Tag: Disaster Recovery

What Prior Disasters Have Taught Housing Advocates About How to Respond...

When it comes to helping people maintain or recover their housing, hurricanes and fires aren’t as different from a pandemic as one might think.

Deciding Not to Rebuild After Climate-Related Disasters

Officials in large and small cities along the East Coast are realizing that maybe they shouldn’t rebuild on land that repeatedly floods. Instead they’re focusing on buyouts, building affordable housing on higher ground, and other mitigation efforts.

Rules for Radicals to Demand a Fair and Transformative Disaster Recovery

At Texas Housers, we've confronted a series of natural disasters over the past decade that forced us to develop new approaches for our housing advocacy. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, we find ourselves back at it. Here are seven lessons we have learned.

Not If But When: A Disaster Preparedness Conversation

Against the back drop of 2017's California wildfires, a quickly organized session took place to discuss disaster response and recovery from the perspective of being a housing organization.

When Disaster Hits, Your First Responder Probably will Not Be a...

Social scientists reviewed all the recent research on disaster recovery and tell us that before the coordinated help arrives, before the Red Cross and all the other recovery groups descend with legions of volunteers, there are neighbors.

Civil Rights Organizations on Hurricane Relief Efforts

Throughout what we know will be a long recovery over the coming weeks, months, and years, Shelterforce hopes to share the stories of the...

How the Community Reinvestment Act Can Help Flint

The audacious and callous decisions leading to the tragedy in Flint, Michigan are cruel and beyond comprehension. What is needed is an all-out effort...

Policy Victory Means Millions for Lower 9th Ward

For the first time, federal disaster funds will be provided to those who spent thousands of dollars on temporary housing after their homes were destroyed. For many homeowners across Louisiana, this will be enough to return and rebuild. Nearly 700 families in the Lower 9th Ward may qualify.

Doubling Down on Community Resilience

Last month here in Rooflines, I argued that place-based community development can make low-income neighborhoods more resilient to climate...

What Have We Learned a Decade after the Gulf Coast Hurricanes?

As the housing community reflects in August on the tenth anniversary of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, what are the...

2 Easy Ways HUD Could Bring More NOLA Homeowners Home—With Money...

Donna Bartholomew’s mother moved to New Orleans as a young woman and bought a home in the Ninth Ward. Over the years, raising...

Riots and Resilience in Baltimore and Beyond

I remember reciting the Langston Hughes poem Harlem (“What happens to a dream deferred?”) to my students in South...

Two Years After Hurricane Sandy, Much More Work Remains

Comparing and contrasting both the impact and response to Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, through storytelling.

Is It Time to Think About Post-Post-Katrina New Orleans?

Nine years on, New Orleans is a very different place from what it was like in the wake of...

Here’s How CDCs can Overcome the People-Based, Place-Based Gap

“Self interest generalized is community interest” — Kenneth Jones, community organizer Throughout my experience in leading NeighborWorks America's Superstorm Sandy response, two critical aspects have...

Explore Post-Crisis Rebuilding Beyond the Linear Narrative

Luisa Dantas and Micheal Boedigheimer When I first came to New Orleans with my video camera in the months after Hurricane Katrina, it was already...

Lessons Learned from Harmony Oaks Redevelopment

Lessons learned from the Harmony Oaks redevelopment: You can do good work even in a devastated city, but you have to build an alternate set...

Where’s the Map for Social Inequity?

I spent the day at a workshop on July 9 called, “Post-Sandy: The Effect on the Urban,” held at New Jersey Institute of Technology...

Recovery from the Grassroots

An interesting new planning document by the Sandy Regional Assembly was just released by a cross-section of grassroots groups, most based in New York...

CDFIs Speed Up Sandy Recovery

  When disasters strike, our first responders ensure that emergency resources get to those in need.  But...