Impacts Of Ida Expose Underlying Environmental Health Disparities Faced By Marginalized Communities

Upper West Side NY

03 October, 2021

12:55 PM

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Columbia Daily Spectator BY AILI HOU SEPTEMBER 30, 2021 When the rain poured down onto the city, many New Yorkers could do nothing but wait. The remnants of Hurricane Ida, which first made landfall in Louisiana, swept through New York on Sept. 1, flooding homes and streets and killing at least 16 residents of the state. While Ida caused widespread damage across New York City as a whole, low-income populations and communities of color—who are already disproportionately impacted by climate change and its resulting environmental issues—suffered the most from the hurricane's aftermath. Extreme flooding, water and heating outages, and public transportation shutdowns were among the many resulting issues faced by residents of Community District 9, which includes the neighborhoods of West Harlem and Morningside Heights. Within this district, 19.6 percent of residents fall below the poverty line. From Sept. 1 to Sept. 5, residents of Community District 9 called 311 and filed 139 damage complaints—60 for damaged trees, 45 for water leaks in buildings, 25 for damaged utilities, and nine for flooded sewers. Meanwhile, residents of Community District 7—a district in the Upper West Side with only 8.7 percent of residents falling below the poverty line—filed 88 damage complaints to 311 from Sept. 1 to Sept. 6. "West Harlem around Columbia is in the valley, so there's a lot of flooding around the area," Louis Bailey, the manager of membership and organizing of WE ACT, an environmental justice advocacy group based in West Harlem, said. "That is affecting [the] community and how they go about. If an area is flooded, people can't go out to get groceries. They can't go out and get medicine." As climate change worsens the impacts of hurricanes by warming ocean temperatures and producing heavier rainfall, marginalized populations will continue to confront a myriad of challenges to their health and safety. While wealthier areas of New York City have more resources to both prevent and bounce back from severe damage, many overlooked communities suffer from poor living conditions that intensify their risk of harm. The disparities in access to quality housing is one issue that exacerbates the impacts of natural disasters on low-income communities and weakens their resilience to climate change. "New York simply hasn't done enough to deal with the inequities in resilience," research professor Arthur Lerner-Lam of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said. "It's one thing to live in a high-rise where you've got a lot of modern facilities that allow you to be responsive. But if you're in a six-story tenament walk-up that's in a flood zone, you may not have the capacity to deal with [natural disasters]." Basement apartments have become an increasingly prevalent form of housing in recent years, as they are often the only affordable real estate left for lower-income tenants in the city. Although statistics on basement apartments are not widely available, it has been estimated that there may be over 100,000 New Yorkers living in them today. "We in New York City have seen an ongoing housing crisis that has led to decreasing affordability for decades," said Annie Carforo, a climate justice organizer at WE ACT. "Low-income families, particularly immigrants who are coming to the country for the first time, move into where they can afford." Most of the New Yorkers who were killed by Hurricane Ida lived in basement apartments in Queens and Brooklyn, as water flooded into their homes and blocked their means of exit. Basement apartments are often illegally converted residences with unsafe living conditions due to their underground locations and small window openings. Thus, living in basement apartments puts residents at risk for many different issues, including a much higher exposure to life-threatening flooding. "Black and brown communities and low-income communities of color are going to be disproportionately impacted by climate change, and [basement apartments] are one of those examples of the intersection between the climate, climate justice, and housing justice," Carforo said. "If not everybody can afford a safe place to live, they're going to be at increased risk for the next 100-year flood that happens every five years." In addition to facing poorer housing quality, low-income populations and people of color also tend to rely more on public transportation, which was disrupted in New York by Hurricane Ida. According to a fact sheet published by the White House earlier this year, households of color spend an additional 58.9 percent of their time commuting and are 2.5 times more likely to take public transportation. When many subway stations were completely flooded with water and several trains temporarily suspended across the city due to Ida, these commuters were undoubtedly affected. Nonetheless, conversations about fortifying subway stations against floods do not seem to center around those who rely on them the most, according to John Mutter, a professor of earth and environmental sciences and international and public affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs. After the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy on the subway system in 2012, the MTA installed floodgates designed by ILC Dover in 68 out of the city's 472 subway stations, most of which were concentrated in Lower Manhattan. "People talk about protecting subway entrances. Well, they're not doing it in the Bronx, they're doing it in Wall Street," Mutter said. "Who has the lobbying power to make their community safe?" Another factor that contributed to Ida's disproportionate impact was the insufficient communication regarding the danger it posed to residents of basement apartments. "What doesn't make perfect sense is … why were there not warnings for people who live in basement apartments?" Mutter said. "Why didn't the news or the media say, 'If you're in a basement apartment, go visit your friend in a second-floor apartment?' It's a simple thing to do, and it would've reduced the deaths." Tweets by the New York National Weather Service the day of Sept. 1 highlighted the risk of flooding in "urban areas and areas of steep terrain." Less attention was devoted to basement apartments, and no information was distributed about subway flooding. On Sept. 3, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a plan called the Climate-Driven Rain Response to improve the city's response to severe weather events. As stated by de Blasio, these protocols would include more forceful door-to-door evacuations of basement apartments and targeted mobile alerts to vulnerable residents. However, even if at-risk communities were directly warned about the storm, many would still not have had the necessary resources to get out of town and avoid being affected. According to Lerner-Lam, government institutions must identify not only the physical factors that increase one's vulnerability—such as living in a basement apartment prone to flooding—but also the socioeconomic factors that determine whether or not people have the ability to evacuate. Temporary forms of lodging such as hotels, ride services, and other amenities can be costly, leading to a disparity in accessibility for less-affluent New Yorkers. "People may not have the capacity to react even if they got a warning," Lerner-Lam said. "Where would they go? Do they have the money to go to a motel?" While New York has already proposed plans to diminish inland flooding, some of its measures may only serve limited parts of the state, neglecting many of the communities that are in greatest need of protection. In response to Hurricane Sandy, which caused an estimated $19 billion in damages across New York City alone, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a design competition called Rebuild by Design to promote the construction of innovative, environmentally-resilient infrastructure. As one of six winners of the competition in 2014, a team led by the Danish architectural studio Bjarke Ingels Group was granted $335 million to improve Lower Manhattan's storm defenses through a project called the Big U. The Big U will consist of a 10-mile-long protective "ring" that will stretch from West 57th Street, around the lower tip of Manhattan, and all the way to East 42nd Street. Some of its features will include elevated flood berms, increased forestation, and new public spaces. The project will be implemented in multiple phases, with some not scheduled to be completed until 2025. According to Carforo, however, other areas that experience intense flooding, such as the outer boroughs in which many people of color and low-income residents live, are not receiving the same resources. "The city is again prioritizing wealthier neighborhoods in the city—Lower Manhattan, Lower East Side," Carforo said. "Those areas have more expensive real estate, and those populations are wealthier, whiter, and have more political power. So, when we talk about equity, these are the communities that are going to get flood protection first." Furthermore, flood protection initiatives such as the Big U may present unprecedented challenges for unprotected communities. "This ring they're thinking about putting around Lower Manhattan may be a good idea for Lower Manhattan, but where's that water going to go?" Bailey said. "It's going to push upstream, and it's going to hit low-lying communities like Upper Manhattan and West Harlem. So when they put that ring down there … water is going to be pushed somewhere, and then other communities are going to be affected." Moving forward, it is clear that communities who were left particularly vulnerable to the effects of the hurricane not only require more robust protections against natural disasters but also greater measures to improve their standards of living in the first place. Building safer sources of affordable housing, ensuring that basement apartments have multiple exits, and warning residents that they live in dangerous flood zones are all ways to mitigate potential damage to and bolster the resilience of at-risk communities, according to Lerner-Lam. Additionally, according to Bailey, more action must be taken to directly combat climate change, which continues to increase the severity of natural disasters and further expose the vast structural inequalities affecting marginalized New York City residents. Bailey highlighted the city's continued deforestation, for instance, as a factor that contributed to the exacerbation of the effects of Hurricane Ida. The presence of trees and green spaces has been shown to offer many health and safety benefits, including the counteraction of extreme heat temperatures and protection against devastating winds. However, according to a study led by the Center for American Progress, people of color are three times more likely to live in nature-deprived areas—heightening their exposure to the consequences of climate change and natural disasters. The city, Bailey argued, must begin to tackle all of the disparities faced by marginalized communities at the same time instead of responding to each natural disaster as it comes, leaving many people in a constant state of insecurity. "Until we address all these things at one time, it's going to be the same thing," he said. "It's going to happen again. It's going to get worse." Staff writer Aili Hou can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter at @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.