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Low-Income People Caught in FEMA Quagmire

Equity and social justice begins with zoning by cities and counties.

This Politico article highlights the challenges of being low income and then being caught up in a disaster, ‘People just give up’: Low-income hurricane victims slam federal relief programs. This applies to Texas and Hurricane Harvey, and also just about every other disaster that hits the United States. 

We doom people to be continually poor and more vulnerable to disasters when "we" let developers and builders construct homes in the wrong locations that are more susceptible to disasters, a.k.a., flood plains. This is when we double-doom people to struggle to have equity in accessing federal resources.

Then, our rules and regulations that have good intentions trap poor people into not having the insurance they need to qualify for federal disaster relief, not to mention the complexities of our archaic and cumbersome disaster recovery system administered by multiple federal departments. 

We are "exceptionally" bad at many things, this being one of them!

Claire Rubin shared the link above. 

 

 

 

 

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.