Arthur (Andy) Felts

Resources, Resilience and Recovery Following Disaster

September 29th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

            I was doing some online searches last week and encountered an editorial by Columbia University’s Dr. John Mutter in Nature Vol. 466 26 August, 2010. The title was “Disasters widen the rich-poor gap” and focused on the fact that recovery from Katrina in New Orleans has been significantly slower for the urban poor than the middle and upper classes. Poorer neighborhoods have not rebuilt, the poor have lost jobs and had less access to basic services.

            Mutter opines, “In many ways, this disproportionate effect is no surprise. Poorer people’s homes tend to be constructed to a lower standard, and occupy marginal areas such as swampy, low-lying land. But it is surprising that even in the developed world — where much effort and strategy goes into recovery efforts — the division between rich and poor is allowed to broaden in the wake of a disaster. The same thing happened after Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 and the Chicago heat wave of 1995.”

            This observation struck me because in many ways, the same logic was applied in developing the Great Society programs in the 1960s. How, many leaders argued, could the world’s wealthiest nation tolerate the fact that significant portions of its population lived in at least some degree of depravation? A War on Poverty was declared—we would use our wealth to eliminate poverty in a generation. I’m certain we have not yet won that war, but also hope that that is not taken as a reason we should stop fighting.

            Looked at through that lens, we should critically examine Mutter’s base logic that we have placed much effort and strategy into recovery efforts just because we are a developed nation. From early on, we at CARRI have argued that resources are only one leg of a tripod of recovery with the other two being (a) the capacity to utilize those same resources and (b) anticipate (and mitigate) losses from disasters. Having resources (wealth) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for recovery.

      To be sure, we spent a lot of money on post-Katrina recovery efforts. But we should keep in mind a comment Alesch made in 2001 after looking at several communities and their recovery from disasters—including those affected by Hurricane Andrew:

 “[We have] . . . seen many anomalies in disaster sites, including immediate adjacent communities with markedly different post-event experiences. We have seen millions of dollars directed at activities with no apparent long-term benefits to the community. Some locales get better, some get worse, and a few wither away.”

            Developing more community resilience seems a better way to address post-disaster issues such as those raised by Mutter and myriad other issues as well. As we have said all along, a community’s trajectory before a disaster will likely be echoed during recovery. And a goal to develop more resilience puts a community on a positive trajectory.

            About a year and one-half after Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston many noted that the City had not looked as good since before the Civil War. But the city had its poor as well. What was the difference in this case? Resources were used in that recovery to buy paint, deal with ongoing drainage issues, clear debris, and myriad other problems and the end product was different than that observed by Mutter. Perhaps it is because area was more resilient. By the way, in Charleston swampy land is highly valued for its vistas.

John Plodinec

Recovering from the Great Recession –What Might a More Resilient Economy Look Like?

September 14th, 2010 - John Plodinec  

The Great Recession has had devastating impacts on every part of every community in the country – individuals and families with nest eggs severely depleted or disappeared often along with their jobs, businesses treading water, governments caught between the greater demand for services and fewer resources to provide them.  Recovery will be protracted, and may potentially take a decade.

In any and every sense, the Great Recession has been a disaster.  But we will recover – we are already seeing communities that are using the Great Recession as an opportunity to look at themselves with a new perspective and to do things better than before.  We are also seeing the classic dichotomy of views about what “recovery” should look like – some want to rebuild the economy the way it was; others want to build a new and more resilient economy.

If we could describe our pre-Recession economy in one word, it would be “consumption.”  We as individuals piled up debt to buy things we couldn’t afford, and might not have needed.  Government encouraged (and in some cases coerced) financial institutions to make risky loans.  Speculators packaged those loans into even riskier investments, offering outlandish rates of return.  We were living off of our futures, while ignoring the lesson of the past that the future is never certain.

It is clear that the American people have recognized that the economic model of the recent past is not very viable, and certainly not resilient.  Instead of spending, most of the almost 90% of us who are working are saving more than ever.  Individual savings are at a level not seen in decades.  Clearly, those who want to go back to a consumer-driven economy are likely to be disappointed.  This begs the question, what might a more resilient economy look like?

I’m sure there are several possible alternatives.  One that I can envision is what I call a “value-driven” economy.  In a value-driven economy, economic decisions are made on the basis of overall value at each step of the economic chain.  Individuals and families would make their purchasing decisions balancing protection from future contingencies against the value of the goods or services to be purchased.  Thus, we would see a return to saving for a house or a car, and a lessening of future debt.  Instead of spending so much on health care, individuals and families might spend more on health – eating better, getting outside more, spending more time together (Somehow in the debate about health insurance all sides seem to have lost sight of the fact that Americans rank somewhere in the 25-30 range in terms of almost all health measures – when we don’t rank even worse!).

Businesses would recognize that employees are not interchangeable parts, but significant assets to be nurtured (Loyalty might even make a comeback!).  Businesses would recognize that we live in a time of almost frenetic technological change, but that success in business is built more on relationships than technology.

Government and business would forge a new relationship.  In times like these, government would not try to create jobs (at $240K per job!), but would help businesses – especially small businesses – create many more and better ones.  Government would not champion energy measures that actually add to our already bloated energy budget (e.g., carbon capture), but would encourage and reward efficiencies that reduce that budget. Communities would balance incentives to attract new businesses against actions to nurture the ones they already have.  Communities would also recognize that the natural environment is just as important to the community as the built environment.  And most importantly, communities would encourage and help individuals and families to be as self-reliant in the face of disaster – of any type – as possible.

 An unrealistic pipe dream?  Perhaps.  But clearly the old model didn’t work – this one just might.

Arthur (Andy) Felts

If Vulnerability is the Dark Side, Resilience is the Force

September 7th, 2010 - Arthur (Andy) Felts  

          Recently I had a conversation with a colleague who works at the National Science Foundation. I shared with him some of the work I’ve been doing with CARRI and community resilience. His response to me was interesting. He recognized that resilience was finding its way into researchers’ and practitioners’ lexicon and opined that he viewed it as the opposite of and a more positive take on vulnerability.

            My colleague was following the logic of John McKnight and his research on poor communities. McKnight argued that rather than constantly talk about what poor communities need, we should focus on what they already have; rather than doing a needs analysis, we should do an assets analysis.

            It is an interesting conceptualization—seeing vulnerability and resilience as two sides of the same picture. I confess to not being entirely convinced and that makes it a good topic to blog on, seeking input from readers of this.

            Some researchers, especially social work academics and social psychologists, write about the resilience of vulnerable populations. Their arguments are cogent: disadvantaged, vulnerable populations can see each day as a stress test—they are only an illness or broken down car or temporary job loss away from personal disaster. Their ability to survive and even thrive is testament to their resilience.

            This likely speaks to the building of social capital in some groups we see as vulnerable. But then, are they as vulnerable as we think they are, looking from the outside?

            The biggest difficulty I have in seeing vulnerability and resilience as closely related is that what might not look like a vulnerable population may become one as the cascading and rippling effects of a disaster unfold. Small business owners may look to be in reasonably good shape pre-disaster. But they can quickly become part of a vulnerable population if they lose their businesses six months or a year after a disaster.

            The same might hold for the underinsured. If they lose a business or home and the insurance settlement just pays off their debt, those that appeared to be middle class can quickly look very different.

            Edmund Andrews, an economics reporter for the New York Times, wrote last year about his slow spiral into a $500,000 mortgage by borrowing constantly to pay off old debt. Andrews was finally unable to meet his debt obligations after paying his alimony and child support. It is doubtful that he would look vulnerable until the house of debt cards he constructed completely crumbled.

            Interestingly, in a conversation with Dr. Dean Kilpatrick, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina, who looks at psychological effects and disasters, I opined that older people might be more vulnerable. He immediately said his data did not support that observation. Older people often don’t have many of the obligations of middle class workers—high mortgages, children to care for, jobs to worry about and even parents to look after.

            It may be that populations vulnerable to disasters can be just about any place we look for them. That is why a more comprehensive view of a community, as we have consistently taken with CARRI, is a better way to see resilience than as the opposite of vulnerable.