Disasters & wealthNatural disasters widen racial wealth gap
Damage caused by natural disasters and recovery efforts launched in their aftermaths have increased wealth inequality between races in the United States, according to new research.
Damage caused by natural disasters and recovery efforts launched in their aftermaths have increased wealth inequality between races in the United States, according to new research from Rice University and the University of Pittsburgh.
“Damages Done: The Longitudinal Impacts of Natural Hazards on Wealth Inequality in the United States” will appear in an upcoming edition of Social Problems. A supplement to the paper highlights the wealth gap between whites and blacks attributable to natural disaster damage from 1999 through 2013 in 20 U.S. counties.
Researchers Junia Howell, a scholar at Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and Jim Elliott, a professor of sociology at Rice and fellow at Rice’s Kinder Institute combined longitudinal data from nearly 3,500 families across the U.S. with governmental data on local natural disaster damages, Federal Emergency Management Aid (FEMA) and demographics. They followed these people from 1999 through 2013 as disaster damage of varying scale struck counties where they lived, and examined how their personal wealth was impacted.
“Last year the United States suffered more than $260 billion in direct damages from natural disasters –mainly from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria,” said Howell, who was the study’s lead author. “And there were also numerous wildfires, floods and tornadoes. Data show that since 2000, approximately 99 percent of counties in the U.S. have experienced significant damage from some type of natural disaster, with costs expected to increase significantly over coming years. We wanted to investigate how these damages impact wealth inequality and accumulation.”
Rice notes that ehites who lived in counties with only $100,000 in damage from 1999 to 2013 gained an average of approximately $26,000 in wealth. However, those who lived in counties with at least $10 billion in damage during the same time period gained nearly $126,000, the paper said.
“In other words, whites living in counties with considerable damage from natural disasters accumulate more wealth than their white counterparts living in counties without major natural disaster damage,” Howell said.
