Homes Wiped Away by Natural Disasters

Elderly Victims of the Whittier Narrows Earthquake

Orange, California, flourished before World War II. Small cottages housed young residents who settled, raised families, and formed a community. Fifty years later in 1987, when the Whittier Narrows earthquake struck Orange, the residents had retired, many of the men had died, and their surviving widows were elderly, sometimes disabled, and often frail. However, these women lived independently in their one-story cottages, long since paid for, even when their disabilities left them blind and mobility impaired. Their familiar surroundings and supportive neighbors and church colleagues had enabled them.

The cottages had been built before California had a seismic building code requiring homes to be bolted to the foundations. The earthquake destroyed many of the cottages and, suddenly, these women were homeless. They were taken to hospitals because they could not meet the standard for independent self-care required of the American Red Cross general population shelters. A social worker for Orange County followed these elderly women as they moved from hospital to nursing homes. Because they lived on low fixed incomes, they could not qualify for Small Business Administration loans to rebuild their homes.

Although earthquake insurance was available, most could not afford the extra premium on their small Social Security or pension checks to obtain coverage. Tracking their mental deterioration, depression, and rapid demise, the social worker noted that, within two years of the loss of their homes, more than half of the elderly women had died, and the rest were in welfare-assisted nursing homes or assisted living centers, having lost their independence and their privacy when the earthquake took their homes. These women were disaster homeless.

Loma Prieta Earthquake Breaks Watsonville, California

When the shaking stopped in Watsonville, California, in 1989, the economy of the town was changed forever. It had been a farming community with a large cold-food-storage industry and a population including a large number of migrant workers and their families living in overcrowded conditions due to low wages. It was not unusual for a whole family to be living in a garage, or for two families to be sharing a two-bedroom apartment. The Loma Prieta earthquake damaged or destroyed the overcrowded and often substandard housing, leaving thousands of migrant workers homeless. FEMA brought its entire stock of trailers to Watsonville to provide temporary housing.

The earthquake also damaged or destroyed many of the cold storage warehouses. Since it was fall and the harvest was underway, growers decided to put their produce on rail cars and send it to Mexico for cold storage, because the cost of shipping to Mexico, storing for months, and reshipping back to U.S. markets proved to be less costly than storage in Watsonville.

The workers lost not only their homes, but also their livelihoods. Their welfare payments could not cover the cost of housing that met HUD standards for occupancy a maximum of one person per roomso they remained in the FEMA trailers, often with multiple trailers for one family. The migrant workers were first overcrowded, then homeless in temporary shelters, and then temporarily housed in trailers that became their permanent homes.

Oakland-Berkeley Hills Firestorm Destroys Homes of a Lifetime

The Oakland Hills neighborhood overlooks San Francisco Bay, with the gleaming towers of San Francisco in the distance, along with views of the Bay Bridge and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. These were homes to aspire to, and in the 1960s and 1970s a neighborhood of unique, individually built single-family homes developed on hillside lots. The streets were narrow to discourage cut-through traffic. Most of the homes were paid off and their residents were retired by 1991 when a wild fire burned the area to the ground.

Residents of the Oakland Hills were fortunate to escape with their lives from the wind-driven conflagration that consumed a whole ridgeline in Oakland and Berkeley. They evacuated to hotels paid for by their fire insurances temporary housing coverage. They confronted the loss of their homes contents, but began planning to rebuild on their paid-for lots. Some lots had eroded when fire fighters poured water into residential areas. The fire department response was slowed by the narrow roads and evacuating residents.

Post-fire community meetings heard battles over whose front lawn would disappear to widen the road, and which lots would be grandfathered to permit rebuilding on the eroded lots that were too small to meet the zoning requirements. Insurance adjusters arrived to estimate the value of losses and provide policy limit payouts.

A neighborhood of prosperous homeowners suddenly became a neighborhood of homeless people, a shock to them and to the city. Most of the homes in the fire area had been purchased in the 1950s and 1960s and paid off in 20 years. By 1991 their insurance coverage was often 10 or more years out of date. In addition, since the homes were more than 50 percent destroyed, current seismic and building codes applied, adding to the cost of reconstruction. The owner of a home that would cost $200,000 to rebuild often had a fire insurance policy that paid $100,000 or less on a total loss, including contents.

Because most of the owners were 10 or more years into retirement, most did not have the income to qualify for a Small Business Administration loan to supplement the insurance payout. Most could not afford the payments on a new mortgage to supplement the insurance money, even with the equity in the valuable view lots. Some owners found that their lots were too eroded to permit construction of a new home on the property, rendering their lots almost valueless. Overnight, residents of uppermiddle-class professional neighborhoods found themselves homeless.

With their insurance proceeds and some money from the sale of their lots, fire survivors moved to Sacramento to seniors-only communities. Soon they discovered that while they could afford to purchase a condo, they could not afford the annually rising community association dues on their fixed incomes. Within a few years they had to move again, often to assisted living facilities.

Their decline in health, while related to aging, was accelerated by depression over the loss of their community, homes, and possessions. One woman said, I spent a lifetime building a lifestyle, and in one day I lost it all. I am completely alone in a strange place. She was no longer a proud homeowner, but instead the resident of a senior home that took her entire pension and social security check each month. In fact, her fixed monthly income no longer qualified her for a private apartment. She anticipated sharing an apartment with a stranger, and ultimately ending life in a nursing home bed instead of the expected retirement in her home overlooking the city by the Bay.

Katrina Homelessness

Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans in 2005. As the locally owned levees failed along the canals, neighborhoods were lost to the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. The residents of the Lower Ninth Ward were particularly hard hit, because their community was below sea level, and, lacking deeds or tax bills, they could not qualify for federal assistance. In Louisiana, people do not pay taxes on their homes unless the value exceeds $75,000. Therefore, most residents of the Lower Ninth had no tax records to use for proof of ownership.

In many cases, the homes had been in the same family for generations, with ownership passing informally, and no one had a deed. Many of the homes did not have city utility services, so they had no utility bill. Lacking any proof of ownership of the damaged property, it was difficult or impossible to get help with rebuilding. In addition, incomes were so low that even those with proof of ownership often could not qualify for loans to make repairs.

FEMA requires that all flooded homes rebuilt with federal funds meet federal flood insurance policy standards of construction. Along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, the homes have been raised above flood level, often rising 10 to 20 feet above ground level, with the first level used only for storage or garages. In the Lower Ninth, this meant that some homes would have to be raised as much as 25 feet above ground level, and the cost and aesthetic considerations prevented rebuilding.

Even in middle class areas like Lakeview there are still many homes boarded up. Older homeowners on fixed incomes, like those in Orange and the Oakland Hills, cannot qualify for federal loans or new mortgages. Some homeowners not in the flood plain did not have flood insurance. The cost of rebuilding exceeds the maximum assistance available through FEMA. Some owners are still in lawsuits with the insurance companies, and the government cannot provide federal aid until insurance settlements have been reached.

Mitigation: The Lesson of Disasters

As demonstrated in the case studies, mitigation against disasters helps ensure that a family will have a home after a disaster. There is no government or private program that will make a family whole after a community-wide disaster.

Risk-based zoning and strict building codes are important mitigation measures. Communities should forbid construction of multi-unit residential properties in flood plains, on active fault lines, or in other unstable or dangerous areas. Single-family homes should have risk-related mitigation requirements in geologically unstable areas, flood plains, wild land urban interface fire zones, and in areas with significant weather threats.

Residents should develop vital records folders for their emergency kits to ensure that they can prove ownership and contact insurance companies. Such steps will lessen the likelihood that a community will have to care for large numbers of residents made permanently homeless by disasters.