CONCLUSION
Ecologies of Inequity in Disaster Response
There is a chasm between human suffering and institutional support during disaster response. We need to make visible how higher-order racializing and classing logics inscribed in segregated urban spaces, organizational practices, and interpersonal relations unleash exclusionary biases, blind spots, and behaviors to deny equitable access to the poor and racially minoritized disaster survivors. We need to learn about the making of inequality, so that we can figure out a way to unmake it.
—Sancha Doxilly Medwinter, the author
Post-Sandy Rockaways and Canarsie present many lessons learned about race-and class-differentiated communities, their relationships to governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and their access to timely information and resources pertinent to recovery outcomes. Superstorm Sandy has taught us that the configurations of FEMA, NGOs, and NYS disaster response centers help create an ecology of inequity through racializing/racialized and classing/classed urban spaces, organizations, and urban residents. An ecology of inequity bestows ecological privilege to one community while relegating ecological deprivation to another. In the former scenario, a robust configuration of networking organizations and responders produces social capital relations that transmit unique access to resources and information. This concentration of organizational networks and interpersonal relations benefited disaster survivors in Westville, the White economically privileged urban area. On the other hand, the absence of this concentration in economically deprived urban areas relegates an ecology of deprivation in places such as Eastville, excluding disaster survivors in this area.
NGOs Home-Field Advantage Creation Excludes the Vulnerable
The locational decision of Resiliency Is Us, the large NGO, helped Westville become better bridged to high-capital NGOs. High-capital NGOs are, in turn, better linked to governmental resources (Woolcock 1998; Woolcock and Narrayan 2000). The convenient location of Resiliency Is Us also incubated organizational, community, and interpersonal social capital. Westvillers reaped the benefits of hypervisibility of their suffering and their disaster work, the opportunity to become “regulars” of the NGO center, and, consequently, the relative advantage of frequent interactions with NGO responders.
Westville’s interactional context allowed Westvillers to then build affective, emotional bonds with NGO responders, the brokers of the high-capital NGO. As a result, Westvillers were able to influence the on-the-ground decisions of Resiliency Is Us and reciprocally receive and share continual, informally transferred, time-sensitive disaster information and resources. On the other hand, Eastville, the economically deprived community adjacent to Westville, remained starved of such a lucrative ecology of structures and relations and the informational and resource exchanges they transmit.
The “home field advantage” that the Westville center provided to Westvillers enabled them to engage in mechanisms of social closure, quasi-privatization of public space, and hoarding of public goods. Westvillers also engaged in exclusionary narratives to substantiate notions of who belonged to Westville and therefore had a right to access disaster resources. One example is determining that people who looked clean, who were coincidentally non-White, could not be Sandy survivors and therefore were not entitled to the disaster supplies.
Always With You, the Eastville community-based organization, due to its limited resources primarily provided Eastvillers with bonding social capital, the expressive type, punctuated with short stints of fleeting crisis capital. Always With You was spatially and organizationally isolated from Westville and Resiliency Is Us, and it severely lacked its own resources. Even the location of Resiliency Is Us on the periphery of Eastville was dormant primarily due to the NGO’s strained relations with grassroots community volunteers, who were already serving the community before the NGO’s arrival. Resiliency Is Us also interrupted the early mobilization of bonding social capital around what would become the NGO’s Eastville location. Yet, the NGO was ill-equipped to replicate the “warmth” that the impoverished, racially minoritized, White, and new immigrant disaster survivors had received from members of their community before the NGO’s arrival.
Eastvillers had long-standing bonding social capital with the founder and volunteers of Always With You. However, these community-based organization responders did not have the needed links to institutionalized resources and information that was available to NGO responders through the NGO’s unique access to federal resources. There was also no opportunity for the Eastvillers who trekked to the Westville NGO center to forge bonding social capital with the NGO responders, the custodians of institutionalized resources, due to their embeddedness within the high-capital NGO. The founder and volunteers of Always With You repeatedly expressed a desire for a sustained, collaborative relationship with Resiliency Is Us, but the most they received was the occasional drop-off of an inadequate number of basic supplies such as cases of bottled water. This situation of mis-alignment of resources away from the most vulnerable communities they served was incredibly vexing among the Always With You responders, as well as other community-based organizations and small churches in Brooklyn.
NGO Organization Agglomeration Exponentiates Inequity
When an NGO comes into an urban disaster area from outside and selects a location that is most convenient to White economically privileged survivors, this is a loss of potential material and informational resources for adjacent economically deprived, marginalized communities. This loss is in the form of lost opportunity for the latter to also benefit from “home field advantage,” have influence on the on-the-ground implementation of disaster response, and receive timely, pertinent information to secure institutional resources.
However, the magnitude of loss to the urban economically deprived community is not merely the loss of what one organization provides. When an NGO that commands influence, resources, and connections with governmental collaboration locates near a White economically privileged urban area, the distributional inequities are exponential. This locational decision amplifies inequity because large and small NGOs in the disaster response and recovery organizational field may view close proximity to this NGO as allowing them to gain reputational status and organizational capital. This dynamic was evident in my conversation with the field manager of a small NGO who revealed her hope that providing support services for Resiliency Is Us would position her organization for future opportunities to collaborate with the large NGO in its international disaster response missions.
FEMA’s Bureaucratic Logics Displace the Vulnerable
Governmental organizations also play an instrumental role in the creation of ecologies of inequity. They do this by transferring to NGOs the huge responsibility of brokering State resources. Their placement in buildings with local governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and high-resource churches also contributes to organizational agglomeration. A third way that they contribute to an ecology of inequity is through the logic of response carried out by disaster response organizations and their staff and volunteers. This logic of response comprises the practices, assumptions, and expectations of governmental organizations and responders. This disaster response logic reflects and caters to White and middle-class privileged statuses, while it disadvantages and makes invisible the hardships that are unique to those who are non-White, lack legal status, and are economically deprived.
The logic of response displaces the centrality of the logic of services in economically deprived communities. The logic of services is what typically sustains, albeit ineffectively and inadequately, vulnerable populations in economically deprived urban areas. The prioritization of disaster response displaces the prioritization of the routine needs of those who have always experienced institutional neglect and economic deprivation, prioritizing the recent and immediate needs of “disaster victims.” However, this category does not distinguish those who are only temporarily experiencing acute deprivation from those whose acute deprivation compounds with their decades-long, in some cases, chronic deprivation.
The logic of response is race and class blind. As this study illustrates, FEMA-run centers and responders erased significant distinctions of deprivation that causes vulnerability among survivors. The logic of response of the ecology of inequity is also not as responsive to the disparities among homeowners and renters. This logic is especially blind to the unique plight of basement renters, who had to watch their entire life’s work be submerged under flooding that reached their ceilings, as they escaped with nothing. This logic renders basement renters invisible because this class of renters does not “legally” exist, which means that many undocumented experience yet a second type of legally defined invisibility and exclusion.
This logic of response promotes a middle-class bootstrap bias that more easily recognizes and recovers losses to the formally employed than to the self-employed. This logic of response must not fully comprehend the value of the tools, nor the value of the DJs, the peddlers, and the backyard mechanics, nor the value of these urban economies of survival.
This logic of response also does not sufficiently consider how the placements of disaster response organizations combine with the fragmentation, depletion, and deflation of social ties of disaster survivors. Furthermore, it does not see how the cultural rules around asking among racially minoritized and impoverished populations further compromises the utility of traditional networks. This logic is also blind to the fact that the networks of the racially minoritized and economically deprived urban residents suffer the most during disasters. The fact that the networks of the racially minoritized tend to be concentrated in disaster areas is not insignificant, because this means that social ties that are the key to navigating disaster assistance are themselves multiply displaced and dispossessed.
Another tendency in this logic of response is to reward “early birds” and penalize latecomers who are seeking disaster assistance. This logic of response does not fully comprehend the confusion around how legal status may impact FEMA grant eligibility or how FEMA’s relationship to the Department of Homeland Security might discourage some disaster survivors who are part of mixed-status families from seeking disaster assistance at FEMA-run disaster response centers.
This logic of response has not yet fully grasped the urgency to assuage the challenges governmental organizational support pose to the chronically economically deprived and substance-dependent program recipients. The logic of response does not see that they have been cycling through transitional housing and homelessness for years under the logic of services to then again be offered a voucher for yet more transitional housing, again with no clear path to permanent housing. The logic of response through these various pathways transmits inequity like race, class, immigrant status, and poverty status.
Centering Race, Class, and Social Capital
In discussing the specific policy implications of what Sandy has taught us, I use as a baseline the policy recommendations that FEMA already has at its disposal. On November 20, 2020, the National Advisory Council (NAC) presented Administrator Peter Gaynor a report featuring the equity issues, among other things, with FEMA’s execution of disaster response. The NAC 2020 report cites FEMA as not meeting the civil rights requirement of the Stafford Act, which explicitly states the requirement of racial equity. The executive summary of the 2020 NAC report confirms what I had already learned while in the field: that FEMA’s disaster response “provides an additional boost to wealthy homeowners and others with less need, while lower-income individuals and others sink further into poverty after disasters” (NAC 2020, Executive Summary, 6).
The NAC report also identified issues of equity at the heart of the overlapping, disproportionate, negative impacts of Covid-19 on communities that are already “socioeconomically marginalized” (NAC 2020, 7). The NAC report’s glossary defines its equity goal as “everyone meeting a minimum outcome.” This would mean that Ricky, who had slipped into a deeper stage of homelessness after Sandy, “would not be homeless” if FEMA implements this needed corrective (50). These recommendations are good first steps, although the benchmarks leading to full implementation by 2045 remain unclear at the moment.
It is important to note, however, that neither FEMA nor the 2020 NAC recommendations explicitly deal with the question of how racializing and classing structural and relational processes connect to produce inequity in disaster response. For example, where the report raises the subject of equity, we do not find any mention of race or racism (NAC 2020, 7–8). In the whole report there are two mentions of race that are part of a list, which appears in a quote from disaster scholarship and another in quoted language from the Stafford Act. The word “racial” appears twice, both in reference to racial diversity. There is zero mention of racism, neither institutional, environmental, nor interpersonal. Furthermore, the report connects the need for equity to a vague statement on “nationwide protests and unrest” and “social disruption” (7–8). This stops short of a clear articulation of the Black Lives Matter movement as an explicit, collective cry for racial equity and racial justice, of which disaster justice, with race and class at its center, needs to be a part.
The NAC 2020 report situates social capital within a framework for achieving equity, citing social capital as the “main contributor to the effective recovery of a community post-disaster” (45). The report relies on a conceptualization of social capital that emphasizes “norms,” “trust,” and “networks” (15) and is operationalized at the community level. The report also states that communities with low social capital experience low recovery, while those with high social capital experience high recovery. This social capital framework leads to a focus on building trust between communities and emergency management systems.
While the above definition of social capital has its utility, this Sandy study’s conceptualization of social capital emphasizes the information and resource conferred from high-to low-capital social ties at the organization-to-organization and person-to-person (dyadic) levels. More importantly, this study finds that race and class structures and processes impede the access and mobilization of pre-disaster social capital and therefore their utility during disaster response. Race and class structures and processes simultaneously interrupt the social capital creation for economically deprived areas and their residents, while facilitating this process for economically privileged areas and their residents. These findings point to a need to systematically investigate and address the race and class dynamics that hinder equitable networking opportunities of disaster survivors and community-based organizations to produce social capital during the disaster response period.
This approach conceptualizes and operationalizes social capital at levels that make interventions immediate and feasible. Adopting this approach also avoids the slippery slope of resigning whole communities to an uncritical fait accompli explanation that says, poor investments in pre-disaster social capital, then low recovery outcomes. From an implementation standpoint, there is also a danger of resorting to simply summoning social capital explanations as a proxy for serious interrogations of how and why ecological racism and classism leads to inequitable social capital creation opportunities during official, organization-mediated disaster response. As this study has shown, the relational processes of race and class interrupt the relational processes of social capital at multiple stages and levels. Therefore, to the extent that we care about social capital as it relates to equity, we need to keep in focus race and class structures and processes.
The NAC report also stresses the need for FEMA to place an “emphasis on local capacity” because the multistate approach has become financially prohibitive, given the frequency and intensity of disasters as well as myriad supply chain issues (NAC 2020, 45). Beyond the reasoning provided, this Sandy research identifies additional drawbacks of a heavy reliance on nonlocal response. One of these drawbacks is the lack of urban cultural understanding of nonlocal responders, which inhibits FEMA responders’ understanding of the way that urban residents structure their lives around local city living. For example, Beverly, the FEMA staff person from a midwestern state, did not understand that living in a basement apartment in New York City is not as peculiar as she perceived.
Similarly, people who are racially, ethnically, and culturally different from disaster survivors and who have little experience assisting racially and socioeconomically divergent populations do not understand the particular needs of these urban disaster survivors. They do not possess the racial, ethnic, and cultural understanding and the keen awareness of how race and class structures and processes create and maintain urban inequality. Their implicit assumptions and biases reduce the capacity of these responders to deliver assistance equitably. This problem became evident in the unfortunate slogan of a FEMA site manager who confidently stated “First you get the needy, then you get the greedy” in response to my question about a noticeable lag in disaster survivors coming in to seek disaster assistance.
Both the NAC report and FEMA seem to converge on culturally sensitive training of FEMA employees to address biases and assumptions. I agree, and I return to my recommendation of hiring local residents, who are already organically endowed with a thorough understanding of the challenges of navigating the unique terrain of the city. Disaster responders need to reflect racial, ethnic, and local community membership of the disaster survivors seeking assistance.
Implications for FEMA Response
Specifically, FEMA will need to significantly reduce its bureaucratic burdens. One primary avenue to achieve this is to streamline the labyrinth process of applying for grants. The process needs to be more linear with less emphasis on obtaining denials and submitting appeals. Many Superstorm Sandy disaster survivors with whom I spoke both in Canarsie and The Rockaways incurred what Pamela Herd and Donald P. Moynihan (2019) call “administrative burdens.” Administrative burdens are the unnecessary costs (i.e., learning, psychological, and compliance) that citizens who need to access a public benefit from the government have to incur in order to receive such benefit. FEMA processes unequally distribute administrative burdens, as not everyone necessarily has the material, human, and social capital to gather information to apply for benefits.
In particular, there is a huge tax on the emotional and psychological bandwidth of the racially minoritized and economically deprived disaster survivors when they navigate FEMA’s labyrinth appeals process. Finally, there is a prohibitive cost of compliance to administrative burdens (Herd and Moynihan 2019) such as the financial cost of applying for a SBA loan or the psychological cost of making multiple trips to centers, finding paperwork, and contacting third parties. Some disaster survivors found these burdens insurmountable and gave up before receiving any benefit. This cost is high even for those who dare to stick with the process to the end. The psychological cost of administrative burdens was particularly visceral among the racially minoritized, noncitizen, elderly, and economically deprived mothers and fathers, basement renters, and the multiply displaced and homeless in Canarsie and Eastville. Contrastingly, there was a marked absence of this anguish and fatigue among Westvillers, who often described their FEMA application process as smooth and uneventful.
FEMA needs to reallocate significant aspects of disaster response as the responsibility of governmental organizations. The staggering human suffering, deprivation, and psychological burden falls to private organizations such as churches, community-based organizations, and, to a lesser extent, NGOs. Where the State has failed, these organizations have tried to fill in. However, while nonlocal NGOs have unique access to institutionalized resources, they are not best suited to provide disaster response in impoverished and marginalized communities. We see this when we compare and contrast the disaster response pitfalls of Resiliency Is Us with that of Always With You. While local churches and community-based organizations take on this huge responsibility of meeting the needs of the economically deprived, they provide services with little to no funding. Therefore, I suggest a tighter partnership with governmental and local community-based organizations, where the former provides a steady stream of information and resources as well as organizational capacities to the latter, while the latter continues to provide the person-to-person, block-by-block assistance to their communities that they are the most equipped to provide.
FEMA needs to place less emphasis on a compliance-based, fraud-detecting model of disaster response and place greater emphasis on a deprivation-cognizant model. FEMA uses subcontractors to deliver services, such as nonlocal adjusters. These nonlocal adjusters focus on detecting disaster fraud (GAO 2015). Unfortunately, unsuspecting disaster survivors are confused when they receive a denial letter. The Sandy survivors did not understand why adjusters had taken numerous photos or viewed the photos that disaster survivors had taken themselves yet did not include those in the claim. Some Caribbean disaster survivors followed West Indian cultural norms that stress keeping a clean home. Therefore they had quickly cleaned up the filth from their basements in time for the early pickup by the sanitation trucks. Unfortunately, this meant that by the time the adjuster arrived, much of their evidence was gone. Since then, a fact sheet updated by FEMA in March 2021 instructs that disaster survivors should not wait on the adjuster before cleaning. However, it is unclear whether adjuster investigative methods have significantly changed to align with these guidelines.
Some Canarsie disaster survivors described their impressions of adjusters’ assessments as seemingly arbitrary, lacking empathy, and conveying condescending remarks, as if their personal belongings lacked value and did not need replacing. Some also thought that the process was inequitable, especially those who had compared grant amounts with their neighbors who had incurred similar damage. Furthermore, the feeling that these unfavorable assessments were related to racial stereotyping led to even more frustration and despondence among these disaster survivors.
FEMA needs to examine and address how its on-the-ground operations alongside other organizations may usher in a logic of response, which displaces the logic of services. Addressing its contribution to the Logic of Response will be indispensable for future response to communities marked by heavy reliance on social services. It is paramount that FEMA works seamlessly to integrate social services and disaster response. This would reduce the possibility of exacerbating the suffering of the chronically economically deprived. This population depends on social services in routine periods, which only increases during and after disasters.
Related to the earlier points about the need to transition away from nonlocal responders, local social workers with extensive social services experience need to replace nonlocal FEMA field and site managers. These local professionals are best suited to manage disaster response centers, precisely because they customarily work within a framework that sees and understands long-standing trauma and deprivation. This recommendation comes from my extensive interview and observation of how site manager Caroline runs her disaster response center.
When compared with how nonlocal FEMA site managers run their sites, having a local site manager with a social services background brings indispensable value to disaster response. Caroline, who had twenty years in social services, explained that providing social services cannot be a mere afterthought, secondary to a preoccupation with disaster response. Drawing on her model of enlisting the services of a local mental health clinic, I recommend the presence of on-the-spot mental health counseling in all disaster response centers. The current practice of referrals to medical professionals only further strains the thin psychological bandwidth of the most marginalized. Furthermore, disaster survivors may have already been struggling with undiagnosed and untreated mental health challenges before the disaster event. This means that these disaster survivors are experiencing a further compounding effect from the trauma of experiencing the disaster event and having to navigate FEMA’s labyrinthine grant appeals process, among other disruptions in their lives.
Implications for NGO Response
NGOs need to broaden their on-the-ground implementation goals beyond merely trying to bring disaster supplies to the general vicinity of economically deprived impacted urban areas. Large, reputable, nonlocal NGOs need to set and follow through with explicit, specific objectives of establishing their base of operations in the most economically deprived and dense residential urban areas. Their consistent, visible presence in these economically deprived disaster areas would reassure these habitually neglected urban residents that their needs are central to disaster response efforts. By taking this step, they will provide the possibility for greater and more timely access to informally transmitted, up-to-date information and resources.
Pursuing and fulfilling this goal will incubate social capital in economically deprived areas through NGO responder relations with community-based organizations, as well as among disaster survivors who can comfortably frequent the NGO disaster response center. Additionally, as this Sandy study finds, the presence of a large reputable NGO serves as a magnet for other smaller organizations, leading to the pooling of responders and services to the area. Up to this point, this is the process already uniquely enjoyed in economically privileged, White areas, such as Westville, to the exclusion of racially and ethnically diverse and economically deprived areas, such as Eastville.
NGO responders deploying to an urban disaster area need to have a thorough understanding that urban space is segregated; racial and ethnic groups are hierarchically ranked in terms of wealth, status, power, and influence; race and ethnic relations become animated over scarce resources, to include disaster response resources; and urban space is contested as boundaries and networks become reified to exclude those presumed to be undeserving or not belonging. More importantly, NGO responders need to be cognizant of how these dynamics individually and collectively are set in motion by, and infiltrate, the decisions of NGOs, beginning from where they decide to establish their presence.
This consciousness of race and class dynamics equips NGO responders to avoid the blind acceptance of race-and class-neutral assessments of “safe” versus “unsafe” urban areas. NGO site managers need to become more aware that the decision and action of placing an NGO site in a White middle-class urban area ensures inequity for its adjacent economically deprived communities. Even when they place a satellite location in the adjacent community, they need to ensure that this location is nearest to the densest residential clusters where there is the highest concentration of vulnerable, impacted disaster survivors.
Furthermore, it is insufficient to simply outfit NGO disaster response centers located in economically deprived urban disaster areas like those in economically privileged areas. NGO site managers need to be equally present at both sites. NGO managers and other decision makers need to also consider whether a proposed site placement will be in an area that experiences overpolicing. They need to be aware that establishing their base near a police precinct office may deter disaster survivors seeking resources, especially if the carceral state has, at one point or another, swept them into its dragnet.
In talking with disaster survivors in areas where Resiliency Is Us, the large NGO, had a mobile operation, disaster survivors had often missed or were not even aware that the NGO trucks were dropping off supplies. There were also differences in the resources across communities, such as hot plates of food versus pastries and packaged dry food. Disaster survivors and local responders of small churches and community-based organizations both in Canarsie and Eastville attributed these inequities to an assignment of racial and class inferiority to their communities. In both cases they were aware of the better resources that Westville received. My observations also confirmed this inequity. In both Canarsie and Eastville, the local ministers and community-based organization volunteers understood this disparate receipt of disaster assistance by Resiliency Is Us as racism and classism.
Nonlocal NGOs that are going in to provide disaster assistance to economically deprived urban areas also need to prioritize achieving amicable relations with these communities. Local volunteers and community-based organizations are essential to the survival of these communities even in the absence of disasters. This is why it is crucial that NGOs not disrupt the organic, altruistic relations of communities. NGOs need to adopt a disposition of simply aiding existing, local response with their resources and their logistical capabilities.
In the case of Westville, a community volunteer described Resiliency Is Us as maintaining amicable relations that allowed her to continue to play a vital role in the center. Contrastingly, in Eastville, another community volunteer experienced the same NGO as taking over, disregarding the decisions of the community, and significantly altering how they organized aid. The local Eastville volunteer also attributed the lack of engagement by disaster survivors in this location to these less than amicable relations with Resiliency Is Us.
Nongovernmental organizations and their responders need to be cognizant of how the notion of acute collective crisis, coupled with the visibility of widespread destruction of neighborhoods, masks preexisting spatial, symbolic, and material distinctions of urban spaces and disaster survivors. This vigilance leads to greater awareness of how these racial structures and meanings deploy in the interactional environment of disaster response areas.
NGOs need to be aware that their stable presence in residential areas of White, presumably “safer” urban residential areas gives these disaster survivors an unfair “home field advantage” over their non-White and economically deprived neighbors in adjacent areas. The resulting interactional space encourages territorial language and hoarding behaviors that exclude disaster survivors from adjacent urban areas who are coming in to seek disaster assistance.
In conclusion, those who administer and manage governmental and nongovernmental disaster response organizations need to be cognizant of how already racialized and classed urban spaces combine with institutional, organizational, and interpersonal biases and blind spots that burden and render invisible those disaster survivors already marginalized by race, ethnicity, class, and legal status. Furthermore, there needs to be a reorganization of the goals of disaster response toward reducing the interruption of social capital creation, access, and mobilization during disaster response. As part of this initiative, decision makers need to recognize and immediately address race and class exclusionary relational dynamics that exclude the most marginalized and economically deprived urban disaster survivors.
If anything, Superstorm Sandy has shown us why we cannot sidestep the centrality of race and class in our attempt to address the inequities of disaster response. Furthermore, the impetus for addressing inequity in disaster response needs to focus on understanding and addressing how race and class structures and processes create and maintain disproportionate suffering of racially, socioeconomically, and legally marginalized disaster survivors before, during, and after disasters. In the absence of addressing racialized and classed inequities, disasters will continue to reproduce race and class inequality and urban poverty.