Slate "Harvey Is an Equal-Opportunity Disaster."...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/08/29/harvey_is_an_equal_opportunity_disaster_the_poor_won_t_be_left_behind_until.html

The Poor Won't Be Left Behind Until the Recovery.

By Henry Grabar

One of the bewildering things about Hurricane Harvey, for observers and especially for Houstonians themselves, has been the lack of a comprehensive sense of the extent of the flooding. We don’t quite know, quite yet, who has been hit the worst.


Storm surges come from the sea; a swollen river envelops a downtown along a predictable route. But the Houston metro area is nearly the size of Massachusetts. Harris County, which includes most of Houston, has 2,500 miles of channels. Everyone in Houston lives near a bayou; there is no “railroad track” stigma to these waterways. They are simply everywhere. And because the variance in rainfall totals from one part of the region to the next are running in the feet, it’s hard to anticipate which blocks will flood.



There is an assumption, forged by the experience of Hurricane Katrina, that natural disasters will do their worst to low-income neighborhoods of color.

Nature isn't racist. Nature doesn't target the poor. So if you see disparate impacts with Harvey, ask what human choices caused them.

— Andy Horowitz (@andydhorowitz) August 27, 2017
At City Lab, Tanvi Misra writes: "Within cities, poor communities of color often live in segregated neighborhoods that are most vulnerable to flooding, or near petrochemical plants and Superfund sites that can overflow during the storm. This is especially true for Houston.”



But actually, Houston’s floods have proven to be great equalizers. On the one hand, there are very poor neighborhoods in Harris County that have been hit hard, repeatedly, by flooding. Greens Bayou in Greenspoint has overflowed its banks three times in the past two decades, and nearly half the housing there is in the 100-year-flood zone after FEMA revised its Harris County flood maps in September. More than one in three residents lives below the poverty line. Some of them are among the nearly 1,000 Houston families who live in HUD-subsidized housing in the flood zone. This weekend, Greens Bayou overflowed again, causing mass evacuations and sweeping a family of six downstream as they tried to escape the swirling river.


snip - more to read, worthwhile, lots of maps and info