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Black Communities Left to Sink as Insurance Companies Abandon the South

The situation in Elba, Alabama, may be unique, but it speaks to a larger problem for Black Southerners.

Studies have revealed that Black households are nearly twice as likely as white households to experience flood-related property damage due to the location and condition of their homes. (Courtesy of Shiloh Community Center and the Bullard Center)

By Adam Mahoney, courtesy of Capital B and URL Media


On Sept. 29, Pastor Timothy Williams will lose the property insurance coverage for his home in rural Elba, Alabama. It’s another mark on a long list of recent letdowns for him in the aftermath of a persistent flooding crisis born by the expansion of a highway next to his home. 


Since the state raised and expanded U.S. Highway 84 from two lanes to four, virtually every time it rains, water rolls down the highway and from drains beneath the highway, engorging several homes in the historically Black neighborhood known as Shiloh.


The expansion of U.S. Highway 84 from two to four lanes has had a catastrophic impact on nearby residents in Shiloh, Alabama. (Courtesy of Shiloh Community Center and the Bullard Center)

The floodwaters have seeped into homes and led to septic tanks overflowing, turning their yards into murky lakes. Since 2018, Williams’ house has slowly sagged into the earth and his roof has split apart as a result.


Williams’ situation may be unique, but it speaks to a larger problem for Black Southerners as Republican officials have worked to weaken Americans’ abilities to bring civil rights complaints, and severe weather events have made insurance companies less likely to insure homes across the region. The future of some elements of the Civil Rights Act are under attack and have already been weakened in nearby Louisiana, and as dozens of insurance companies leave the South because of climate change, Black rural homeowners are left high and dry at disproportionate rates. 


With the increasing frequency of extreme weather due to climate change combined with a gas pipeline that runs underneath the neighborhood, the threat of disaster in Williams’ neighborhood is constantly increasing. Last year, residents brought a civil rights complaint to the federal Department of Transportation. They alleged that their community was disparately impacted when the highway expansion led to storm drains being directed toward their homes and that it was done because it was Black-owned land that was gaining in property value. 


The complaint prompted a visit from some of the most prominent Black environmental justice leaders and even U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. “There is no way I’m going to forget what I just heard,” Buttigieg said during the visit. “I don’t claim to have a magic wand on me, but I have a lot of tools.” 


U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited Shiloh, Alabama, after hearing residents’ complaints about flooding tied to a highway expansion project. (Courtesy of Shiloh Community Center and the Bullard Center)

But in the months since, the tools have not produced any remedies. After the visit, Williams said, the community thought they would have a victory by now, but “our homes are still sinking, and we’re still losing.”  


The DOT did not offer responses to Capital B’s questions about the active civil rights complaint before this story was published. But nationwide, analyses have shown that the Biden administration’s handling of civil rights complaints has been slow and most often don’t lead to resolutions, particularly in environmental justice cases.  


“It’s clear this cannot be solved by giving a few people checks,” said Ben Jealous, former director of the NAACP and current director of the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s largest environmental organizations. Jealous was invited to the community in August by Williams to see the flooding impact firsthand. 


Black Southerners are disproportionately bearing the brunt of America’s flooding crisis, with studies showing that Black households are nearly twice as likely as white households to experience flooding-related property damage due to the location and condition of their homes. In Southern states, this disparity is compounded, but it exists similarly in urban and rural areas nationwide, leaving Black communities most vulnerable.


Last week, Robert Bullard, who is known as the father of environmental justice for his research in the 1980s in showing how pollution disproportionately impacted Black Americans, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that it’s “time for [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] to prove he cares about Black people drowning.”


As floodwaters rise, safeguards dwindle


Already, homeowners have shelled out hundreds and thousands of dollars each to fix their yards, roofs, and to rid their walls of mold. Some residents also received funding from the state to fix some of the damage to their properties, but unbeknownst to them, the funding agreements placed restrictive deed covenants on their land. The agreements limit the ability of current and future residents to file actions against the state related to the flooding.


As a result, without insurance — or federal intervention — the situation may become untenable. 


In a letter from his insurance company, State Farm, the company said due to Williams’ home experiencing more than $10,000 in damage since 2021, the insurance agreement is no longer “acceptable” to the company. 


The low rate of having home insurance for Black households dates back to the New Deal, often regarded as the country’s most socially progressive spending package ever. The New Deal, brought in by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, created the Federal Housing Administration, which was founded to help homeowners by providing federal insurance for mortgages while also drawing up appraisal maps of neighborhoods. Those maps led to what we now know to be redlining, which deemed Black and immigrant communities less valuable and dictated where people from these communities could live. The FHA limited or refused to provide insurance for people in the neighborhoods deemed risky. In many ways, redlining is the basis for many of the environmental and climate injustices that harm Black communities today because it left only the undesirable and toxic neighborhoods for Black residents. 


Today, a Black household is about 1.5 times less likely to have property insurance than the general population. It’s even more drastic in rural places like Shiloh, particularly for people living in manufactured or mobile homes and for those who inherited their homes through what is known as heirs’ property


For the first time in Alabama’s history, the home insurance industry was unprofitable in 2020 due to widespread damage from extreme weather. And since then, average home insurance premiums have risen by $560. (Despite dozens of insurance companies pulling out of the South because of severe weather risks, Republican lawmakers have denied that climate change is playing a role.) 


As Alabama’s flooding season begins in November, Williams said, “our people are scared.” 


“We done lost everything already. What other community would have to deal with this for six years if they weren’t African American?” he added.

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