http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i46/46b01601.htm
From the issue dated July 21, 2006
POINT OF VIEW
Disasters and Deregulation
By TED STEINBERG
From a statistical perspective, our nation's recent hurricane problem
comes down to a case of bad luck. Even though 32 major hurricanes developed
in the North Atlantic from 1998 to 2003, only three reached the mainland in
the United States. Then came two very active seasons that brought a record
number of hurricanes. "We went from being very, very lucky to being very
unlucky in 2004 and 2005," Phil Klotzbach, of Colorado State University's
Tropical Meteorology Project, told The Times-Picayune. "Hopefully, we get
back to being lucky again."
A little luck is always a good thing, especially with another hurricane
season now under way. But we can help load the dice in our favor by
understanding what has gone wrong with the federal government's approach to
natural hazards.
To date the Katrina disaster has been presented in the news media as
primarily a textbook example of failed Republican politics. If only
President Bush had left the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone and
not incorporated it into the Department of Homeland Security. If only he
had appointed a FEMA director with experience in disaster preparedness. If
only he had not slashed funds to strengthen the levees, then things would
have gone better down South.
There is little doubt that the Bush administration badly mishandled the
disaster. Nor can there be any question that concern with terrorism drained
away resources and distracted political leaders from the threat of natural
disasters. But ultimately our nation's problem with such calamities goes
back much further than the rise of Republicans to power in the 2000
election or the attacks of September 11, 2001. The dilemma stems from the
deregulatory ethos that has dominated U.S. politics since 1980. That
disregard for limits be they on coastal development or storm-susceptible
housing is something that both Republicans and Democrats have conspired
to bring about.
The ethos is part of a more general trend since the late 1970s toward a
neoliberal agenda. As described by the geographer David Harvey in his
recent A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005),
neoliberalism involves "an institutional framework characterized by strong
private property rights, free markets, and free trade." It is a philosophy
centered on nearly absolute economic freedom that flourished during the
Reagan administration and, as the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has pointed
out in The Roaring Nineties (W.W. Norton, 2003), carried over into the
Clinton era.
Consider, for example, the National Flood Insurance Program, established in
1968 and based on the idea that the federal government would help people in
flood-prone locales insure their property. In return, local municipalities
would enact regulations limiting land use in vulnerable areas and thereby
reduce exposure to flood risk. Unfortunately, a 1983 General Accounting
Office report revealed that FEMA first charged with administering the
program under Jimmy Carter had failed to monitor state and local regulations.
A bipartisan assault on the program soon followed. What was once a
requirement that local authorities adopt flood-plain rules became "the
preferred approach" under the Reagan administration. The Clinton
administration then abandoned land-use regulation entirely, drafting a new
policy that sought to "encourage positive attitudes toward flood-plain
management."
Meanwhile FEMA allowed the maps defining flood zones to go out of date, a
move that understated the risk of inundation and thus helped encourage
coastal development in vulnerable areas. Back in the 1970s, mapping those
areas subject to a 1-percent risk of annual flooding occurred every three
to five years. But the deregulatory climate that began the following decade
led to a lackadaisical attitude at FEMA's cartography department.
By the time Hurricane Katrina struck, some of the flood-insurance maps were
a full generation old. A map depicting part of Hancock County, Miss., for
example, allowed homeowners to build some 10 feet below the elevation that
an accurate estimate of a 100-year flood would have permitted a disaster
waiting to happen if ever there was one.
Sadly, the same deregulatory agenda also applied to vulnerable barrier
islands. In 1982 the Coastal Barrier Resources Act set aside 186 units of
dynamic barrier land and denied those areas federal support for bridges,
water and sewer systems, and national flood insurance. The problem is that
the law applied only to those barrier islands not yet developed. It also
did not prevent people from using their own money to build on private land.
A 1992 report by the General Accounting Office found that two out of 10
federal agencies provided assistance to undeveloped barrier islands covered
by the legislation. Indeed, the barrier-resources act has done virtually
nothing to contain development on those high-risk land masses. It has no
teeth because Democrats and Republicans both support strong property
rights; neither group has had the backbone to rein in real-estate developers.
Nothing better demonstrates the lack of respect for rules than policy
trends in governing the construction of mobile homes, a form of housing
extremely prone to destruction from hurricane-force winds. Such
manufactured homes popular housing in the South have been regulated by
the Department of Housing and Urban Development since the 1970s. But the
agency has fallen down on the job.
In the 1980s, engineers at Texas Tech University exposed flaws in the
wind-design standards in the manufactured-housing code. That did not,
however, stop dealers from selling as "hurricane resistive" mobile homes
that could not withstand winds of more than 80 mph just barely a Category
1 hurricane. HUD spent years ignoring the troubling evidence. It took
Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed 97 percent of the mobile homes along the
hurricane's path in Dade County, Fla., or roughly 10,000 structures, to
force the department, over objections from industry, to upgrade wind-safety
standards. (The tougher wind code applies only to mobile homes built after
1994.)
Recent developments in mobile-home regulation are even more troubling. In
2000 President Bill Clinton signed the Manufactured Housing Improvement
Act. The legislation further deregulated an industry that had never been
stringently supervised. The law established a "consensus committee" of 21
voting members to interpret and revise mobile-home construction and safety
standards 11 members of the committee, a majority, were even allowed to
have a "significant financial interest" in the very industry they are
supposed to be regulating.
Unsurprisingly, only two weeks after Katrina ripped through the South,
David Roberson, president and chief executive of Alabama-based Cavalier
Homes Inc. and a representative of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a
trade group, went to Congress to argue for suspending wind-safety
standards. The idea was to facilitate the installation of mobile homes in
areas affected by the storm places that remain vulnerable to hurricanes.
Last spring FEMA issued a flood-insurance guideline requiring those New
Orleans homeowners whose houses were more than 50 percent damaged by
Hurricane Katrina to elevate rebuilt structures three feet off the ground.
The three-foot figure seems arbitrary though FEMA claims it is not
based less on hard science than faith in unrestrained real-estate
development. Computer models reveal that even a Category 3 storm could
inundate the city to a depth of more than 10 feet above sea level, and
that's assuming the levees hold. The lenient rule fits with the larger
generation-long pattern that has come to define U.S. natural-hazards policy.
Although the gravity of the recent Katrina disaster inspired some members
of Congress to put forth a tougher and more meaningful set of
flood-insurance regulations, they found little support. Michael G. Oxley,
an Ohio Republican, and Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, sponsored
legislation in the House of Representatives that would have beefed up the
federal program by including those areas subject annually to a fifth of a
percent chance of flooding. Such a move would have expanded the areas
deemed at risk to nearly the entire nation floods, after all, have been
recorded in all 50 states and would have allowed the program to build up
the necessary reserves for a future calamity on a par with what happened
last August.
Developers have opposed such legislation because it would presumably
increase construction costs. David L. Pressly Jr., of the National
Association of Home Builders, told The New York Times that the
flood-insurance program "may need a tune-up, but I don't think it needs
radical change." Congress appears to agree. Instead of substantive reform,
both chambers are considering bills that tinker with the flood-insurance
program. The House version calls for increasing premiums on vacation homes
and businesses and instructs the comptroller general to study the program,
the latter move a favorite ploy by those seeking to stave off any truly
meaningful environmental reform, as the history of studying global-warming
policy attests. The Senate version is somewhat stronger, but it would do
little to correct the federal government's role in underwriting life on the
edge of obliteration.
If we find mobile homes reduced to rubble and water 10 feet deep in the
streets this summer, people ought not simply blame President Bush or his
political appointees. The real problem is the bipartisan disregard for
rules and limits that has made our nation's approach to natural disaster so
much like playing Russian roulette. With $7-trillion in insured property
along the stretch from Texas to Maine, now is the time for more not less
regulation of coastal development.
Ted Steinberg is a professor of history and law at Case Western Reserve
University. Among his books are Acts of God: The Unnatural History of
Natural Disaster in America (Oxford University Press, 2000) and American
Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).
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