By Jen Rose
For the longest time, wealthy retirees migrated to the beaches—of, say, sunny Florida. Now with the reality of rising sea levels, higher ground is a more desirable destination. But what happens to those who have lived for generations on higher ground, or to those from vulnerable coastal areas who can’t afford to move?
Liberty Square, Miami: Ground Zero for Climate Gentrification
Located to the immediate west of Miami’s Design District is Liberty Square in the Liberty City neighborhood, the first housing project in the Southeastern United States that became a cultural hub during a renaissance in the 1960s Civil Rights era, when the neighborhood regularly welcomed leaders like Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King Jr.
Today, Liberty City copes with climate gentrification, in which lower-socioeconomic communities are displaced from housing by the wealthy as they seek “climate safer” land. Eager developers respond to sea level rise by planning to build on the neighborhood’s higher ground, which attracts the higher-income crowd seeking safety from the risks of building on Miami’s vulnerable coastline.
Communities like Liberty City and nearby Little Haiti—home to the largest Haitian population in the U.S.—give us early warnings of what’s to come. It also makes sense that those hit earliest by sea level rise are among the earliest to adapt to the future. They have been experiencing these impacts for some time, and are well versed in the crucial connection between climate change and climate displacement.
This gentrification dynamic is forcing residents of Liberty City, Little Haiti and eventually nearly more than half Miami-Dade County residents to decide whether to defend their right to stay in their homes, or to move away and expect little in the way of local government aid or municipal support. Razing Liberty Square explores all of this with compassion.
At the Liberty Square Housing Project, from the film “Razing Liberty Square”
“The Seas Are Rising but So Are the People”
Civil rights activist/community organizer Valencia Gunder is known as “a modern-day [community organizer] Fannie Lou Hamer.” With an extensive background in disaster response—Gunder founded the Community Emergency Outreach Center that assisted over 23,000 residents after Hurricane Irma hit Florida in 2017—she works on community self-sufficiency in the face of gentrification.
On a panel captivatingly called “The Seas Are Rising but So Are the People,” Gunder noted that when you grow up where she did in South Florida, “climate change and resiliency are always a part of the conversation.” As noted in this panel, these communities—historically excluded from emergency planning measures—are now less inclined to trust a “top-down” scenario in which a team of scientists and government aid airdrops into the situation. Instead, they look to themselves for help.
Gunder told Convergence magazine that communities of color can look to alternative systems, “grassroots disaster relief models for us to be able to help each other, ‘cause that’s what we do anyway. We are our own first responders. If you look at under-resourced communities, that’s what you see every time there’s a disaster. Neighbors helping neighbors. Community helping community. The churches open the doors. That’s the work, that’s the organizing. No big institution can serve your community better than you. We can get it done.”
The concept of “climate gentrification” highlights demands from consumers and investors, based on changes in risk assessment that impact local real estate markets, zoning preferences, and flows in capital. Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University, coauthored a gentrification study called “Measuring, mapping, and anticipating climate gentrification in Florida,” which revealed a high likelihood of haphazard outcomes for residential and commercial neighborhoods alike.
A study on Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood draws a picture of the forceful effects that climate change is already having on its economic security, putting a finer point on the fact that forced displacement and rising housing costs are short-term fixes for a set of long-term and layered problems.
Displacement
Displacing populations to make room for those who can pay premium rates is simply a stop-gap that benefits the privileged few.
A study on the city of Tampa, located across the state from Miami and rising no more than 48 feet above sea level, found that it’s not just low-income residents who face displacement. “We discovered businesses and industry were also in this race for higher ground,” said Tulane professor Jesse Keenan, one of the study authors.
“We need to start planning today about land use decisions and movements in the future instead of just letting the market haphazardly create the situation we have,” he said. “[We learned] we need to be mindful of where these conflicts are arising today and tomorrow.”
The Case of Puerto Rico
Low-income and neglected neighborhoods in coastal cities have learned from past mass disasters that communication gaps between local communities and early warning systems only widen. We saw this when Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico during the intense 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, which was unprecedented.
The major hurricanes of 2017—which also included the disastrous Irma and Harvey—combined for $265 billion in damages. In 2019, BMJ Global Health subsequently investigated whether the federal response to Hurricanes Maria and Irma in Puerto Rico was smaller and slower than the responses to Irma in Florida and Harvey in Texas that same year.
This study concluded the responses were vastly different.
There were several possible explanations for the disparities: a hampered ability to access the affected area based on geography and distance; existing infrastructure aiding or acting as barriers to response efforts; “disaster fatigue”; and issues of racial bias and perceptions of differential citizenship.
After the hurricane disaster recovery began in Puerto Rico, the island also began to see an increase in gentrification as new settlers—including cryptocurrency investors looking for tax breaks—took advantage of cheaper prices, bought up property, pushed up home values, and pushed out residents. And coastal gentrification in Puerto Rico is thought to be not only displacing people, and privatizing beaches, but damaging precious mangroves and wetlands.
“The creeping gentrification troubles many Puerto Ricans,” wrote Coral Murphy Marcos and Patricia Mazzei in The New York Times. They “have become more forceful in questioning how an economy reliant on tax breaks for the wealthy can work for local residents increasingly unable to afford property.”
Puerto Rican journalist Bianca Graulau on how people are resisting gentrification on their island:
Sharing Is Caring: Disaster Collectivism
We may all be sinking, but not all of us are in the same boat.
At least a decade ago, many neighborhoods of these coastal cities witnessed the need for robust localized systems, independent of government agencies, that can assist when a levee breaks or a hurricane makes landfall.
On the Puerto Rico disaster, author Rebecca Solnit wrote, “You can think of the current social order as a kind of power that fails in disaster.” In her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit reported that communities tend to build their own mutual aid networks in the absence of outside support, and she coined the term “disaster collectivism” to describe this response. In the face of federal neglect, the Puerto Rican populace transformed gathering spaces into medical and childcare centers, communal kitchens, and information hubs.
The cold fact is that the majority of the 1 billion global climate migrants forecasted by 2050 will be lower-income, with scant resources to secure more optimal habitats. Close to half (42%) of the global populations that live along coastlines are among those hit first by the changes ahead.
While some will seek climate-stable regions and try to move to an increasingly expensive inland, more will be forced to stay and face the cascading calamities brought on by sea-level rise. Still, on a smaller scale, people within affected communities are finding solutions, that piece by piece can make a difference in survival.
Sea level rise map of Miami; from Razing Liberty Square. Credit: Caresse Haaser.
The “Tree Lady” of New Orleans
In the 7th Ward of New Orleans, a neighborhood that continues to be overburdened by the fallout from Hurricane Katrina and from increasing gentrification pushing out people of color, Angela Chalk, executive director of Healthy Community Services, embodies the catalyzing energy of disaster collectivism. Known locally as the “tree lady,” Chalk’s mission is to empower residents and business owners in rewilding the 7th Ward.
Chalk knows that green infrastructure increases water table levels. She knows that the heat sensors they have installed in their tree canopy are collecting crucial and valuable climate change data. “In my community, we are on what was once swampy land, but it was cheap land. We don’t have these tree-lined avenues like those of the more affluent sections of New Orleans,” she said. “Now everybody in the neighborhood is a native tree expert.”
Watch >> “Planting Trees to Keep New Orleans Cool”
Rewilding
Coming from conservation biology, the concept of rewilding emerged in the 1980s as “wilderness recovery.” According to The Rewilding Institute, the ambition is to restore habitats at a grand scale, a scale needed by wide-ranging species.
The work often focuses on the apex predators, like wolves, great cats, crocodiles, sharks, and salmon, “and other keystone species that tend to need wild space and be lost quickly in domesticated or exploited lands and waters.”
Rewilding is an elastic term used to describe a paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and nature, and the general ambition for increasing restoration and safeguarding existing wilderness. In the case of the 7th Ward, such ambition is seen in projects spearheaded by Healthy Community Services to teach residents restoration techniques, like native tree planting and urban stormwater management to improve the water quality of Lake Pontchartrain.
Ironically, some feel rewilding in cities could lead to increased property costs, thus pricing out the poorer residents. But:
“If these tensions are resolved,” writes Guardian environment reporter Helena Horton, “rewilding could be positive for underserved communities, which are usually at most risk of the negative effects of the climate crisis, including air pollution, heatwaves, and flooding.”
The Obstacle of Human Bias
Dr. Michael E. Mann, professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of Our Fragile Moment (and the fellow who inspired the main character in the 2021 movie Don’t Look Up,) reminds us that the sooner we all grasp this deep connection between climate change and climate migrations, the sooner we will begin to respond in ways that can ensure our survival.
Rugged individualism is not a good look for facing these storms. A true flex when facing climate gentrification takes imagination and collective creativity.
“The obstacles aren’t technological, the obstacles aren’t physical,” said Dr. Mann. “The obstacles are political, and they can be overcome.”
While a chorus of voices in civil society echo this message, we nevertheless have a pesky tendency to tune it out. Why? It can be difficult to grapple with a future unfolding on a scale never seen before, especially while also coping with significant present-day challenges like a global pandemic and cost-of-living increases.
According to Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert in an episode of The Happiness Lab podcast, “Why Our Brains Don’t Fear Climate Change Enough,” another reason for our historically slow response to this threat is that climate change doesn’t have a face.
From an evolutionary standpoint, we are designed to mobilize against a common enemy, like another tribe or a predatory animal. Putting a face to a problem has the potential to light a fire under us, but in the case of climate change, calling out the CEO of Exxon hasn’t inspired us to harness our capacities to organize and plan ahead.
Overcoming Future Shock
Rugged individualism is not a good look for facing these storms. A true flex when facing climate gentrification takes imagination and collective creativity. Those hit by the first waves of change show the rest of us what it looks like to overcome the fear response and awaken our dormant capacities for survival.
Communities that bolster self-sufficiency are strategizing now on local and regional policy and planning decisions. Through their measures in community-centric disaster planning, green infrastructure development, and collaborative partnering, places like the 7th Ward, Liberty City, and Puerto Rico have pulled from their collective ingenuity and imaginations to build early warning systems and more sustainable infrastructure.
As Suga Free sang, “When you stay ready, you don’t gotta get ready.”
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