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hurricane katrina
Hard Lessons From Katrina We’re Still Learning 20 Years Later
Hurricane Katrina not only exposed the vulnerability of communities to extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, but also systemic injustices and a deeply flawed US insurance system.
Aug 29, 2025
It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States, wreaking havoc in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. An estimated 1,833 people died in the hurricane and the flooding that ensued. The storm destroyed or damaged more than a million housing units and more than 200,000 homes, causing one of the largest relocations of people in US history.
In the months and years that followed, entrenched inequalities, questionable policy choices, and predatory practices by private insurers decided who could return home and rebuild. For instance, countless residents impacted by the hurricane learned too late that their standard homeowners’ insurance offered no protection against flood damage, leaving them to shoulder devastating repair costs themselves. In cities such as New Orleans, these dynamics further marginalized Black residents, who were more likely to live in flood-prone neighborhoods. The result was widespread and often permanent displacement, with longtime communities effectively erased from the map.
Hurricane Katrina not only exposed the vulnerability of communities to extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, but also systemic injustices and a deeply flawed US insurance system. Private insurers pour billions of dollars into the fossil fuel industry, which is the main contributor to climate change. Thus, insurers help fuel the very crisis that is driving more frequent and severe climate disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, they are passing the financial risk of the escalating impact of climate change onto policyholders and forcing them to bear the costs of the crisis the industry itself helps perpetuate.
As climate-driven storms grow more frequent and increasingly destructive, the same insurance failures, housing crises, and inequitable recovery that followed Katrina now threaten communities nationwide. Two decades later, Katrina’s hard lessons cannot be ignored. Everyone deserves to live in safety and the opportunity to stay in the place they call home. Corporate greed and government negligence cannot continue to undermine these rights.
The Hurricane
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall with winds that reached 140 miles per hour. These high-velocity winds drove a storm surge that raised sea levels 25 to 28 feet above normal along parts of the Mississippi coast, and 10 to 20 feet along the southeastern Louisiana coast. The surge breached protective levees, causing catastrophic flooding. Two days after the hurricane struck, 80% of the city of New Orleans was underwater. Other coastal towns and cities in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and along the western Florida panhandle also experienced significant storm surges and destructive winds, which caused widespread flooding and damage to homes.
The Great Displacement
Approximately 1.5 million people aged 16 years and older had to leave their residences in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama because of Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, where the mayor issued a mandatory evacuation order, a population of around 500,000 was reduced to a few thousand people within a week of the storm.
As water was pumped out of the flooded areas and basic services and infrastructure were restored, New Orleanians were allowed to return. But tens of thousands were not able to do so. One year after Katrina, approximately 197,000 residents had not come back to the city; many relocated to the relatively close cities of Houston and Baton Rouge, but others as far away as Alaska and Massachusetts. Still today, many of those who evacuated the city, hoping to return, remain displaced. New Orleans’s metropolitan area population remains 20% below pre-Katrina levels.
The Impact On Black Communities
The development of New Orleans has been fraught with injustices. Racial segregation, redlining, and chronic underinvestment in Black communities pushed residents and renters into areas with crumbling infrastructure, poorer-quality homes, and greater exposure to environmental hazards and contaminants.
When Katrina hit, Black residents were concentrated in the most vulnerable parts of New Orleans, located well below sea level and poorly protected by inadequate levees. Accordingly, neighborhoods with the highest percentages of Black residents saw greater housing destruction from the storm.
Did You Know?
The disparate impact of climate disasters on property and infrastructure in US minority communities is the result of nearly a century of discriminatory home lending and insurance policies.
In the 1930s, the US federal government used a rating system in its low-cost home loan program to assess lending risk. Assessors created maps ranking the perceived risk of lending in certain neighborhoods, with race often used as the determining factor in assessing a community’s risk level. Black and immigrant neighborhoods were typically rated as “hazardous” and outlined in red, warning lenders that the area was a perilous place to lend money. Known as redlining, these and other discriminatory practices led to a lack of investment in minority communities.
This lack of financial access resulted in shoddy construction and poor infrastructure that have made minority neighborhoods less resilient to climate disasters and more prone to other financial risks. For instance, insurers are more likely to increase premiums if they determine that properties are less resilient to climate damage. This new financial practice is known as bluelining, and it occurs when insurers raise their prices or pull out of areas that they perceive to be at greater environmental risk.
Reconstruction: A New Pathway to Segregation?
For Lousina’s Black residents, Katrina’s damage was compounded by discriminatory recovery policies that deepened inequalities. After the storm, the federally funded Road Home program was launched to help residents repair or rebuild damaged homes. It offered grants of up to $150,000 per homeowner, but payments were based on whichever was lower—the home’s pre-storm value or the cost to rebuild.
Because property values in Black neighborhoods were often far lower than in white neighborhoods, this meant many Black homeowners would receive only a fraction of what they needed to rebuild. In one case, a woman had rebuilding costs of over $150,000, but because the estimated value of her home pre-storm was much lower, she would’ve received an essentially useless grant of $1,400. As a result, the program was alleged to discriminate against Black homeowners, and a federal class action suit was filed on November 12, 2008, on behalf of 20,000 homeowners. The litigation settled with Louisiana agreeing to reward approximately 1,300 homeowners with $62 million in additional compensation.
The Blow to Affordable Housing
Renters fared no better. Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed 82,000 rental units in Louisiana, 20% of which were affordable to extremely low-income households. The impact on public and federally subsidized rentals was especially severe. In New Orleans, public-housing residents were displaced at a rate of nearly 90%. And reconstruction policies only exacerbated the disparities these residents faced.
Consider this.
Before the storm hit and floodwaters rose, the Housing Authority of New Orleans evacuated all residents living in its 7,379 public housing units. After the waters receded, residents were allowed to return to approximately 1,600 units. Most other units were sealed off with steel doors and barbed wire—officially due to storm damage—before being slated for demolition. Yet, the redevelopment that followed included far fewer mixed-income apartments. By 2010, five years after the hurricane, less than half of the original 7,379 units were open in any form. The dramatic decrease in public housing contributed to the permanent displacement of many of New Orleans’ longtime residents.
After Katrina, renters faced a range of economic pressures. Many landlords delayed repairs or rebuilding, especially in low-income areas, which are seen as less profitable. Some used the disaster as an opportunity to renovate and target higher-paying tenants, further shrinking the supply of affordable rentals. Within five years of the Hurricane, the stock of mid-priced housing units in New Orleans had declined by more than two-thirds, pushing the median rent from $689 in 2004 to $876 in 2009. These rising costs hit Black residents hardest, forcing many to leave and permanently altering the city’s character.
Even those who could afford to return to New Orleans and buy a new home after Katrina faced soaring prices—up 14% in the first year alone—as demand outpaced the reduced housing supply. In addition, homeowners’ insurance premiums jumped 22% in Louisiana between 2005 and 2007, adding yet another barrier to homeownership.
The Flood Exclusion Trap
Then, as now, and to the surprise of many victims of the Hurricane, standard home insurance policies in the US did not protect homeowners from floodwater damage. This means residents must buy additional flood insurance to be protected in the event of a disaster like Katrina.
New Orleans residents had among the highest participation rates in the country in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), a federal government program that provides flood insurance to homeowners, renters, and businesses. However, the majority of residents in areas affected by Katrina had not purchased flood insurance. Uninsured property losses due to flooding were economically devastating, exceeding an estimated $41.1 billion (USD 100 billion in 2024 prices). In addition, the NFIP incurred some $16.1 billion in losses and a deficit exceeding $18 billion as a direct result of the flooding caused by Katrina.
Even for New Orleanians with flood insurance, coverage likely fell short. Policies typically covered about $152,000—the city’s median house price at the time. But this was rarely enough to replace the damaged household contents or to pay residents for temporary housing while their home was uninhabitable.
More and more, whether people hit by climate-driven storms get anything from their insurers depends not on the fact that their homes were damaged, but on how they were damaged.
While the standard home insurance policy does not cover water damage from a hurricane, it does cover wind damage. This gap left residents and insurers arguing about whether Katrina’s destruction to their homes was caused by its high-velocity winds or the flooding that followed, with multiple lawsuits challenging the validity of flood exclusions in insurance policies. Even before the flooding receded and residents of Louisiana and Mississippi could start to rebuild their lives, courts were inundated with litigation, with about 6,600 insurance-related lawsuits being instigated in the US District Court. Yet, Katrina’s destructive flooding was driven by a storm surge powered by the hurricane’s high winds—the very peril homeowners’ policies are supposed to cover.
On September 15, 2005, Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood filed a case against five of the largest homeowners’ insurers in the state. Attorney General Hood sought a court declaration that the flood exclusion provision in standard home insurance policies was “void and unenforceable” and in violation “of the public policy of the State of Mississippi.” However, in that case and others, courts ruled that the flood exclusions were spelled out clearly in homeowners’ insurance policies and did not violate public policy.
The exclusion of water damage from insurance coverage remains a present issue for existing homeowners. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, since 1996, 99% of US counties have been impacted by flooding, but only 4% of homeowners have flood insurance. And, more importantly, over half (56%) of American homeowners don’t know that their home insurance policy excludes flood damage. As hurricane season intensifies, many homeowners will be shocked to learn that their insurance does not cover flood loss.
Insurers’ Favorite Loophole: Wind vs. Water Damage
After Katrina, some insurers exploited the false dichotomy between wind and water damage, classifying losses as water damage to shift liability onto homeowners or the NFIP.
In 2013, a federal jury in Mississippi found that State Farm Fire and Casualty Co. defrauded the NFIP after avoiding covering a policyholder’s wind losses from Katrina by blaming the damage on storm surge, which is covered by federal flood insurance. Almost 10 years later, in August 2022, State Farm settled the case, agreeing to pay $100 million to the federal government.
State Farm was not the only insurer engaged in nefarious behavior, attributing Hurricane Katrina damage to flooding instead of wind. In oral argument before the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2009, insurance company USAA publicly admitted that it shifted its own costs to the NFIP and thus taxpayers.
The false dichotomy between the wind and water damage resulting from a hurricane remains nebulous. The damage caused by Hurricane Ian in Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina in 2022, with its record-high wind speeds, generated $63 billion in private insurance claims. In contrast, 2018’s Hurricane Florence primarily caused water—not wind—damage in North and South Carolina, leaving uninsured flood losses estimated at nearly $20 billion and letting private insurers largely escape liability. More and more, whether people hit by climate-driven storms get anything from their insurers depends not on the fact that their homes were damaged, but on how they were damaged.
Regulators Must Act: People over Profit
Hurricane Katrina exposed widespread gaps in home insurance coverage that persist today. In the 20 years since Katrina, unmitigated climate change has fueled rising temperatures and made extreme weather events such as hurricanes both more frequent and more severe. As storms grow costlier and more destructive, insurers have raised home insurance premiums and declined to renew many policies, leaving households with fewer options for protection. This escalating cycle has produced today’s insurance crisis.
Federal and state lawmakers must respond. The federal government must reform the NFIP to improve federal flood insurance and ensure it provides affordable coverage for more hazards. At the same time, the NFIP should do more to support community-based mitigation. States, meanwhile, must use their regulatory authority over insurance markets to address skyrocketing insurance costs and growing coverage gaps resulting from mounting climate change impacts.
Regulators should adopt legislation, like New York’s Insure Our Future bill, to prohibit insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects, require them to phase out support for existing projects, and force insurers to divest from fossil fuel companies.
The insurance industry cannot ignore its role in fueling the very crisis it now faces. Climate change-induced disasters are indisputably driven by fossil fuel emissions. And insurance companies facilitate climate change by investing in fossil fuel companies and underwriting fossil fuel projects. US insurance companies have investments of more than $500 billion in fossil fuel-related assets, including coal, oil, and gas. In 2022 alone, insurers worldwide collected $21 billion in premiums for underwriting fossil fuel projects—directly enabling their expansion.
Regulators should adopt legislation, like New York’s Insure Our Future bill, to prohibit insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects, require them to phase out support for existing projects, and force insurers to divest from fossil fuel companies. Without bold action, insurers will continue to profit from climate destruction while leaving families and communities to bear the costs.
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'Generation on Fire': Sunrise Movement Activists to March 400 Miles From New Orleans to Houston
"We're living in constant crisis: hurricanes, superstorms, jobs that break our bodies and could be taken away at any minute. This is an emergency, but it isn't an accident."
May 10, 2021
Following the path of thousands of families who permanently fled the lowest-lying major city in the United States in the wake of storms like Hurricane Katrina, a group of activists from the youth-led Sunrise Movement on Monday began a 400-mile march from New Orleans to Houston to demand President Joe Biden include "good jobs for all" and a Civilian Climate Corps in his $2.26 trillion infrastructure plan.
"This march symbolizes my story as a climate refugee who fled New Orleans and moved to Houston after Hurricane Katrina destroyed my city. This is me claiming agency over my future."
--Chante Davis, Sunrise Movement
Participants in the Sunrise Movement's "Generation on Fire" campaign set out from the New Orleans Superdome--the site of so much suffering and a symbol of state failure following Katrina in 2005--and walked along the Mississippi River following a delay due to flash flood warnings.
The climate campaigners are marching "to make clear that young people are unsatisfied with Biden and Congress' incremental, watered down proposals," according to a statement from the group.
With Democrats in control of both Congress and the White House, "young people expect more from their political leaders," the statement added.
\u201cDancing in New Orleans with @sunrisemvmt @smvmtgenonfire at beginning of their 400 mile trek for climate justice. \n\nTeens shouldn\u2019t have to make this kind of sacrifice for good jobs and an end to the climate crisis. \n\n#GulfSouthMarch #Project400 #GenerationOnFire #NOLAtoHOU\u201d— Elias Newman \ud83d\udd25 (@Elias Newman \ud83d\udd25) 1620678211
The activists will stop in cities and towns along the march route to stage protests, rallies, and visioning sessions with community members. They will be joined by political leaders, environmental justice advocates, and other supporters.
"As a young person in the Gulf South, we're living in constant crisis: hurricanes, superstorms, jobs that break our bodies and could be taken away at any minute," said Chante Davis, a high school senior and Sunrise Movement organizer.
"This is an emergency, but it isn't an accident," Davis continued. "We know there is money that can provide living wages, stop the climate crisis, and take us back from the edge of survival. There's always money to rebuild rich neighborhoods after storms, always money for petrochemical plants and oil wells, always money for border walls and jails."
"This march symbolizes my story as a climate refugee who fled New Orleans and moved to Houston after Hurricane Katrina destroyed my city," Davis added. "This is me claiming agency over my future."
\u201cA statement from Sunriser Chante Davis https://t.co/mtH1bpGf7D\u201d— Resist Reckless Redevelopers (@Resist Reckless Redevelopers) 1620667118
The White House has touted Biden's American Jobs Plan as "an investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country's infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China."
However, since the plan was unveiled on March 31, Sunrise Movement and other climate campaigners have said it needs to go further.
Sunrise Movement executive director Varshini Prakash said at the time that the plan "lacks a commitment to the full scale of transformation that is needed of our economy."
"We cannot miss this moment," Prakash insisted. "Congress must strengthen this plan and Biden must pass it into law as quickly as possible. If Republicans don't cooperate, do it without them. If the filibuster obstructs progress, abolish it. Money needs to go out the door and flow into communities now."
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Texas Freeze Illustrates a Failed Economic System
We need to begin changing our fundamental ethic, from "I'm getting mine. Screw you," to "We're all in this together." Because we are.
Feb 19, 2021
The Texas Freeze illustrates just some of the shortcomings of conservative economics as a basis for public good. The nation's problems will only get worse the longer we pretend private solutions are best for all situations.
"In Texas, everybody agreed that everybody needed a robust electricity grid. But nobody wanted to pay for it."
But notice something important: the mainstream media never discusses the fact that a failed economic system is at the heart of so many of our nation's woes. And they won't, either, because they are the public relations arm of the owners of that system and the owners are making out like bandits. So, we need to discuss the problems ourselves.
The first problem with conservative economics is that it wants to imagine that only private economic interactions are legitimate, and that public intervention in the economy is illegitimate.
The truth is that public goods are ones that benefit everybody, but where it is difficult to assign individual ownership for the benefits. That makes it difficult to collect individual payments for the services. The result is underinvestment in public goods.
Hurricane Karina, in New Orleans, in 2005, exposed the failure of inadequate investment in public infrastructure. In that case, it was in the levees that were supposed to protect the city, but that had not been sufficiently maintained, for years.
Adequate investment would have cost tens of millions of dollars, but would have averted tens of billions of dollars of damage. Private motivations made such allocations uneconomical. More than 1,800 people died and the city has still not fully recovered.
The coronavirus pandemic exposed the chronic underinvestment in public health infrastructure. The U.S. response to the pandemic has been one of the worst in the world, with almost half a million people dead because of it. We see its effects, still, today, in the haltering testing and vaccination programs.
The damage to the society from the pandemic and the failed response has been incalculable, though we can calculate that 2020 was the worst year of economic performance in 75 years. Tens of millions of people have been harmed, many grievously, with poor and minority communities--those with the least economic power--bearing the brunt of the costs.
A second problem with conservative economics is that it wants to maximize private profits in the short run, so fails to invest adequately in the long run.
"The Republican response is typical Republican blame-shucking: it was the Green New Deal, which doesn't exist except as a concept, and AOC, a second-term Congressperson who lives in another state."
In Texas, everybody agreed that everybody needed a robust electricity grid. But nobody wanted to pay for it. It has been known since 2011, the last crisis, that this kind of freeze would inflict this kind of damage on this many people. But rather than bear the honest costs, Republican authorities up and down the state simply kicked the can down the road.
We're now down the road and the effect is catastrophic. The Republican response is typical Republican blame-shucking: it was the Green New Deal, which doesn't exist except as a concept, and AOC, a second-term Congressperson who lives in another state. It's beyond irresponsible. It is immature, and reckless.
The deindustrialization of the U.S. economy over the past four decades is a case of issues one and two, above, coming together. Private parties dismantled the largest manufacturing base in the world in order to maximize private profits in the short run. It devastated the larger economy and society, giving rise to the seething rage that is Trumpism.
The U.S. has an unambiguous public interest in a vibrant economic foundation. But that is being undermined by leaving so many essential decisions only in private hands. The fallout--Trumpism, and its efforts to reverse a national election--threatens our democracy, a negative spillover from the economy to the constitutional basis of our society itself.
A final flaw in conservative economic thinking is that adaptation to change is resisted unless the benefits can be captured by those who already hold power and wealth.
This is why it is impossible to reform the U.S. health system. We pay twice what other industrial nations pay for health care but get inferior results. People suffer higher costs and worse outcomes, while the nation bears a burden to GDP of about 10%, making the entire economy that much less competitive in world markets.
That excess 10% of GDP--amounting to about $2 trillion a year--flows into the pockets of the very rich, who own the pharmaceutical and hospital and insurance companies. And media companies. They invest billions in politics and media to protect trillions in profits, meaning that things are all but impossible to change.
Similarly, with climate change. The science is clear: pumping carbon into the atmosphere threatens cataclysmic planetary damage. But the oil companies have a death-grip on Congress, with the result that something as beneficial as the Green New Deal is invoked only as an epithet by conservatives rather than as the godsend that it could be.
If we cannot, will not, adapt to a changing climate by changing our energy choices, we will inflict existential damage on the planet and every life form on it. And that, to protect the stratospheric profits of a few dozen oil companies and the few hundred families that own most of them.
"If we cannot, will not, adapt to a changing climate by changing our energy choices, we will inflict existential damage on the planet and every life form on it."
Underinvestment in public goods. Short term profit maximization. And resolute resistance to essential change. These limitations of our conservative economic ideology inflict trillions of dollars a year of costs on the American economy and all of its members. Unless they are changed, they will continue to enervate, to weaken and drain, the economy, the constitutional order, the society, and, ultimately, the planet.
The mainstream media are not going to inform us of these failings because the system is working like a charm for its owners. They have been glutted with the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. That is the economic news the media should be talking about.
Don't hold your breath. We need to begin changing our fundamental ethic, from "I'm getting mine. Screw you," to "We're all in this together." Because we are. Pretending we're not, in order to satisfy a destructive ideology, doesn't change the outcomes, or reduce the temperature. Just ask the people freezing in Texas.
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