Some disasters serve sadly as social equalizers. Workers at the World Trade Center shared the same fate, whether a janitor, an insurance clerk or a global bond broker. In large measure that wasn’t the case with Hurricane Katrina, which laid bare the cruel face of poverty in the Gulf states. While damage and displacement victimized residents from every income class and all walks of life, the poor had too few resources for coping and were forced to bear the brunt of suffering.
The poverty that was exposed in New Orleans has been a disturbing aspect of the Katrina aftermath. The city’s poverty rate, at 28 percent, is more than double the U.S. average. But it’s not as if New Orleans is especially destitute – poverty rates in more than a dozen cities (Miami, Cleveland, Atlanta, Fresno, El Paso, Memphis, Long Beach and Dallas, among them) are even higher.
We hope the sudden attention to this will motivate public officials to tackle the broad needs of the community as they design the new New Orleans. The city needs a broad economic boost that will provide opportunities for those until now left behind.
Overshadowed by the brightness of the French Quarter and the Garden District, New Orleans poor have often seemed out of sight, out of mind. When officials mapped the Katrina evacuation they ignored the fact that more than 30,000 households – at least 100,000 people – had no cars and that many thousands of citizens were ill or infirm and could not escape without assistance. Residents died in their wheelchairs or on city streets waiting to be rescued. Heartbreaking images of sick and elderly Louisianans sitting on baggage carousels at Louis Armstrong Airport waiting for help will linger. By and large, the region’s better-off residents were able to find transportation and shelter. If they stayed behind, it was by choice and calculation, not necessity.
Jim Zelenski, senior analyst with the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, said that a “significant wealth stratification” was apparent between those able to leave New Orleans and Biloxi and other Gulf Coast cities before Hurricane Katrina hit and those who were not. “People able to move themselves were spared,” he said.
Katrina exposed the painful reality that being poor in America means substandard housing and depending upon pals or public transportation for lack of a car.
“These conditions were there the whole time. Unfortunately, it took this kind of tragedy to make people think about poverty,” said research economist Jeffrey Romine of the Leeds School of Business at CU. “What we’re finding is that this hurricane put a face on poverty again. We’re starting to see poor people as people again.”
The fact that some of New Orleans’ poorest were living on the cheaper, lower-elevation land that bore the brunt of the flooding is a “natural urban phenomenon,” Romine said. “Those who can afford it move to higher ground.”
A U.S. Census Bureau report, released on the very day the levees collapsed in New Orleans, reveals that the poverty population is growing in the United States. The annual report showed that the number of Americans in poverty has climbed in the last four years to 37 million – up 1.1 million since 2003 and 4 million since 2001. The report found that the number of Americans without health insurance rose by 800,000, to 45.8 million – the most since 1998. The United States is among the richest nations in the world, yet we have a higher percentage of poor people than any other industrialized country – twice the rate of Canada and Great Britain and three times that of European countries.
Now is the time, Zelenski said, for the government to strengthen safety net programs, not to make further cuts. “Ultimately, the issue of poverty is a national issue,” he said. “For that reason it’s Congress and the administration that we have the right to look to first.”
Lorez Meinhold, executive director of the Colorado Consumer Initiative, says that, “Hurricane Katrina highlights a problem advocates fight every day: impoverished citizens without adequate health care. During times of crisis our nation appropriately focuses on these issues, but lasting change will only occur when we prioritize finding a permanent solution for those in need.”
Romine says that if there is a silver lining to Hurricane Katrina, it is that the nation as a whole might do something about poverty. “We might realize that there are people living in these conditions right under our noses and, wow, we collectively have to band together to do something about it.”
Bush administration officials have acknowledged the rising poverty numbers on their watch, but they haven’t got a strategy to reverse the trend. The victims of Katrina and the task of rebuilding New Orleans provide the opportunity to mount, finally, a concerted effort.
There are those saying that money was funneled to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans and others pointing out that money went to tax cuts for America’s wealthiest rather than to services for the nation’s neediest.
Professor David Brady of Duke University said more prosperous Americans too rarely seem aware of such a large poor population. “Only on rare occasions do we even bother to acknowledge the poor. Most of the time, we contentedly believe that only a few people are poor, and those undeserving poor have themselves to blame,” he said.
There is an equalizer at work here – none of those dead or displaced are to blame for Katrina’s aftermath. But with the costs and images of poverty on our minds, it is prime time to redress the problem that affects so many millions of people in this country. Katrina’s poorest victims embody the need for America to declare war on the nation’s growing poverty problem.
