CHAPTER 2

Race-Class Logics of Urban Spaces

There is a deep history of racism and violence and segregation in this area. And that’s going to be here for a while. And that’s not going to go away because a storm came . . . When we’re working to prevent displacement, we also care about these residents [smiles, pauses] who don’t care about their neighbors.

—Sapphire, thirty-eight, lead volunteer, Always With You

Through my observations and conversations with the founder and lead volunteers of Always With You, the local community-based organization in Eastville, I explore how the race and class boundaries marked in urban space seep into the disaster response process. From the onset, the placement decisions of the NGO Resiliency Is Us replicated the racialized spatial boundaries that divide Westville from Eastville. This in turn led to racialized zones of disaster response for Eastvillers and Westvillers, respectively. Resiliency Is Us situated one of its makeshift centers in an affluent residential cluster in Westville and set up its other location at the periphery of Eastville closer to Westville. Always With You, the local community-based organization, ran its disaster response center out of its storefront location in Eastville.

The sociospatial and sociohistorical cleavages of race and class of Westville and Eastville led to racialized zones of response. Race and class enter disaster response through a process that begins with the perceptions, beliefs, and practices of responders and survivors; racialized recruitment and voluntarism among volunteers; and most importantly through the placement decisions of large NGOs as well as the service perimeters of responders around the need for space and the concern for volunteer safety. The chapter focuses primarily on the latter.

Historicizing Race and Class on The Rockaways

The Rockaways separates Jamaica Bay from the Atlantic Ocean (figure 3). It has a combined population of 114,978 as of 2010. (See table 1 for a community profile of The Rockaways.) The western and eastern side of the Rockaways are highly segregated by race and class. The residents are stark opposites on measures of income, occupational status, transfer receipt, and owner occupancy. This segregation on the Rockaways leaves the residents residing in the eastern part of the peninsula socially vulnerable to disaster (see figure 4).

TABLE 1. Community profile of The Rockaways. The Rockaways consists of several zip code tabulation areas, so the ranges in column 2 represent the lowest to highest value across the ZTs in The Rockaways.

After Sandy, dilapidated nursing homes, drug rehabilitation centers, and halfway houses were visible toward the eastern part of the Rockaways. The eastern part of the Rockaways warehouses the urban economically deprived and socially vulnerable: such as those living in single room and boarding house occupancies, and other shared living arrangements. There are also residential clusters of recently migrated, first-generation immigrants renting basements and store tops; and clusters of high-rise apartment buildings, public and subsidized, housing Black and economically deprived families and the elderly who live alone. Public housing on The Rockaways goes back to the Robert Moses’ Urban Renewal projects. He bulldozed dilapidated bungalows and replaced them with what is today a concentration of high-rise public housing (Caro 2006). Contrasting to this, The Rockaways contain the only “neighborhood in the entire country that has a majority-Irish population” (Kliff 2013). These neighborhoods with a high concentration of Irish descent residents (Figure 5) range from being modestly economically privileged to being quite affluent.

The race and class segregation of The Rockaways has a long history. From 1830, The Rockaways served as a seaside getaway for wealthy Manhattan businessmen and civil servants who came to escape the scorching heat of the summer (Bellot 1917). However, it eventually lost its appeal after World War II, leaving many of its summer bungalows vacant. The Rockaways’s residents have always considered themselves separate from New York, and in 1917 they actually sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to secede from New York State on the grounds of disinvestment despite paying more than their fair share in taxes (Bellot 1917). New York City was a significant port, welcoming over one million Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine in 1845 (Glazer and Moynihan 1970). While the Irish met with discrimination in cities such as Boston, in New York Irish immigrants soon became a politically formidable ethnic group (Ryan 1999). They also became dominant in civil service jobs such as those in the New York City police and fire departments. By the mid-to late 1800s the Irish were one-quarter of New York’s residents.

The arrival of African Americans to the Rockaways was a highly racialized process. In 1950, the Welfare Department placed the most economically deprived African Americans who migrated from the South as part of the Great Migration, in The Rockaways. Commissioner Raymond M. Hilliard and the Welfare Department settled African Americans on public assistance, who, due to anti-Black racism, were “ineligible for public housing and not easily placed in private rentals.” (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003, 69). The government incentivized small business owners of vacant summer homes toward the eastern part of The Rockaways to convert their homes to rooming houses to accommodate welfare clients (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003). In exchange they were to receive guaranteed government funding with little to no accountability, leading to providing inhabitable housing for economically deprived African Americans (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003, 69). This practice contributed to The Rockaways having the reputation of being a “repository for problems the city did not want to leave in the city’s center” (69).

There is also a Jewish population among these nonWhite residents toward the East. The Black population had been placed in proximity to Jews because “the Irish population provided more resistance than Jews . . . to the placement of Black tenants” (Kaplan and Kaplan 2003, 58). By the early 1970s, there was already an influx of Latinx and Caribbean immigrants in The Rockaways. Many of them are among the working and nonworking economically deprived residing in the eastern part of the Rockaways (see figure 6). However, a 2001 New York Times article referred to the westernmost part of The Rockaways as “the whitest neighborhood in the city, once known as the Irish Riviera [where] families go back three and four generations” (Scott 2001).

How Race and Class Organized Disaster Response

Sapphire and I stand beside a debris-filled, fire-obliterated lot in Eastville, The Rockaways. Sapphire is a thirty-eight-year-old Puerto Rican disaster response volunteer with Always With You. During Sandy’s landfall, the flood waters triggered a fire that consumed three blocks of decrepit apartments stacked atop a row of immigrant-owned retail spaces and a storefront church where El Salvadoran immigrants worshiped. Sapphire describes one way that race and class intervene in disaster response; namely, through disaster survivors themselves:

There is a deep history of racism and violence and segregation in this area. And that’s going to be here for a while. And that’s not going to go away because a storm came . . . When we’re working to prevent displacement, we also care about these residents [smiles, pauses] who don’t care about their neighbors. It’s very, very tough to negotiate your place as someone from outside who is coming to do advocacy for residents. How do you even try to bridge communities that have been segregated from each other for this long? I went to a community meeting . . . and the way the people of [Westville] spoke about the people of this neighborhood [Eastville]. [Sighs] The contempt that they expressed about the people of this neighborhood. . . . A fireman said the fire [which had consumed three blocks of primarily immigrant businesses, a storefront church, and apartments] did not go far enough.

Beyond the overt racism among disaster survivors and even responders, there were more subtle but important ways that race and class filtered into disaster response. Resiliency Is Us tended to attract White, non-Black, non-Latino, and middle-class nonlocal volunteers with leisure time or flexible employment and deployed them in neighborhoods with similar or different demographics. At the very least, disaster responders were certainly aware of the race and class similarity and differences among themselves and the communities in which they were stationed.

Alternatively, the racially minoritized tended to volunteer with local organizations in racially minoritized and economically deprived residential areas, particularly their own communities. For example, Sapphire, who was Puerto Rican and spoke fluent Spanish, continued to volunteer in Eastville because it had a “strong El Salvadoran contingency” that she felt especially obligated “to do advocacy for.” She explains that the Spanish-speaking residents who spoke little English were “lost” after the storm. She further explains Eastvillers were “discarded” because of the neighborhood’s extreme level of poverty and reputation for crime.

Race and class also organize disaster response through the placement of disaster response centers that adhere to race and class sociospatial boundaries both within and between neighborhoods (Charles 2003; Hunter 1974). For example, Resiliency Is Us, supported by several other NGOs from out of town, established its distribution center in the hub of Westville. Contrastingly, the disaster response center in the hub of Eastville was set up by Always With You, where Sapphire volunteered. There were no large NGOs in the visibly decayed center of Eastville, which Freddie, the founder of Always With You, described as where the government scattered decrepit nursing homes, boarding houses, and drug rehabilitation outpatient clinics and halfway or three-quarter houses. George, a fifty-eight-year-old unemployed Italian Eastville boarding house resident, describes other SRO neighbors as “mostly elderly, some are drug addicts, you know some work the streets, they’re retired people, ex workers from the home—they ain’t workin’ no more.” Although Resiliency Is Us set up its disaster response center in Eastville, that location was closest to the Westville border and inconveniently located away from where these most vulnerable Eastville residents lived.

The historical geographic distribution of wealth of the communities, which correlated with race and class of residents, also affected disaster center placement. For example, the Westville Resiliency Is Us center was conveniently located in the heart of the residential areas of Westville. Westvillers knew this location well and frequently traveled by it, as it was the best route to several stores. Contrastingly, the correlating street in Eastville used to house an immigrant storefront church, sandwiched within a row of retail spaces stacked with second-floor apartments, which burned to the ground during the hurricane. The location of the Westville center was in the neighborhood of third-and fourth-generation Irish residents, who are at the top of the racial-ethnic hierarchy both in terms of wealth and status. The community church was a Catholic church, which has historically owned large real estate and continues to own several buildings, but most importantly it owned vacant land, where Resiliency Is Us was able to operate. This is significant because large vacant land space is a prime asset during disaster response, since it is one of the primary factors in locational choices of large NGOs wanting to set up their response operation.

The way that race is spatialized in urban areas combines with racialized notions of “safe” and “unsafe” areas, influencing locational decisions of NGOs. Referring to the Resiliency Is Us’s Eastville-Westville border location, Sapphire explained that the large NGO was told they should set up in places that are safe, and that the NGO “defined that as right next to the police precinct and that’s where they operated.” The Resiliency Is Us website confirms that safety is one of the criteria for selecting where to locate their disaster response centers.

Related to center placement, the narratives of volunteers that link poverty level and race-class composition of neighborhoods with threats to volunteer safety also influence the service perimeter of out-of-town NGOs. Sapphire complained about the Resiliency Is Us center in Westville and the racial dynamics that surrounded the placement of the center:

When the Westville center was open, we heard from more than one volunteer that agencies would not provide services beyond a certain point on the peninsula—for safety concerns. Stories of a death of a volunteer—which has never been confirmed in any way but was only a folklore. We heard this from volunteers. Especially those coming from other parts of the country.

Sapphire’s account illustrates the relevance of race, class, and poverty composition of urban areas to the placement of NGO centers in disaster areas. Her account also illustrates how perceived threats to volunteer safety may have influenced the service perimeter of the nonlocal NGO. Beyond talk, the impression of exclusionary placements and practices of the Resiliency Is Us disaster response center, held by the Always With You disaster responders, led to further entrenchment of segregating disaster response perimeters. Sapphire told me that this action by Resiliency Is Us triggered a counteraction by Always With You to establish their own response perimeter.

Sapphire stated that the Always With you decision prioritized Eastvillers in the way that she thought the NGO had been prioritizing Westvillers, to the exclusion of Eastvillers. This mutual enforcement of a disaster response perimeter leads to inequity in disaster assistance across these communities. This is because Resiliency Is Us has greater resources than Always With You. In turn this leads to greater race and class inequality across these racially and ethnically divergent communities where such a great wealth gap already exists.

In the following chapter, I present how FEMA, another arm of the disaster response machinery, similarly contributes to the reproduction of inequality based on ethnicity, citizenship, and legal status among Canarsie disaster survivors. Since Canarsie is homogeneously Black, it also provides a comparison of disaster survivors’ experiences with FEMA in Westville and Eastville.