Trey Smith
The fight for home is still being fought in New Orleans, more than seven years after Katrina. And it’s in full-swing in the New York metropolitan area, months after Sandy.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently announced he wanted to use $400 million in federal funding to buy “beachfront homes” to “reshape the New York coastline.” The stated goal is to make the region “better prepared for storms like Hurricane Sandy.” With that money, the government would pay homeowners pre-storm values, raze their houses, and leave the land as “open space.” More than ten thousand homes would qualify, with notable exceptions. According to the New York Times, “The program is not targeted at the most expensive waterfront homes; it would cap the payments for houses at around the median home value in a given neighborhood.”
So, who’s going to have their homes razed? Middle and low-income owners.
~ from The Fight For Home Goes On by Daniel Wolff ~
If I wasn't convinced of it before, I am now. God must be a capitalist or least a good buddy of the capitalist elite.
Over the last few years, every time God exerts his wrath through climatic events in the US, it provides the capitalist elite with a ready-made opportunity to push poor people to the margins. That's what happened to the poor in New Orleans. The rich people had their homes rebuilt and the poor people didn't. In fact, the poor -- predominantly black -- no longer live in New Orleans. With their homes condemned, they were farmed out across the nation.
Since this blueprint worked so well in Louisiana, why not try it in New York? The people in those wealthy coastal communities didn't like those poor people so close by anyway and now, with this plan in place, they won't be!
In the long term those coastal properties will become uninhabitable anyway, as more frequent and more powerful hurricanes caused by global warming will just destroy those homes again each season (unless you build them like bunkers or something). Either the government or the poor homeowners themselves will have to fit the bill for the constant rebuilding. It's all for the best that they are given the means to leave now before things only get worse.
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