When I think of terrible disasters such as 9/11 or Hurricane Sandy that require a large restoration effort, I assume that the city would do all that it can to make sure people are being cared for and that they have a shelter. For example, During Hurricane Sandy, I remember that Queens College opened the gym as a shelter for people who lost their homes during the storm. Miriam Greenberg, author of “The Disaster Inside the Disaster: Hurricane Sandy and Post-Crisis Redevelopment,” turns my potential misconception on its head. She argues that the reconstruction of neighborhoods and infrastructure depends on how wealthy the neighborhood is. Since the people in the wealthier neighborhoods, such as Lower Manhattan, had strong existing infrastructure and health insurance before Hurricane Sandy, they were redeveloped quickly and had “services like electricity, heat, and hot water back within days and 99 percent of its commercial, residential, hotel, and retail inventory ‘back to business’ within weeks” (Greenberg 49). She contrasts this to places like Coney Island and the South Bronx where it took weeks or months for FEMA to reach and restore basic functions and schools. This is an example of what she calls “crisis driven urbanization” (46), where the wealthy communities get restored much faster than low-income neighborhoods after a disaster.
Though I know that it is “not fair” that rich communities get restored faster than low income neighborhoods, Greenberg fails to expound on why the wealthy communities get restructured first. Part of the reason they get rebuilt much quicker is that their existing infrastructure holds up better and the damage they endure is much easier to rebuild than to start building a whole neighborhood from scratch. If a building is still standing after the storm and it is simply a matter of getting the hot water and electricity back up, then of course that building will be fixed first. I believe that the way the rebuilding following Hurricane Sandy was not discriminating between low income neighborhoods, as Greenberg implies, but that it was done in a practical way that the organizations could do it: by starting on the small projects and moving to the larger ones.
Rebuilding houses and restoring heat and electricity was not all that was on the restoration plan. In Melissa Checker’s “Green is the New Brown: Old School Toxics and Environmental Gentrification on a New York City Waterfront,” Checker talks about how “economic interests are pursued at the expense of environmental safety and public health” (Checker 177). For example, while residents of Staten Island were still without heat and electricity, Mayor Bloomberg decided to hold a meeting on building the largest ferris wheel on Staten Island’s North Shore. I am shocked that this is what could be on someone’s mind during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy while people still needed somewhere to live. Clearly, Bloomberg did not care for the environment because this ferris wheel was going to be put in place of a giant oil tank that was originally there before the storm. Building the ferris wheel is not surprising, considering the Bloomberg administration was all about economic growth and not the day-to-day lives of residents of Staten Island. However, It was horrific how the people of Coney Island and Staten Island had to wait months and sometimes years for essential functions in their homes like heat and electricity. In “The Flood Next Time” by Jarret Murphy, Murphy writes about how it is crucial to care about the rising levels of water around New York. Even though the water levels are rising, we are not so concerned about building more housing near the shores in order to generate revenue. This ties into how economics is the main idea at play when we should be more concerned with the how the people are holding up.
So was Hurricane Sandy cleanup successful? If you were to ask the Environmental Defense Fund, their answer would be a resounding “yes”(check out the link below). They believe that much of the rebuilding efforts were done quickly and effectively in New York and New Jersey. However, there were many people waiting without electricity and heat for months after the storm that should have been taken care of. We must keep in mind that business and the economy are not always the most important considerations and we should be more worried about the lives of the people. Perhaps with better planning, New York could be better prepared for the next storm and its cleanup and treat lower income people with the same respect as higher income.
Additional Source: https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/content/SandySuccessStories_June2013.pdf
