Hi Sophia,
I really enjoyed reading your post.
I agree with your comments that technological fixes would not work in low-income neighborhoods without some kind of economic benefit for those companies. It seems unlikely that the poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods would receive aid proportionately to wealthier ones. When it comes to environmental crisis, settling for top down development just doesn’t cut it.
You mention how Murphy’s The Flood Next Time talks about how most people with knowledge of a natural disaster coming would still choose to remain where they are. I don’t totally agree with your argument here — that because of the fact that the danger is not pressing, people choose to stay there. While this may be true for some people, I don’t think it is true for everyone. In many cases, I imagine that low-income residents may be forced to live there- whether it’s for their job, or because the rent is cheap enough that they can live there. In high crime communities, danger is imminent — but many families stay there not by choice, but by necessity. I think it’s important that we make that distinction.
I think we also have to look critically at what we mean when we tell people to get out — or to evacuate. For many low income residents, they may not have access to a car, may have pets that they cannot take to shelters, or may not have the money/family ties to spend days somewhere else. Thinking about it this way — we can see another critical flaw in how we continuously set ourselves up for a huge disaster. When people are not considered, they are put in danger and raise the casualties that a storm can cause.
Thinking about money for rebuilding — low income families who rent their homes may not have the same compensation if any that home owners would receive. Building owners would be the ones to receive funding from NY to rebuild. When that eventually happens, those people who were displaced may not even be able to go back.
Ultimately, I agree that with your comments that we should not continue to focus on development as an answer to rising shorelines. However, for the already existing structures, perhaps some kind of barriers protecting the most vulnerable areas of NYC (not just in manhattan as the article you posted mentioned) could be helpful if it could be implemented on a wide scale. In addition, perhaps implementing an evacuation plan (buses?, properly equipped shelters?) that address some of the difficulties of low income residents could be helpful in avoiding the devastation that natural disasters can cause in this city.
What I am trying to get at here is very similar to what Neil Smith talks about in “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster.” He talks about how “the supposed ‘naturalness’ of disasters here has become an ideological camouflage for the social (and therefore preventable) dimensions of such disasters, covering for quite specific social interests.” While there are certainly acts of nature which cannot be avoided, it seems like a cop out to categorize the deaths of NYC residents and destruction of communities as unavoidable and not as a failure of the city to protect its residents.
Additional Source:
