house of the rising waters

摘要

JUNIA HOWELL, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh whose work deals broadly with race and socioeconomic inequality, once lived in a depressed area of Houston and saw how frequent flooding affected her neighbors. She studied the impact of natural disasters on wealth in the long term and found that extreme weather events are exacerbating inequality-not just because of who the victims are, but also because of how society distributes disaster relief. Thanks to insurance payouts, white, college-educated homeowners who were affected by a large-scale disaster generally saw an increase in their long-term wealth. Most black victims, on the other hand, ended up worse off. Those patterns extend to disaster payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which disproportionately help white homeowners in higher-priced areas, according to Howell. "FEMA aid is constructed to restore property," she says, "not people's lives."