Hurricanes/Natural disasters doing the work of the privileged few

[packman]

The buildings of the wealthy will stand, and the rest will be flooded, crushed, or blown away, no matter how meaningful they are to us or the history we would prefer to write. In the wake of such destruction, the shock doctrine—to use a phrase coined by Naomi Klein, which describes the remaking of towns, cities, and countries by the forces of private capital to their own benefit, especially in the wake of natural and man-made upheaval—will reign.
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Klein explains how Hurricane Katrina paved the way for the privatization of New Orleans’ public school system, and how the beaches of Sri Lanka were privatized in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. Who knows what comes next for Mexico Beach?



And what has become clear is that when the stakes get this high, normal, everyday, affordable ways of building are not up to that task. That’s what the architecture of the lone house on Mexico Beach represents. It’s not a beacon of human resilience or a symbol of the power of well-designed architecture as a solution to our climate problems. It is an urgent architectural warning to all of us that the wealthy will survive a Category 5 hurricane. The rest will be left to stare down devastation, realizing perhaps too late that climate change is class war.

I remember my son who lived in the Florida Panhandle before we migrated there from Pennsylvania, telling methat hurricanes would come in and destroy the homes of the poor and those that bought their land/houses when they were affordable but no where near any degree of being able to withstand a cat 3-4 or 5 hurricane. After the destruction, the houses would be rebuilt, the land bought by people with the means to build a stronger house. Also hotels and high-rises would appear on the beaches now that it suddenly became available for those with money. The hurricanes scrubbed the land for those with the means to live there in sturdier homes.



https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-palace-and-the-storm-wagner