Disaster Response and Recovery Systems are Failing Black and Brown Communities in Texas

Key Takeaways

• It’s an enormous burden for poorer folks to have to constantly rebuild their homes and fight with insurance companies to cover it, if they can even afford insurance.

• Insurance and other disaster response systems are not adequately providing what people – especially poor and Black and brown people – need in order to recover after a major disaster.

• Local groups like West Streety Recovery help a lot of people, but the problem is much bigger than local groups can take on. Government needs to step up–including the federal government when state leadership isn’t acting.

Andrew Barley is co-director of rebuild and voter engagement at West Street Recovery, a horizontally–structured and worker–directed disaster recovery nonprofıt based in Northeast Houston, Texas.

Barley spoke to me of the immense obstacles to disaster recovery faced by the Black, brown, and working-class communities in Northeast Houston as they confront disaster after disaster, and how both government and private insurance systems that are supposed to support in such moments have failed these communities.

Moira: Please explain what West Street Recovery does and what your role is. 

Barley: West Street Recovery is a horizontally-structured disaster recovery organization. We do both direct service work – which includes rebuilding of people’s homes after natural disasters, helping folks get through insurance claims, helping folks with direct assistance during and after natural disasters – as well as direct policy work at the local, municipal, state and federal level, which we do in partnership with our community organization or Northeast Action Collective, comprised completely of community members from Northeast Houston. So our work is about tackling issues of environmental justice, particularly as they affect the heavily industrialized, heavily minority-centered areas of Northeast Houston. 

I got involved with West Street on day three: a friend of a friend asked me to come out and do water rescues after [Hurricane] Harvey [in 2017] . Doing water rescues transitioned to us gathering our friends and our community members together at 1707 West Street, where we did everything from rescues, to passing out clean clothes and sanitary supplies, to helping people muck out their homes, to eventually helping people rebuild their homes. And then we decided to set this up as a non-profit, because we saw a lot of people falling through the cracks in Northeast Houston. 

Now my role is twofold. I’m the co-director of rebuild, so I’m hands on a lot when it comes to the rebuild work that West Street does on homes. And I’m also the co-director of voter engagement, because we do nonpartisan voter engagement work in order to connect what happens to our community members and their narratives day-to-day to the importance of actually participating in an electoral system. 

Moira: Please say a bit more about the communities served by West Street Recovery.

Barley: It’s mostly an older population, and people who have lived multiple generations in these communities. These communities are heavily Black and brown. These communities are, for the most part, working class folks.

A lot of these folks don’t have access to some of the resources that you would see even in inner-city Houston. Because of our zoning laws in Houston, you see a lot of the more unsavory businesses are out there. This is the oil town of the country, right? So you see a lot of the petroleum production refineries, or various trucking businesses, or the concrete crushing plant that produces toxic chemicals.

There are also a number of superfund sites in these neighborhoods, including one in Fifth Ward, that’s being called a “cancer cluster,” where Pacific Union Railroad put creosote deposits and other harmful chemicals in the grounds decades ago, and people are now seeing the repercussions in their health.

In general, these are Black and brown people who lack resources, and don’t have a lot of political power in the city. That’s part of why we helped create the Northeast Action Collective, so community members can make informed decisions, go to the halls of power, and talk directly to decision-makers about their visions for the future of their neighborhoods.

Moira: How are you seeing housing safety and affordability interact with climate change in this area?

Barley:  We already have rising housing costs here in Houston, like every other major city in the country. But that’s being worsened by the string of natural disasters that we’ve dealt with over the last decade. Before Harvey [in August 2017] there was Ike [September 2008], a major storm that took out a lot of homes in Galveston but also did some damage here in Houston. Before Harvey we had the tax day floods [April 2016], which was a tropical storm, and then we got Imelda [September 2019], and some other smaller tropical storms after that. So people are in this perpetual state of disaster here, and the most vulnerable people, like folks who live in Northeast Houston, don’t have the resources to continuously rebuild time and time and time again. 

Then we’re in a once in a lifetime pandemic, and folks who are in working class jobs are now at a high risk of getting sick, but also their pay isn’t increasing at a decent enough rate. So then we had a freak winter storm that came out of nowhere. Then just this past Thursday we had a derecho on the land. We do get a lot of hurricanes coming from the water. But land hurricanes aren’t a thing here – that’s a midwest thing. Yet last week we had a derecho.

There’s never been a time for us to fully recover. And I don’t think our politicians or our community leaders in general, or the more affluent members of society, understand what type of burden it is for poorer folks to constantly have to rebuild their homes, to constantly have to fight with their insurance companies.

But when you try to go to the places that you expect to help you out, when you try to talk to the folks who are supposed to provide resources, who are supposed to come and help you when natural disaster strikes all of a sudden…they can’t give you a straight answer. They can’t tell you what sort of resources they’re gonna be able to provide. There’s a lot of bureaucratic paperwork. When it’s at the city level – or really at every level – there’s a lot of committees. There’s a lot of walking around. There’s a lot of talking about actions. There’s a lot of planning about actions. There is the committee for the committee to the committee, and then, after those committees are finished talking, then maybe we’ll get some legislation, hopefully, if it doesn’t get any opposition, and when that passes, maybe we can provide you some relief in the short term. Maybe but we’re not promising anything. Maybe we’ll get $750 per family. Oh, well, wait. That’s too much. Maybe we’ll reconsider that. Maybe it’ll be based on the property size…It’s like no one wants to give. No one in a bureaucratic role just wants to get on the ground, get their hands dirty and just give people the resources they need.

There is a lot of contemplation about why people deserve these resources or how they can be qualified for these resources instead of just providing them. And we see this same thing, every time we go through a natural disaster.

Moira: Let’s talk specifically about insurance. Insurance costs are rising around the country. How have you seen that impacting in Northeast Houston? And how have you seen insurance be helpful or not helpful after all of these disasters, year after year?

Barley: The times are few and far between when the community members I deal with in Northeast Houston have been able to just file a claim and get what they need from their claim. A process we go through every time there’s a natural disaster here in Houston is fighting for folks who have been denied claims. A lot of our poor folks get denied—and if they’re not being denied, they’re not getting the amount of money that will actually help them recover. 

On top of that, a decent amount of our population in Northeast Houston is older and on fixed income. These aren’t people with lavish 401ks or who are easily set for retirement, but they still have to retire because their bodies can’t keep up. They have to decide between home and flood insurance and taking care of groceries, and can only afford to take care of some of those. So one of the things we try to raise funds for every year is to provide a certain amount of our community members’ homes with full flood insurance coverage for the year. And we typically do that in 2-3 year periods for folks. And then we try to see if people can find a way to take care of themselves afterwards. If not, we try to go back and raise more funds to do another round for folks. But a lot of folks just can’t afford insurance right now.

Moira: In a previous conversation with one of your colleagues, they mentioned that one of the barriers to folks getting flood insurance is that the premium payments are required annually, in full and upfront, and that most folks in Northeast Houston can’t possibly afford that lump sum payment. Similarly, a barrier for lower income people, even if a claim is approved, is that you’re expected to pay upfront for the repairs and then get reimbursed. But what if folks don’t have cash on hand for those upfront repair costs?

Barley: Sometimes we’re fortunate enough to have funds on hand to just do the rebuilding work for folks; we do our best to raise as much money as possible for this, and one of our main goals is to cover the folks who don’t have anything at all. So we rebuild those homes, but we also rebuild the homes that have insurance that are in our area that, just like you said, can’t afford those upfront costs. And then since they don’t have to cover the upfront costs, they can file a claim and then get reimbursed on the back end, and then they’ll just pay us back when they’re reimbursed. But typically, we don’t even ask for repayment.

Moira: What do you think is getting left out of the policy conversation about home insurance in Texas?

Barley: Before the interview we were talking about policy ideas, that maybe a state-based insurance option could be a response to this. But… this is a red state. I’m going to be blunt about this: in a lot of ways, this is a good-old-boy, very corrupt state.

The time and energy and effort required to change the political system here in Texas, so that it is more equitable…it’s gonna be a minute. It might be a couple of decades, and unfortunately, for the day-to-day lives of Texans, especially the most vulnerable Texans in areas that are going to continuously see natural disasters year after year…they do not have the resources to wait around for that.

This is an area where the federal government needs to step up. They need to fight tooth and nail for this. These are the types of things that, in my opinion, really sway whether or not people become more apathetic at the federal level when it comes to voting. It’s like, Hey? When I was vulnerable, when I was hurt, when I was down, you came down here, FEMA reps came down here, and they offered a check.

The further you get from a natural disaster, the less people are worried about recovery efforts, the less these big donors are worried about putting money into rebuilding homes, the less they’re worried about providing money for insurance for folks who can’t afford insurance. And then [these donors] want us to come up with ‘innovation’. But we don’t have the space to think about innovation; we haven’t fully recovered from the disaster. We’re still fighting these folks to get the money for this from this last disaster.

Moira: Are there ideas and proposals that you have for better disaster prevention and recovery, whether related to insurance or not?

Barley: Like I said, I think we need the federal government to step up because across the board we’re seeing these red states not really care about who gets left by the wayside. Which is why I think we desperately need for there to be some intervention at the federal level. I think they should be fighting to get those laws changed at the Congressional level to ensure that they can take back a little bit of power from the states in situations where they’re not doing their job, when they’re not taking care of people, and they’re mismanaging funds. Maybe it could work like a bypass, where the federal government can grant monies directly to municipalities so that they can provide some form of insurance.

Moira: Is there anything else that you feel like is really important for policymakers, researchers, or the media to know and understand about what is happening in Northeast Houston, and what that means for this conversation about the intersections of home insurance, housing safety and affordability, and climate change?

Barley: A lot of the new housing here isn’t really affordable for folks who live in northeast Houston, when your house is valued at $75,000 to $120,000. New builds are $340,000.

So it’s kinda hard to get up and move. And a lot of folks don’t wanna leave their communities. They built up these communities for years. It’s hard to let go of something and let it just get washed away, only to be rebuilt with like 8 condos, where your house and property used to stand.

It feels like the system is definitely stacked against our folks. And for the average individual interpreting what their policy actually does provide for them after a storm happens, or having resources like lawyers or even anyone savvy enough to translate these documents and be able to tell you what you need to do and what your what your steps are. It’s often hard, and yes, we step in sometimes and help. But there are so many more people out here than we’re able to help with our current capacity. So in the short term, even just providing a degree of transparency when it comes to what insurance companies will actually do for folks on the other end of disaster is really important.