“The waters are rising, but so am I. I am not going under, but over.”
~ Catherine Booth, founder of the Salvation Army
In his recent article, Struggle Against the Water: Connecting Fair Housing Law and Climate Justice, Professor Jade Craig explains the outsize impact that flooding has had and will continue to have on Black communities in the United States. Rising sea levels and intense weather-related hazards destroy property and displace people. Over the past several years, more people have been displaced by natural disasters than by war. Climate changes fuel increasingly dire global and local refugee crises. The “struggle against the water” is real. Research demonstrates that so-called “100-year” floods now occur much more frequently – once a decade or even annually. Flood devastation poses a mortal threat to people living in floodplains. And a majority of the 30 million Americans who live in flood-prone areas today are both poor and Black.
It is not residents’ bad luck or poor choices that cause the disparate adverse effects of climate change. Black communities are located in climate-vulnerable areas because, for generations, racist land use policies dictated that they be located there. Today’s environmental and economic injustice is thus rooted in historic racism. There is, however a silver lining to the dark cloud of climate harms, says Craig. The imperative to respond to an impending environmental catastrophe provides an opportunity to simultaneously address persistent housing segregation and inequality.
The claim that historic injustices situated Black populations in climate-vulnerable locations is neither new nor contested (at least, by any serious scholar). Numerous studies published over the past few decades provide a wealth of both quantitative data and qualitative details regarding the forced settlements of racial minority groups in “discarded and unwanted space,” those areas which were “swampy, mosquito infested, prone to smoke from fires, and frequented by floods.” (Pp. 741, 752.)1 Examples are legion: Village Creek in Birmingham, Alabama; East Austin, Texas; Cadillac Heights in Dallas, Texas; along the Anacostia River in Washington, DC; and, of course, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana, which was decimated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “The vulnerability of these communities to climate-induced flooding is a result of the Racial Path Dependence that began with their establishment in the first place,” asserts Craig. (P. 754.)
Craig’s thesis is that because racial injustice causes the outsized environmental harms borne by Black communities, government responses should mitigate not only the environmental harms themselves but also the underlying race-based housing inequality. Justice, logic, and morality provide theoretical support for this premise, but Craig recognizes that it will be practically difficult to design and implement an effective solution. Although state and federal disaster relief programs exist to fund aid to vulnerable community members suffering property loss, in the months since Craig’s article was published, the Trump Administration has stymied the effectiveness of those programs.2
Funding (or lack thereof) is only one aspect of addressing community flood vulnerability. People impacted by climate dangers need homes and neighborhoods, not just money. Disaster relief funds can be allocated either to rebuild communities or relocate their members, but it is ineffective and wasteful to rebuild a community that will almost inevitably be decimated by another flood. Relocation may therefore be the most efficient and sustainable response to increasing environmental threats. But forcing people to leave their homes and community compounds the injustices that situated Black communities in these vulnerable areas to begin with. Craig explains that it is a “cruel irony” for “climate retreat policies” to require the same people who were forced to occupy vulnerable land to now “abandon the communities they built and called their own.” (P. 766.) As they cope with the impacts of climate change, affected people and communities must be provided with dignity alongside dollars.
Although the reality of environmental and racial injustices naturally elicits anger and frustration, Craig manages to strike a positive, hopeful note in Struggle Against the Water. Craig believes that community flooding can be framed as a “remarkable opportunity to reduce patterns of segregation and disadvantage based on where people live.” (P. 768.) As Craig points out, marrying fair housing mandates to environmental resiliency efforts is not just smart, sustainable policy; it is the law. After all, the Fair Housing Act provides that the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and “all executive departments and agencies” shall “administer the programs and activities related to housing and urban development in a manner affirmatively to further fair housing.”3
What must resiliency efforts do to meet the fair housing mandate? Craig suggests that, at a minimum, responses should reflect input from impacted communities. Fair housing requires that residential desegregation and equal access to opportunity neighborhoods should be prioritized in the context of disaster mitigation, although Craig points out that integration imposes some unavoidable costs on relocated Black individuals who lose social networks and endure the stress of insufficient neighborhood inclusivity.
Craig’s prescription for fair housing and climate justice is essentially threefold. First, buy-out or resiliency funding must be calculated prospectively and be sufficient to cover new housing, relocation costs, and necessary supports rather than simply reimburse the market value of destroyed property. Second, the use of resiliency funds must be tailored to the impacted community’s own priorities and choices. Craig believes that robust community engagement and individual counseling/education efforts can provide essential dignity and autonomy. Finally, land-use processes must pre-emptively identify sustainable solutions to community displacement. People fleeing climate disasters should have sustainably sited, racially integrated, mixed-income communities with the necessary physical and social infrastructure in place before disaster strikes. Current disaster and housing programs fail to embrace these three elements.
“In many ways, climate retreat policy provides a missed opportunity to both advance population shifts to climate-safe areas as well as fair housing goals in a market where there is very little incentive to make choices focused on the benefits of racial integration,” explains Craig. (P. 785.) Understanding the connection between racial injustices in housing and racial injustices from climate change enables community residents to win the struggle against the water. Equitable, sustainable solutions to housing inequality and environmental injustice can lift vulnerable community residents out of the floodwaters and onto higher ground, both literally and figuratively.
- Jade A. Craig, Struggle Against the Water: Connecting Fair Housing Law and Climate Justice, 24 Nev. L.J. 737, 741and 752 n.95 (2024) (quoting Jeff Euland & Barney Warf, Racialized Topographies: Altitude and Race in Southern Cities, 96 Geographical Rev. 50, 54 (2006)). Craig cites numerous studies that clearly prove this point, including his own prior article, Jade A. Craig, “Pigs in the Parlor”: The Legacy of Racial Zoning and the Challenge of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing in the South, 40 Miss. C. L. Rev. 5 (2022), as well as important articles by other legal scholars including Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, Planning Milagros: Environmental Injustice and Land Use Regulation, 76 Denv. L. Rev. 1 (1988); Richard Briffault, Our Localism: Part 1 –The Structure of Local Government Law, 90 Colum. L. Rev. 1, (1990); David D. Troutt, Localism and Segregation, 16 J. Affordable Hous. & Cmty. Dev. L. 323 (2007); Wyatt G. Sassman & Danielle C. Jefferis, Beyond Emissions: Migration, Prisons, and the Green New Deal, 51 Env’t L. 161 (2021).
- During 2025, FEMA slowed the flow of Disaster Relief Funds to a mere trickle and suspended the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program that subsidizes homeowner relocation from chronically flooded areas. Jennifer DeCesaro & Sara Labowitz, The Trump Administration Is Quietly Curbing the Flow of Disaster Funding, The Emissary, Carnegie Endowment (Sep. 19, 2025). As noted by Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, Trump’s FEMA also terminated the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) Act, gutting Biden-era investment in stabilizing and relocating climate-imperiled communities.
- 42 U.S.C. § 3608(d) and (3)(5).
