Extreme Cities by Ashley Dawson

Author:Ashley Dawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

This account of displacement captures the way in which even the most intimate relationships, the ones that are most sustaining under normal circumstances, can be strained and soured by the extended dependencies catalyzed by disaster-related displacement.

Leila Rassi’s experiences are anything but unique. In some communities, harrowing displacement was the norm after Hurricane Sandy, as Alex Woods, a resident of a beachfront adult care facility in Queens, recounted to Sandy Storyline, an online participatory documentary project that collects stories, images, and videos about Sandy’s impact on communities.4 Woods was evacuated along with 160 other residents of the facility on the morning after the storm hit, ultimately spending over three months in temporary residences.5 Although the facility lay smack in the middle of a floodplain designated as a “Zone A” mandatory evacuation area, no efforts had been made to relocate Woods and his friends before the storm. Woods ended up spending much of this period in a halfway house on the grounds of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, a ramshackle, partially abandoned psychiatric institution in an isolated area of Queens, where he and his friends had to cope with deteriorating conditions, including sporadic lack of heat and hot water.

The displacement of people following a natural disaster such as Hurricane Sandy is a particular challenge in New York since the region already has a systemic housing crisis. At the time of Sandy, more than 50,000 people were sleeping in city shelters or on the streets every night, a number that has grown significantly in subsequent years. Disaster-related displacement thus raises basic issues of social justice. Leila Rassi draws the lesson powerfully in her blog post for Rethinking Home:

To discuss the effects of Sandy without giving prominent consideration to the need for sustainable, fair, and affordable housing in New York City would be to ignore the needs of the many low-and middle-income residents of the devastated neighborhoods. It would also ignore the reality that housing justice is a tangible and achievable outcome that is well within the capacity of governments to implement … My purpose in sharing these concerns is to inform a wider audience of the ongoing man-made destruction of our communities.6

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