Renters Hit Hardest by Hurricanes

By Willy Blackmore

Originally appeared in Word in Black

When a hurricane tears through the Gulf Coast or the Carolinas, or hammers a city in the northeast, we always hear the same chorus in the aftermath: we will rebuild. But whether Ike, Katrina, Sandy, or Harvey, there’s something that goes unspoken in that response to the wreckage — renters get left behind.

Homeowners with mortgages are usually required to keep their property insured, which gives them the capacity to rebuild. If you’re a renter, things look very different after a major storm. You pay rent to live in an apartment that’s now flooded or damaged, but it’s not your decision whether or not to rebuild — or if the rent should be jacked up in the months following a disaster, which is frequently the case.

As new research shows, not only do rents often increase in the year following a major storm, it’s poorer Black and Brown tenants who have the most to lose, even after a hurricane has long passed.

“The occurrence of a hurricane in a given year or the previous year reduces affordable rental housing, especially for counties with higher percentages of renters and people of color,” according to a study from Ohio State University published in October. And unlike homeowners who are eligible for insurance payments, FEMA grants, and other state and federal money dedicated to fixing damaged homes and businesses, the financial safety net for renters is not as robust.

Demand for rental housing following a destructive storm increases for obvious reasons: some units are likely destroyed altogether, while a combination of displaced residents and temporary workers in town for cleanup and rebuilding puts additional pressure on the rental market. But that’s just the beginning of the housing disruptions that can follow a major storm.

The study points to Houston as an example of how race and class complicate matters. In that city, a disproportionate amount of subsidized housing was located in parts of town that flooded dramatically during Hurricane Harvey. The location of the housing is a legacy of redlining, which often placed Black communities in less desirable parts of cities, such as areas prone to flooding. Residents in those parts of town tended to be both older and poorer too, making it even more difficult to join the effort to rebuild.

The same patterns hold true in many other cities, including New Orleans, where so much of the flooding from Hurricane Katrina was concentrated in Black communities that sat below sea level.

But perhaps the most interesting detail in the study is what it didn’t find: a decrease in affordability (measured as a percentage of income spent on rent) following a major hurricane. The researchers had hypothesized that they would find such a change, and it’s possible that it does indeed exist. But because of the way affordability is measured in the study, the lack of a perceivable drop may suggest something even more telling: natural disasters force low-income people of color out of their communities, leaving more white residents with higher incomes. 

As the report finds, “income may be increasing more rapidly than rent following a disaster, leading to the appearance of ‘more affordable’ housing,” but really, it’s just the rapid displacement of poor, non-white residents and the so-called post-disaster gentrification that can often follow major weather events.

Cities are rebuilt, yes, but research like this suggests that a severe hurricane can create a situation where those post-storm cities are not rebuilt for many of the same residents who had once lived there.