Introduction: A Right to Rebuilding the City

This chapter focuses on communities, groups, neighborhoods, individuals, classes of individuals, and families who have a precarious relationship with property. Here, we discuss the ways in which that relationship structures rights to imagine, access, and rebuild infrastructure and social life after a disaster and during processes of relocation as an adaptation to climate change—rights we collectively describe as “the right to rebuilding the city.” Over the last four decades, the language of “the right to the city” (Harvey, 2008; Lefebvre, 1974) has become a powerful rallying cry for social movements such as the Right To The City Alliance, formed in the years after Hurricane Katrina (Greenberg, 2013; righttothecity.org/). The “right to the city,” which we do not view as limited to metropolitan areas (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2015), is conceived as both a right to access public goods, such as housing, or public spaces, and a right to participate in their planning, governance, and transformation (Cohen, 2018; Weinstein & Ren, 2009). This may consist of policies and practices that delineate rights of realistic accessibility to non-property owners, or promote self-organizing communities acting in resistance to, or in the absence of, policies and the imposition of formal property law (for a contemporary example, and a critique of property law as neocolonial and settler colonial logic, see Grandinetti, 2019). In contrast to liberal conceptions of individual rights resting on private property ownership, the right to the city invokes the collective human rights of those excluded from such “paradigms of propertied citizenship” (Roy, 2003). This compels us to ask how property structures access to planning a city, the accessibility of the city, collective feelings of efficacy in space, and the symbolic construction of “place” across different epistemological understandings of “land.” It also compels us to inquire how community members make “claims and appropriations that do not fit neatly into the ownership model of property” (Roy, 2005); in our case, during and after hazardous events and in relation to resettlement, where questions of who has a right to be included are often related to understandings of ownership and participation.

There are a set of assumptions we, the authors, make about justice, and the “right to the city” with regard to those we are calling precarious possessors, disaster, and relocation. The first is that we assume all people, regardless of their status as a legally recognized property owner, have a right to recover after a disaster and not to be further entrenched in risk. This is particularly important when we think about long-term outcomes and risk distribution. We assume that non-property owners should not be increasingly exposed to risk while property owners are not in the aftermath of a hazardous event. Second, we assume that recovery should be possible in one’s home community, or at least, that property ownership should not determine a community, household, or individual’s “right to return” (Ansfield, 2015). In instances where relocation is preferred, or necessary, we assume that renters and other precarious possessors should have power and voice in deciding how relocation occurs, where to, whether community rebuilding or restructuring is possible, and the option to live in the relocation site.

These assumptions produce a set of questions: If there are decades of writing and organizing dedicated to the “right to the city,” how can we translate that work into the right to imagine what a new city, a new community, a relocated future will look like in the context of climate change—what DuPuis and Greenberg (2019) query as the “Right to the Resilient City?” How does a hazardous event and the ensuing response jostle people and communities such that they are in a position, or not in a position, to participate in the reimagining, reconstructing, and relocation of a community? Given that low-income renters are especially vulnerable to displacement by disasters, as well as housing recovery and buyout processes as currently practiced (Lee & Van Zandt, 2019), what can we do to ensure that their rights of participation and return are upheld as a new community is being imagined and created? And, given that precarious relationships to property are the norm rather than the exception (Blomley, 2020), what possibilities exist for disaster and climate policy and activism to rework or dismantle, rather than reproduce, the dominant systems of property that produce widespread vulnerability, all the more so under conditions of disaster and climate change?

This chapter will explore precarious possession, disaster events, and the policies around post-disaster relocation for non-property owners. First, we discuss the diverse categories of (dis)possession and the rhetorical and material power of conflating property ownership with participation in the body politic, as remains the norm today. Second, we discuss the experience of disaster for renters, and identify renting as a characteristic that predicts exposure to risk under current housing, recovery, and adaptation regimes. Third, we discuss the particular intersection of renting and citizenship status. Fourth, we turn to the policies governing renters under cases of flood disaster where relocation is an adaptation option. Included in this, we highlight the data gaps related to renters and other precarious possessors under conditions of relocation and retreat. Finally, we offer a vision forward, highlighting research needs and policy possibilities. We reflect on how home tenure relates to vulnerability indices, how vulnerability may be even more exacerbated in cases of community-based relocation, and how little researchers actually know about the experiences of precarious possessors in relocation scenarios.

Precarious Possessors: Diverse Categories of Possession/Dispossession

Property ownership has been an organizing category and mode of exclusion for how British and American societies function for at least 300 years, as this book has continuously shown. Early in American political life, property-qualification was a prerequisite to cast a ballot. Contemporarily, research demonstrates that property ownership is still predictive of participation in local politics (Yoder, 2020). In 2003, President Bush made the claim, “it is in our national interest that more people own their own home. After all, if you own your own home, you have a vital stake in the future of our country” (George W. Bush, cited in Yoder, 2020). The historical context of property ownership, and the quote given above, demonstrate the deep assumption that to “own” land or infrastructure under legal title is to enshrine a right to participate in the legal apparatus of the state and to participate in the advancement of an aspirational utopia—to “have a vital stake in the future of our country.” If you own a piece of land, you have an assumed principled interest in a community and are afforded greater rights and opportunities to imagine its future, and to realize that vision through participation in planning processes. This harkens back to Alexander’s assessment of the role of property in civic life, described at the beginning of the manuscript (1997).

These conscious and unconscious ties between property and participation have intersectional implications across gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. Persistently excluded are those on whose dispossession U.S. property ownership rests: Indigenous people; Black people, formerly construed as property themselves; the poor, and particularly poor women; immigrants uprooted from formerly colonized nations where wealth has been extracted by and to the Global North; and the unhoused, whose “homelessness” renders them “the ‘constitutive outside’ of propertied citizenship (Kawash, 1998, 329), the alien figure that at once violates and thereby reinforces the norms of citizenship” (Roy, 2003, 464; see also Bhandar, 2018; Blomley, 2020; Harris, 1993; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). U.S. property and the associated rights of citizenship remain concentrated among white men, with the vast majority of agricultural land (98% as of 2002) in the hands of white owners, and the racial homeownership gap recently measured at its highest level in 50 years (Agyeman & Boone, 2020; Gilbert et al., 2002).

From the perspective of the state, property ownership is a dominant way to formalize the relationship among a citizenry and the colonial state—rendering the formal legible and traceable (Scott, 1986). During disasters, legibility, traceability, and deservedness (Jerolleman, 2019; Louis-Charles et al., 2020) are linked to property ownership, which increases access to aid and participation in the rebuilding of communities, neighborhoods, and societies. For example, federal aid is frequently channeled to owners so that they have the capacity to rebuild infrastructure as a tangible outcome, and as a proxy for rebuilding the social functioning of a neighborhood and city. The vast majority of individual assistance from the federal government in a presidentially-declared disaster goes to single-family homeowners when compared to renters, while rental properties are especially slow to be rebuilt, if they are rebuilt at all (Lee & Van Zandt, 2019). After Hurricane Harvey, for example, over 80% of individual assistance went to homeowners, while under 20% went to renters (Dundon & Camp, 2021). In one sense, this is an obvious split. Homeowners are responsible for rebuilding walls, putting on new roofs, and cleaning up debris associated with their properties. In another sense, if owning a home or property is a prerequisite for participating in the decision-making of how a society, a community, or a city will continue to function post-disaster (and into a utopic future), then more precarious possessors are at a disadvantage in their ability to recover, make demands, and actualize their vision for a post-disaster social life in their home communities.

Individuals who do not own property, and their experiences of relocation following flooding and other hazard events, are notably absent from the literature on “managed retreat” (for exception see Dundon & Camp, 2021). When Valmeyer, Illinois relocated most of their community and infrastructure in the aftermath of flooding of the Mississippi River in the 1990s, it was considered a “successful relocation” by city, state, and federal agencies and governments. However, notably missing from the metrics for success was an indication of where renters had gone. The new community was predicated on homeownership and so those families and individuals who did not purchase land or a home “disappeared” from inclusion even within the notion of who and what made up Valmeyer’s community (Manda et al., 2023).

While the disaster literature frequently compares owners and renters as analytic categories, the lives of people who do not hold formal title to a property or fit neatly into these categories are less frequently described in detail and nuance (for an exception, see Sullivan, 2018).Footnote 1 These “precarious possessors” in fact occupy a wide range of engagement with possession and dispossession of land, legibility, and formality (Blomley, 2020; Durst & Wegmann, 2017; Mukhija, 2014), all of which structure the experiences of people during and following a disaster as well as during relocation planning and implementation. Examples include, on-the-books renters; the houseless (in many forms); informal title holders; off-the-books renters; people with “divided tenure;” people living in trailers or mobile homes in formal land-lease agreements (Rumbach et al., 2020); people living in trailers or mobile homes without formal lease agreements; holders of heirs’ property (Hardy et al., 2022); people with underwater mortgages; people with historic claims to spaces, despite not formally residing there; and people living in informal settlements; among others. All of these possession/dispossession positionalities have implications for the assistance available post-disaster and the capacity to act in a meaningful way during relocation planning and receive support and compensation for one’s move. Additionally, as discussed further below, these categories of property non-“ownership” and status are complicated by other intersectional characteristics, most notably race, socio-economic status, citizenship status, gender, and recognition (or not) as a tribal entity.

Disaster Experiences for Renters

Climate disasters will continue to limit the availability of housing nationally. According to New York University’s Furman Center, “An average of 15 million people nationwide lived in the 100-year floodplain in 2011–2015” (Furman Center, 2017). Ten percent of all occupied housing was in the combined 100-year and 500-year floodplain (Furman Center, 2017). Nearly 22 million properties remain at moderate to extreme risk to flooding in the 500-year floodplain (First Street Foundation, 2020). Additionally, 104,497 public housing units (9% of total) sit in the floodplain (ibid.). Fleming et al. (2019) found that as many as 180,400 public housing units (13.8% of current total) could see flooding with 7’ of sea level rise. And flooding, of course, is not the only climate-related hazard that leads to resettlement as a risk reduction strategy. According to First Street Foundation, 30.4 million properties are currently at moderate to extreme risk to wildfire.

Renters face a variety of forms of social vulnerability to disasters (Lee & Van Zandt, 2019; Tate et al., 2016; Wachtendorf et al., 2013). According to the NYU Furman Center, between the years 2011 and 2015, an estimated 64% of all houses in the United States were owner occupied and 36% were renters. During this period, 38% of all houses in the combined 100 and 500-year floodplain were renter occupied (Furman Center, 2017). Before a storm, renters have less control over taking protective action (i.e., retrofitting their home or apartment to withstand hurricanes or tropical storms) and are instead dependent on landlords to take disaster precautions which they may be unwilling or unable to undertake. After a disaster, renters often end up displaced, leaving many individuals away from social networks, which play an important role in preparedness, response, and recovery capabilities. However, as Weber and Peek (2012) show, reliance on social networks can also be detrimental during catastrophic events when communities are severely disrupted and many network members are displaced simultaneously (Quarantelli, 2006, for a more extensive inquiry into these complexities, see Browne, 2015). For instance, many New Orleans community members had strong social ties to the city prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. However, when they were displaced, they suddenly found themselves in new locations, leaving them isolated, and with weakened social support systems, especially considering that those in their networks were also suffering similar losses (Fussell, 2012; Messias et al., 2012). This resulted in severe challenges to accessing housing assistance programs and finding stable and safe housing (Pardee, 2012). Even for those with several social networks, social capital alone was unable to address structural obstacles to recovery, such as discrimination, segregation, and isolation, lack of public transportation, and lack of legal documentation that pose a hindrance to finding housing and present particular barriers for renters (Garza, 2012; Messias et al., 2012).

Compared to owners, renters have less opportunity for public financial assistance after a disaster, and renters in public housing even less so. Recovery programs in the United States are largely tailored to upper- and middle-class single-family homeowners (Jerolleman, 2019; Kamel & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2004; McConnell, 2017; Pastor et al., 2006; Peacock et al., 2015; Sutley & Hamideh, 2020; Zhang & Peacock, 2010). Kamel and Loukaitou-Sideris (2004) found that areas with higher concentrations of multi-family and rental units are less likely to access federal disaster assistance. Consequently, areas with lower access to federal assistance are associated with negative recovery outcomes, such as population loss and increased abandonment of rental units (Kamel & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2004; Zhang & Peacock, 2010). Rental properties also rebuild much slower, which significantly impacts the capacity for renters to return home and rebuild their lives (Peacock et al., 2015; Zhang & Peacock, 2010).

These challenges amplify trauma and impede recovery after a disaster for renters. Post-Katrina, displaced renters or other precarious possessors had limited choices in where they went after the storm. Renters, and specifically poor, Black renters, were less supported or less willing to return to New Orleans. Also, several public housing projects were closed and barred from reopening, with the storm presenting an opportunity for redevelopment projects that displaced tenants from properties that were not directly affected by flooding (tenant displacement also occurs post-disaster when landlords who lose their own houses opt to move into rental properties that they own that did not sustain damage, or when other homeowners chose renting as an alternative to other forms of temporary housing while awaiting repairs and drive up rental rates). As is common following disasters, rents rose. On average, rents rose 40% in New Orleans in the months after Hurricane Katrina (Rodriguez-Dod & Duhart, 2007). In a particularly egregious and eventually unlawful example following Hurricane Katrina, St. Bernard Parish Council approved an ordinance that prohibited all single-family homeowners from renting to anyone except a family member (Rodriguez-Dod & Duhart, 2007). A civil rights complaint was filed against the ordinance, which was eventually overturned due to violation of the Fair Housing Act, but the explicit attempt to exclude renters from an overwhelmingly white community rendered visible the persistent intersection of race, precarious possession, and de facto displacement following a disaster event.

Over the longer term, housing instability continues and compounds for precarious possessors post-disaster. Families displaced to Texas after Katrina were moved into subsidized housing but were later expected to pay market value for rent or to move into regular public housing, which some were unable to do (Lein et al., 2012). Additionally, those who received short-term assistance were not always eligible for long-term assistance in Houston similar to what they received in New Orleans. For instance, many struggled to obtain Section 8 vouchers (Lein et al., 2012), and couldn’t always find available units even when they had successfully obtained such vouchers. Many low-income evacuees were evicted from undamaged units or faced rent hikes for failure to pay while evacuated (Pardee, 2012). Renters, and specifically women, faced numerous displacements in the years following Katrina as a result of increased rent and discriminatory barriers to housing stability (Elliot & Howell, 2017).

Precarious Possession and Citizenship Status

Citizenship status and lack of citizenship compound the challenges for renters. For one, immigrant populations tend to be renters. Second, immigrant groups, especially those that are undocumented or living in mixed-status households, often choose not to open bank accounts or sign housing contracts and sometimes receive cash payment for employment “under the table.” The “off-the-books” renter, possibly an “under the table” employee, becomes particularly at risk and “invisible” in disaster management. Recovery programs demand burdensome amounts of documentation from applicants, which immigrant populations are usually unable to present due to these efforts to remain under the radar. Third, FEMA assistance is set up for nuclear families and utilizes the one head of household model, excluding non-traditional households (Jerolleman, 2019). Immigrant households often have several families living together in overcrowded conditions due to lack of affordable housing (McConnell, 2017), leaving many in need of assistance with no help. Even for eligible immigrant households, disaster recovery programs are designed using a cost–benefit approach intended to compensate for monetary losses to allocate disaster assistance, privileging higher value properties (Jerolleman, 2019).

Further, immigrants, specifically Latinx immigrants, are often assumed to be undocumented and therefore ineligible for federal assistance (Horton, 2012; Muñiz, 2006; Trujillo-Pagán, 2007). Even in situations where aid is available to anyone regardless of legal status, public employees or volunteer aid-workers still ask for identification from Latinx immigrants based on perceived illegality (Garza, 2012; Horton, 2012; Muñiz, 2006). Even if immigrants know they are eligible for assistance, policies such as the public charge law and the SB4 policy in Texas (Gilman & Steglich, 2017–2018) make immigrants hesitant to seek federal disaster assistance as they fear that accessing such services would tarnish an immigration case (Muñiz, 2006; Trujillo-Pagán, 2007).Footnote 2 Fears can extend to undocumented household members, or other family members, even when the primary applicant is eligible for assistance. Difficulties also arise when the eligible applicant is a U.S. born minor, residing with ineligible parents.

Legal status severely adds to the challenges faced by immigrant renters. Immigrant renters are often threatened with deportation or face forced eviction by landlords refusing to provide necessary repairs to rental units. For Garifuna immigrants displaced after Katrina, lack of legal documentation became a hindrance to finding stable housing and led to joblessness (Garza, 2012). A few months after the storm, only those who were documented were back at work (Garza, 2012). Many Garifuna immigrants held non-contractual and temporary jobs prior to Katrina, rendering them vulnerable both before and especially after Katrina (Garza, 2012) and illustrating the intersecting and compounding informalities that affect precarious possessors post-disaster.

Renters and Retreat: Current Policy

The literature on disaster is replete with examples of how precarious possession, or the lack of being a clear, individual title holder, can (1) make immediate housing needs difficult; (2) make long-term recovery difficult; and (3) force displacement away from home communities. Yet renters appear little in the existing literature on managed retreat. When they do, it is as a “forgotten population” (Dundon & Camp, 2021), largely absent from the popular, scholarly, and policy imagination of relocation and resettlement programs designed for property owners (Morris, 2021). As discussed in earlier chapters, in the United States, managed retreat occurs primarily through federally funded home buyout programs, which enable state and local governments to purchase flood-damaged properties and convert them to open space.Footnote 3 Buyout programs target “willing sellers,” landowners with the interest and capacity to sell their property; renters, if considered at all, are an afterthought in program design and implementation. They are excluded from decision-making processes, provided a minimum set of protections that can prove inadequate in practice, and are defined narrowly in law, policy, and research, rendering many of the most precarious possessors invisible and at increasing risk through the process of climate-linked relocation.

The primary policy governing renters faced with the prospect of managed retreat in the United States is the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act of 1970 (also known as the Uniform Relocation Act, Uniform Act, or URA).Footnote 4 The URA came about as a belated response to the damaging effects of mid-century urban renewal, when government action led to the demolition of millions of homes, displacing many more millions of residents, with Black and low-income communities disproportionately targeted for destruction (Becher, 2014; Hartman, 1971). For any project that receives federal funding and involves the acquisition, rehabilitation, or demolition of property, the URA stipulates baseline amounts of compensation and relocation assistance for people who are displaced, provided they are found eligible for assistance.Footnote 5 In the case of buyouts, renters are classed as “displaced persons” subject to URA policy because they have no power to exercise agency in the buyout process. By contrast, property owners can generally choose whether or not to accept a buyout offer. Though the choices owners make may also be constrained or coerced, as described in Chapter 4, they are legally considered voluntary, meaning URA protections do not apply.Footnote 6 Though this is changing, mandatory buyouts are currently happening in Houston, which qualifies buyout recipients for URA protections. Tracing both renter and homeowner experiences during large-scale mandatory buyouts will add critical understanding to the differentiated experiences people have during these processes.

Like other government assistance, including for disaster recovery, URA benefits are subject to stringent eligibility requirements. As the Act sets out, “The term ‘displaced person’ does not include— (i) a person who has been determined, according to criteria established by the head of the lead agency, to be either in unlawful occupancy of the displacement dwelling or to have occupied such dwelling for the purpose of obtaining assistance…” It also excludes “any person (other than a person who was an occupant of such property at the time it was acquired) who occupies such property on a rental basis for a short term or a period subject to termination when the property is needed for the program or project.”Footnote 7 Immigrants without U.S. citizenship or permanent residence are also excluded from assistance.Footnote 8 In sum, many of the precarious possessors we describe above who are disproportionately vulnerable to flooding and related displacement are not protected or compensated under current law. Even renters with legal status and formal leases may struggle to secure the benefits to which they are entitled. Proving one’s eligibility for government aid and disaster assistance demands supporting documentation that is time-consuming and often difficult to compile, especially in the aftermath of a flood that destroys paperwork, computers, photographs, and other personal belongings.

To comply with the URA, buyout programs for their part must notify tenants in advance that their homes are being acquired and they may be eligible for benefits. URA benefits to eligible renter recipients include help finding alternative “decent, safe, and sanitary” housing; moving expenses; and payments to cover the difference in rent for 42 months, up to a maximum amount of $7,200, or an equivalent lump sum that can be applied to a down payment should the tenant buy rather than rent. The $7,200 cap, increased from $5,250 in 2012, arguably remains insufficient; eminent domain scholar Becher (2014, 229) calls the URA’s compensation limits “appallingly low.” In practice, programs can—and often do—pay higher amounts (Garnett, 2006, 122),Footnote 9 invoking the URA’s “Housing of Last Resort” (HLR) provision, which gives agencies “broad latitude” (see Chapter 10 on discretion) to ensure that eligible displaced persons have access to a comparable replacement dwelling. This may entail paying additional compensation on a case-by-case basis, or for an entire program or project if the agency deems it necessary. HLR also authorizes approaches that go beyond sheer compensation, including construction of new replacement housing and purchase of land or housing to sell, lease, or exchange with those displaced (49 CFR §24.404), though it is unclear whether these possibilities are used in practice (see Chapter 7).

Despite the options that agencies have to assist displaced people, support is typically short-lived and inadequate to meet the full spectrum of needs associated with relocation. This is true for all participants, including owners, but is particularly evident in the case of renters. Deborah Morris (2021), who administered New York City’s acquisition program after Hurricane Sandy, describes the predicament facing renters who resided in flood-prone homes partly due to their affordability. Moving outside the floodplain entailed paying much higher rents, which the program only helped cover for the period mandated by the URA. Tenants were left with a choice between moving somewhere they would be unable to afford to stay long term, or moving somewhere at similar risk of flooding. In “Our buyout programs,” Morris (2021, 148) writes, “did not have the tools to create a different outcome, which would have required providing substantially more than moving expenses and time-limited rent differential.” De Vries and Fraser (2017, 934–935) argue the need for a “logic of care” in flood mitigation programs, in which “caregivers do not give up after contractual obligations are over, but instead continue to monitor and engage with individuals and communities in order to address injustices.” In a system governed by property markets, however, logics of care are superseded by “logics of choice” that frame people as individual consumers, prioritizing them accordingly based on the power afforded by the resources they possess.

Discussion and Conclusion: A Study in Remembering

In this chapter, we discussed how ethnocentric and metaphorical conflations of property and citizenship/legal visibility become re-problematized when considering precarious possessors in relocation scenarios, and we discuss possible policy solutions (and their embedded assumptions) as a concluding point to the chapter. If there are decades of writing dedicated to the “right to the city,” how can we translate that literature into the right to imagine what a new city, a new community, and a relocated future will look like in a warming world? How do we think beyond just urban environments and across various models of community? What can we do to ensure these rights of participation are enshrined and protected in the very minute that a new community is being imagined and created, so that precarious possessors can lay claim to their positions within the community of their choosing?