It doesn't have to be that way. Disaster recovery could be based on some fundamental ethical principles, including:
1. Disasters are going to happen more often now, so we better get good at recovering from them.
The science is settled. Hurricanes are getting more severe because of climate change. Even as we fight to minimize the harm we're doing to the environment, we need to accept the fact that disasters like Katrina, Harvey, and Irma are going to shape our world for the foreseeable future.
2. We must never again allow the powerful to use disasters to exploit the powerless.
The recovery from Hurricane Katrina was a national disgrace, thanks to an economically and racially biased plan of action. The city lost 96,000 black residents, nearly one-third of its African-American population, after rebuilding efforts that were slow to help the mostly black Lower Ninth Ward.
Gary Rivlin notes New Orleans no longer has a public hospital. Affordable housing was bulldozed, not repaired.
The city's 7,500 teachers were fired and charter schools replaced the traditional system. The city's most disadvantaged children suffered as a result. As Jeff Bryant writes, "here's no evidence anywhere that the NOLA model of school reform has 'improved education.'" Borrowing a phrase from TV's The Wire, Bryant also characterized the charterized school district's test scores as a case of "juking the stats."
Hurricane Katrina was a tragedy. The response was a crime.
3. Rebuilding, like all government aid, must respect those most in need.
Our current system of mass incarceration targets people of color, who make up more than hal f (59 percent) of the nation's prison population. Although black and white Americans sell and use drugs at roughly the same percentages, the African-American imprisonment rate for illegal drugs is nearly six times higher than the white rate.
Maybe that's why prison inmates in New Orleans were abandoned, potentially to drown, during Hurricane Katrina, enduring days of horrifying neglect before being rescued.
Prisons must be rebuilt as humane institutions, and plans must be put in place to keep inmates safe.
But prisons are only the tip of the iceberg. Rebuilding efforts provide an opportunity to ensure that affordable housing is available to all those who need it. A recent report from the Urban Institute shows that there is an affordable housing crisis, and that it has reached every single county in the United States. "Without the support of federal rental assistance," the report concludes, "not one county in the United States has enough affordable housing for all its (extremely low income) renters."
This is a catastrophe, too, a slow-motion disaster playing out all around us. Its victims deserve to be rescued too. Communities must be affordable, safe, and secure for all of their residents.
4. We need to get smarter about transportation.
Hurricane Harvey destroyed several hundred thousand cars -- as many as 1 million, according to some estimates. Insurance companies will bear the multibillion-dollar cost of replacing them, but that cost will then be borne by the economy as a whole in the form of higher premiums.
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