Even with the ever-lengthening wildfire season in the West, hurricanes are the leading cause of displacement due to natural disasters in the United States. That’s according to new data published only for the second time by the Census Bureau. It provides rare insight into how disasters affect American lives since it added questions about displacement to its Household Pulse Survey.
In total, 2.5 million people had to leave their homes in 2023, and with hurricanes in the Southeast forcing the bulk of those displacement, the people having to flee are disproportionately Black and Latinx, and people who are poor end up being displaced for longer periods of time.
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Both the Census Bureau and analysts note that there are limitations to the data, which is gathered through a voluntary survey, and leaves phrases like “natural disaster” and “displacement” broadly defined. But having any large-scale sense of who goes where after major disasters is both new and incredibly useful. Displacement “has a really big cumulative cost that’s hard to capture,” Andrew Rumbach of the Urban Institute told the New York Times. “This, at least, gives us a snapshot of that.”
When it comes to Black folks, that snapshot shows what was already logical to assume. Just consider all that we already know about the effects of hurricanes on Black Americans: even within Southeastern states, where the bulk of the storms that make landfall in the U.S. hit, Black residents are nearly twice as likely to experience hurricanes than non-Black residents in the very same storm-prone region.
Black people tend to be poorer on average than the overall population, and when it comes to housing, they are more likely to rent rather than own — both of which increase the likelihood of being displaced, and being displaced for longer in the event of a storm. The new Census data also showed that Black and Latinx people who are LGBTQ were displaced at an even higher rate, according to the New York Times.
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An analysis of the 2022 Household Pulse data, the first to include natural disaster questions, from the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that Black and Latinx households were twice as likely to be displaced after a disaster. NLIHC also noted that “Black, non-Latino households and Latino households were more likely to be displaced, regardless of whether they were renters or homeowners, compared to white, non-Latino households.”
The new survey suggests that many displaced respondents in 2023 struggled during their time away from home, with more than a third reporting that they dealt with hunger in the month following the storm. And over half said they were contacted by someone who seemed like they were trying to defraud them.
With climate change making hurricanes both large and more frequent, it’s likely that the number of people displaced by hurricanes (as well as wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters) in the coming years — and the racial disparities may even grow as storms hit the areas where Black people live even harder.