By Julia Robins, Virginia Sea Grant Student Correspondent
When a storm hits, households don’t get hit equally. In fact, says Shannon Van Zandt, low-income households usually get hit the hardest.
Van Zandt, professor at Texas A&M University’s College of Architecture, came to William and Mary on January 30 as part of the Visiting Scholar Series. Her talk, “In Harm’s Way: Measuring and Mapping Social Vulnerability,” proved that planning is not just an architectural endeavor, but also a social science issue.
“People and households are not randomly distributed in space,” says Van Zandt. In her research, mapping hurricane-hit areas in Texas, she’s found that low-income households will most often be found in low-quality and low-lying areas and be more susceptible to storms. This, Van Zandt says, is a political problem that can be solved through planning.
“I can make a difference in terms of restricting development in certain areas…we can also strengthen building codes, we can redistribute and improve the distribution of housing,” she told the attendees of her lecture.
Van Zandt emphasized the effects and prevalence of social vulnerability—the way in which people and households vary in their capacity to anticipate, cope with, respond to, and recover from disasters. This variation is due to social factors such as race and ethnicity, gender and household composition, income and poverty, education, and age. But socio-political policy seems to be the greatest factor.
While Van Zandt acknowledges individual rights, she says that those in “As a planner,” says Van Zandt, “I look at the extent to which these three things [low-lying areas, low-quality homes, low-income households] overlap and in what ways they overlap as being areas that I can make a difference.”
Shannon Van Zandt is Director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development and Faculty Fellow in the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University.
The Visiting Scholar Seminar Series features experts in marine and coastal policy and fulfills a requirement for Virginia Institute of Marine Science students pursuing the Marine Policy designation. This edition of the series is sponsored by Virginia Sea Grant, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and the Thomas Jefferson School in Public Policy at College of William and Mary.
