to the next sister house, that’s how I saved that van up till now. Still running.
Beyond these structural and functional issues with informal networks, there are also race and class rules around asking that complicate mobilization of pre-disaster social capital of survivors. Despite the sociological literature’s emphasis on the social support value of kin ties among Black families (Stack 1974), there are also cultural rules about asking for help, regarding when one should ask, what can one legitimately ask for, what should not be asked, and limits as to when one has expended their acceptable amount of support (Hansen 2011).
All of these asking rules constrain the social capital value of these ties. Studies on social class have also shown that working-class individuals are not as inclined to ask for help as are the middle class (Calarco 2011). In the above example with Harold and Henrietta, despite having extended family in the area on both sides, this couple still resorted to sleeping in their van in extremely wintry weather, incurred multiple “back and forth” trips up to seven times between their home, family, van, shelter, and hotel. Even as I spoke to them that day, they were still contemplating where they would spend the night.
How Westvillers Lose Pre-disaster Social Capital
Sandy also compromised the social networks of White economically privileged Westvillers, but in ways that differed from Eastvillers. The geographic extent of the networks of White economically privileged disaster survivors meant that their social ties were typically outside the impacted area and often stretched into other affluent neighborhoods. One superintendent of a cooperative building explained, as we walked through a gutted-out, first-floor apartment, that residents had dispersed throughout Long Island, New Jersey, and even to Florida. Such hiatuses were an avenue for some to “escape” for a while, but they eventually had to come back and face the devastation.
However, those who lived in co-ops were the fortunate ones because they were able to use their social capital outside since they didn’t have to be present to do or oversee repairs to their homes. However, for the Westvillers who were “stayers,” most of them were homeowners of single-family homes, which meant that they were forced to remain in Westville to repair and protect their homes from further damage. This made their nonlocal social ties unusable for the purpose of providing shelter. Similarly, the storm also destroyed places of gathering, communication technologies, and transportation channels, also making most organizational ties of White economically privileged Westvillers inaccessible.
Another form of social capital that White economically privileged Westvillers had enjoyed prior to the storm was their ability to gain favors based on their reputation or status due to being board members or having a personal connection to a local bank. However, Sandy had created a situation where demands on social ties, coupled with elevated transactional risk, far exceeded the ability of social ties to confer preference. Due to the overload of requests from several disaster survivors, favors were not as forthcoming. In fact, several landlords and well-to-do disaster survivors expressed frustration with not being able to access this form of social capital.
Furthermore, disaster survivors had needs that were different from what they would have been under regular circumstances. When I asked Joe, a sixty-year-old White Westville disaster survivor and landlord with tenants in Eastville, what he found most stressful, he explained:
Well, nobody was really prepared or had any idea of how to deal with all this—It’s like everyone in the community all of a sudden had to pump out their basements, try to deal with mold, do demolition, try, and—try to reach out to plumbers, electricians to put their homes back together again. We’re all used to getting things immediately! You make a phone call, and someone comes out the next day. So that was stressful.
Similarly, Peter Dexter, an eighty-year-old small business owner whose establishment was directly across from a bank he patronized for thirty years, expressed his disbelief and frustration that the local bank, which had now partially resumed operations, would not approve his business loan application. He could not accept that he would not get preferential consideration based on his reputation of successfully running his business for thirty years directly across from and having a close relationship with the bank. Dexter was surprised to learn that his credit worthiness would now objectively be based on the current state of his damaged building and neighborhood.
Other White affluent Westvillers enjoyed a more generalized form of social capital, in the form of preferential treatment that hinged not on personal reputation but on status (Smith 2005). In this situation of crisis, when the number of residents who needed favors exceeded the ability to deliver, it rendered this form of social capital unavailable. One more available form of social capital after the disaster was the access to organizational social capital through church membership. Resident parishioners went to their churches for help and also shared this information with their neighbors. However, since church resources became a public good, these benefits were extended beyond supporting parishioners.
The most vivid example of sustained pre-disaster social capital I observed was between Sylvester, the owner of a print shop, and Johnny, a loyal patron. I stood interviewing Sylvester, who was a visibly despondent owner of this print shop, which reeked of backed-up sewage. On the walls hung shelves of paper and other unrecognizable things that were waterlogged, moldy, and damp. There was debris everywhere. However, Johnny, a disaster survivor, walked in with a smile, called Sylvester by his first name, and placed an order for a print job, pretending like the store was still how it looked before Sandy. This was a gesture of encouragement to the business owner, but few patrons had that much confidence in their own ability to pay for or use such an order.
Crisis Capital Emergence in Urban Disaster Areas
In the context of the unavailability of pre-disaster social capital during the early disaster response period, crisis capital becomes significant. Crisis capital is a transient form of social capital, characterized by “warmth” in addition to support, which stems from the local community (i.e., residents, grassroots organizing, community-based organizations). This crisis capital is quintessential to disaster response efforts even before nonlocal responders arrive with their organizations. Crisis capital is crucial to the survival of economically deprived urban communities, but the arrival of a large NGO interrupts the emergence of this significant form of local disaster social capital. Large nonlocal NGOs have access to sustainable streams of disaster resources, but they do not pursue amicable relations and exchange with local volunteers, grass-roots efforts, and community-based organizations. Yet, amicable relations with economically deprived disaster areas, if pursued, would augment and support the crisis capital in these communities.
Long before Resiliency Is Us and other nonlocal NGOs arrived, organizations and persons within those communities actualized community crisis capital. In an ideal situation, crisis capital would serve as a bridge between the loss of traditional stores of social capital and a new social capital connected to a steady stream of institutionalized resources.
Crisis capital is different from accessing preexisting social capital; rather, it actualizes, or sets in motion, the social capital potential of communities. Community disaster survivors with no personal connections or associational memberships before the disaster primarily relied on crisis capital. Even after the disaster, crisis capital, unlike traditional social capital, did not depend on having a specific relationship or tie among actors.
However, if I were to conceptualize the existence of a social tie, it would be a generalized connection between the actualized actor and a class of people or a specific demographic group such as “the elderly” or “the poor.” In this case, actualized crisis capital does not direct to any specific person but is available to anyone who is a member of the specific category. The last distinguishing quality of crisis capital is that once formed, it becomes a public good available to everyone in that class, such as “Sandy survivors.”
The source of actualized crisis capital is usually from residents and persons living in the disaster-impacted community or who have a direct connection to someone in that community. Typically, these higher-resource actors have already gone through the disaster experience themselves. This type of local transient social capital is vital within the first few days of the disaster, even before the official first responders, police, fire, and sanitation workers get to survey the damage.
In economically deprived communities, such as Eastville, this may be the only or the main source of capital available for a long time. For example, when speaking to Merissa, I asked about what motivated her to give disaster help to her community—in other words, to become a transmitter of crisis capital. Merissa explained:
Even though I was impacted, the only thing was loss of water and loss of light, but I still had a home to go to sleep. And I never thought that when I walked through this door someone would say, “I need a hand. Can you help me provide services for residents?”
The true resource of crisis capital is “know-how.” This resource is not present prior to the disaster and actualizes as a result of the disaster experience. In other words, it is not preexisting. Also, the resources from these actualized social ties are finite, and so the value of this form of capital is inherently unsustainable. One source of actualized community crisis capital was disaster survivors who began baking cakes and brought them to the church before Resiliency Is Us came, until the monsignor deemed it unsanitary.
Similarly, Rudy, a fifty-six-year-old Westviller, describes how the owner of the grocery store “emerged as a leader” in organizing the community disaster response efforts and was doing well, but then he got tired and frustrated and left. As these actualized ties first became inundated and fatigued and watched their resources deplete, their capacity to assist also faded. Another form of actualized community crisis capital came from former residents, such as Kacie, who came to volunteer in Westville because she grew up in Westville. She had a sentimental connection to the “memory” of the community as a child, but no personal or associational connections left there.
Yet another form of actualized crisis capital is the grassroots community organizing in order to provide disaster response. This type of capital is therapeutic and well received by residents, but fleeting. For example, Rudy describes his connection to a local grassroots organization. “People bonded with Apple Angels people because they gave us food and they took care of us. They’re not considered first responders, but they were the ones who fed everybody. . . . It’s the energy they gave out that had an impact.” After the out-of-town NGO took over from these local organizations, survivors felt the loss. Rudy says that his dog misses them because “she bonded with the people here with Apple Angels. Everybody knows her.” The greatest value of this form of capital stems from the intimate knowledge of the community needs that enable customized assistance to be deployed quickly, particularly to less fortunate and hard-to-reach demographics. Despite the utility of this form of capital, like other forms of actualized crisis capital, it is often short-lived due to fatigue, overload, and resource depletion, making it unsustainable for the duration of a protracted crisis and recovery.
The Importance of Local Altruism to Eastvillers
Local community volunteers and community-based organizations such as Always With You know of chronic needs in their communities, so it is not necessary to extensively communicate those needs to them. When I asked Merissa whether she had talked to disaster survivors who came to the make-shift structure before Resiliency Is Us set up its operations, she replied, “Yes I have.” Then she immediately interrupted herself. “We had problems before Sandy came,” revealing that her awareness and understanding of needs came from her own local knowledge of persistent issues. She then gave an example of one such problem. “Senior services people could not get out. Elevators did not work. One building has eleven floors.” Merissa exercised agency on behalf of her community. She told me: “I had raised the issue about sending people over for the senior citizens. There were responses. People were going to each door knocking on the door from top to bottom. I believe it was Apple Angels.” I asked, “You suggested that to them because you knew?” Merissa answered, “Yes, I knew of the situation. Then the media put pressure on things.”
This type of assistance, in the absence of solicitation, provided by community volunteers reveals an intimate knowledge of communities. This in-depth knowledge of the specific type of vulnerability residents would be experiencing is indispensable in providing disaster assistance. As was true for Merissa, the ability to empathize partially stems from similar experiences before and during the disaster.
Community volunteers are also uniquely positioned to work collaboratively with local community-based organizations, creating a more synergistic response than nonlocal NGOs could. Community-based organizations founded by community members have continually had to respond to chronic crises of unemployment, poverty, racism, illegality, drug dependency, overpolicing, diabetes, mental health, and so much more in their communities. Always With You was already actively serving the local Eastville community in that capacity. This means that their relationship with community members was intimate and well established before Sandy. This led to a holistic responsiveness that caters to a range of needs. Sapphire discussed an example with me:
SAPPHIRE: There’s a big family from El Salvador. Three of the sisters lived here . . . two sisters who lived there with children [pointing to a vacant lot] . . . had to run out of their homes in the flood to escape the fire. . . . There were seventeen people living in a one-bedroom home. You know? . . . we’re talking about very unacculturated El Salvadoran immigrants [who are] day laborers, informal workers that have had very little access to education, [who] barely speak the language in terms of knowing what aid was available for them, who they can trust, who they can reach out to, what services they were eligible for. And solving the most basic problems became twice or three times more complicated for them than anyone else because of lack of access to language, cultural aspects, and just because they lost everything . . . with the family dealing with loss.
SM: How did they hear about you?
SAPPHIRE: They came to Always With You from the first day asking for donations. I took it upon myself to be that person to work with them since I was one of the few volunteers who was here who spoke Spanish, so I ended up meeting all these families. The first day we provided them with clothes, blankets, flashlights, but eventually medical services. At one point everyone in the family was sick. We were able to bring in a doctor to evaluate everyone in the home and provided antibiotics to a couple of them. We also eventually, now that they are finally in the fourth month, have new apartments to move into. We try to get them furniture and beds. You know, we’ve helped them out with FEMA applications and their appeals.
Here we see the seamless response to cascading chronic and acute crises of survivors. Community-based organization volunteers and staff are already adept at working on an amalgamation of issues when dealing with the economically deprived urban residents. Furthermore, the people who are attracted to work with these organizations already understand these demands.
Unsolicited Assistance and Reciprocal Loyalty
Always With You responders and Eastvillers had strong bonds between them. However, Always With You did not have the direct and sustained access to resources from large corporations, donors, and the State that Resiliency Is Us does. Always With You’s founder and volunteers demonstrated strong commitment to the community beyond the disaster as they were aware of the chronic problems with the community residents.
This means that disaster survivors can automatically benefit from actualized social ties, without explicitly making a case for their needs. Always With You responders understood what those needs were. Eastvillers, in turn, repaid the psychosocial relations with loyalty and confidence. This loyalty is similar to the loyalty one would expect of regular patrons to their barber or hairdresser. You walk in, sit down, and they know what you need without explanation.
Community members established pre-disaster bonds with the Always With You founder and volunteers. This is evident in my discussion with Eric, a forty-six-year-old Native American:
SM: Who has reached out to you and helped you?
ERIC: Most certainly all churches have stepped in, Always With You is another group, the Occupy Sandy people have helped feed us and, uh, get us assistance, and, uh, Resiliency Is Us has shown up. Maybe five or six days after the storm they were here.
Eric mentions Always With You, local churches, and other grassroots movements as helping and Resiliency Is Us as merely showing up late. Months earlier while sucking deeply on a cigarette and shivering from the harsh winter’s sea breeze, referring to the make-shift structure where Resiliency Is Us would set up their disaster response center, Eric had told me: “There is a disaster response center down by the Westville Catholic Church. From the first night people have brought in clothes. See? [He pinches at his winter jacket] I’m wearing a nice warm jacket.” [Smiles] Months later, standing inside the warm Always With You center with broom in hand, he demonstrates his loyalty and reciprocal commitment to Always With You, stating, “I’m here trying to sweep up for Always With You and helping out and giving a little bit of my time. Always With You is one of the first groups that came and fed us. They gave us hot meals, so it is a way to return that favor.”
Eric immediately follows with commendation for the founder of Always With You: “Freddie is a great person. He’s done a lot of stuff in the community,” revealing the broader community context he is using to assess Always With You’s worthiness of his patronizing the center.
How Resiliency Is Us Interrupts Eastvillers’ Crisis Capital
Resiliency Is Us did not collaborate very well with Always With You in Eastville. Eastvillers perceived Resiliency Is Us responders as nonlocals who came to “take over” daily operations of local grassroots disaster response efforts. Merissa was the only remaining local volunteer at the Resiliency Is Us Eastville location. Her tenure began even before the first responders and Resiliency Is Us arrived. When I inquired about the notable absence of Eastvillers, Merissa explained that ever since Resiliency Is Us took over from a local grassroots organization, it ushered in a more “organized” disaster response effort, which made supplies inaccessible to the community and drained the community of “warmth.” This action by the NGO resulted in Eastvillers’ lack of participation in the Resiliency Is Us disaster response center. Merissa explained this situation to me:
MERISSA: The day after the storm when the water receded, we had Apple Angels [a local community-based organization] out, but we also had local churches that were also giving a hand. There was no place to place things inside a building. They were just placed on sidewalks or steps of religious organizations. [This] church was accepting a lot of donations. It was a large space where people just dumped their items here, and someone came and thought of putting things in this make-shift structure. Now it became organized with donations and distribution in one structure and food in one. With everything being so organized [sarcasm], a lot of things people need—they’re being placed somewhere else. Resiliency Is Us has a permit, but basically the local community ran it all before. Resiliency Is Us came in about late November [four weeks after the storm]. Most of it was food in the trucks. Local persons were running the tent.
SM: What difference did you observe with the transition?
MERISSA: Well, when people came here it was a place of warming. Just knowing there was someone around, especially someone that was from the community, that was lending a hand to them despite the trauma they went through. It heals what they might have been going through. Because they had someone from the community that they were familiar with to give them a hand, feed them, and give them supplies. Things that they needed as well as having some form of mental consultation. People to talk to. So, it’s basically in spite of what they had lost, they had somewhere to come to, and they felt comfort coming to this location.
What Merissa was describing was what Rebecca Solnit (2010) describes as an altruistic utopia. Solnit (2010) explained Mizpah Cafés as egalitarian kitchens created and run by local volunteers after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Merissa’s utopia was the coalescence of a local community, local community-based organizations, and local volunteers who created a “place of warming” and “healing” where disaster survivors had access to needed supplies. This utopia also provided “mental consultations” and “people to talk to.” But unlike Solnit’s post-disaster utopia, Merissa describes the abrupt interruption of this organic emergence of community crisis capital triggered by Resiliency Is Us, the nonlocal, large NGO that simply came and “took over.” This utopia was no more, as I stated to Merissa:
SM: It looks pretty empty.
MERISSA: Yes it’s pretty empty. We have been going through a lot of changes. Who is supposed to take charge? The main thing it boils down to is bringing back the communities together and having them come back to where they felt warmth. So, it’s not just that the space was warm. They felt warm in their hearts.
Merissa indicates that the management of disaster response by Resiliency Is Us left a situation where it was not clear who was “supposed to take charge.” This power dynamic that ensued impacted the quality of the disaster assistance that Eastvillers received. These Eastvillers no longer felt the “warmth” emanating from their pre-NGO-arrival crisis capital utopia, and now they no longer significantly participated in the disaster response center.
My observations of interactions and interviews with Eastvillers confirmed Merissa’s viewpoint that residents were comfortable in their relationships with local volunteers from their communities, due to the “warmth” they provided. Racially minoritized Eastvillers almost entirely disengaged from utilizing the center under Resiliency Is Us management.