As Hurricane Harvey wreaked devastating flooding across southeast Texas, there was relatively little focus on a group that is especially susceptible to natural disasters: the poor.
“Whatever the inequalities of your society, those are very often replicated in the disaster,” says Jacob Remes, who teaches disaster studies at New York University. This plays out in several ways, he said:
People who have more money are likely to have friends who have more money, and so when they have to stay with friends, they’re going to stay in a guest room. When poor people have to evacuate, they stay on a floor or on a couch—and that’s if they’re lucky.
To discover what Harvey has meant to south Texas’s low-income residents—nearly 600,000 Harris County residents live below the poverty line—one had to read carefully between the lines. The New York Times followed up its in-depth report on storm survivors (8/27/17) with a long, sympathetic report (8/28/17) on residents temporarily being housed in Houston’s convention center.
But aside from the former story’s brief mention of an immigrant hotel worker who’d waded through waist-deep waters to get to her $10-an-hour hotel job, washing and ironing sheets and towels—and who, in the Times’ description, “seemed to epitomize Houston’s work ethic, its resolve and its shock”—the paper paid little attention to the wherewithal of those fleeing the storm, or why they were there. The Times (8/27/17) did send a reporter on Saturday, as Harvey first hit, to report on homeless Houstonians trying to ride out the storm under flood-prone highway overpasses, but never followed up to see how they’d fared once the waters rose.
Virtually every news outlet (e.g., Washington Post, 8/28/17; Wired, 8/28/17) devoted attention to Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s decision not to call for residents to evacuate—noting the lessons learned from Hurricane Rita in 2005, when dozens of people died on the roads during an evacuation panic. But few noted the problems faced by those who might want to evacuate, but lacked cars or the money for gas or a place to stay—though the LA Times (8/28/17) did note in passing that one reason not to call for an evacuation was that “the city would also have to scramble to transport the poor, the elderly and the disabled who did not have cars.”
In fact, remarkably few outlets investigated people’s reasons for staying put, financial or otherwise. A Guardian report (8/30/17) on volunteer rescuers who had trouble convincing residents to be evacuated by boat never asked any of those declining help why they were choosing to stay put. A Vox report (8/25/17) on the eve of the storm, meanwhile, elaborated multiple possible reasons people might choose to remain in harm’s way, including disabilities, fear of looters or not wanting to be separated from pets—but not lack of a car or other resources—before spending much of the article discussing ways to frighten people into leaving, including using markers to write Social Security numbers on their skin so their bodies can be identified by search and rescue teams.
“Most reporters don’t understand what it’s like to live under severely constrained economic circumstances—and media rarely help people learn such things,” said Stephen Pimpare, a University of New Hampshire professor who has authored several books on Americans’ attitudes toward poverty. “So they are baffled by some people’s inability to do what, to them, seems easy and obvious.”
Some of the most incisive reporting on Harvey and poverty came from the international press. The BBC (8/27/17) reported on residents of “hardscrabble” Rockport who were hit by the brunt of the storm, unable to flee because, as one resident said, “I had some problems getting out of town, a little broke and stuff, so I had to come home and, you know, tough it out.”
The Atlantic (8/27/17) was one US-based exception, noting that “while many South Texans evacuated North per the recommendation of Gov. Greg Abbott, poorer or disabled residents may not have had the resources or the capability to follow that advice,” and pointing out that poorer residents tend to be concentrated in areas more prone to flooding.
Poor people being subjected to misery, of course, aren’t news in the same way that the wealthy are. The New York Times (8/31/17), in a puzzling article headlined “Storm With ‘No Boundaries’ Took Aim at Rich and Poor Alike,” reported on two flooded-out Texans, one a working-class construction worker, one a well-off doctor. While the Times briefly noted that “there are huge differences between the options open to the poor and to the well-to-do”—the doctor has savings and flood insurance, the construction worker does not—it concluded that “the devastation is connecting people of disparate means in one common experience: loss,” leaving readers with the impression that the true tragedy here was that the flooding hadn’t spared those with expensive homes.
