practices used by insurance companies, banks, and mortgage companies are built largely around racialized zip
codes. Historically, racialized place buttressed Jim Crow and translated into white neighborhoods receiving
libraries, streets lighting, police and fir protection, paved roads, sewer and water lines, garbage pick-up,
swimming pools, and flood control measures years before black neighborhoods received these tax-supported
services. Racist housing policies relegated many blacks to “low-lying” vulnerable places.
Katrina exposed a weakness in urban mass evacuation plans. Emergency transportation plans are built
around car ownership. Car ownership is almost universal in the United States with 91.7 percent of American
households owning at least one motor vehicle. American cities are not built for mass evacuations. Disasters
highlight the problem non-drivers and transit-dependents residents face everyday. Transportation planners and
social researchers fail “special needs” population before and after man-made and natural disasters strike. As in
the case of Hurricane Katrina and similar disasters, emergency transportation planners generally fail the “most
vulnerable” of our society, individuals without cars, non-drivers, disabled, sick persons, elderly, and children.
Sociological research is needed to answer other key questions: Will government response to climate
change be fair? Does fairness matter? Does race and class matter? What lessons can be learned from
environmental justice research, policy, and community organizing and their applicability to climate change work?
Research is needed on institutionalized factors that shape strategies to reduce the direct and indirect impacts of
climate change on vulnerable populations—issues surrounding “environmental refugees” and internally displaced
persons (IDP), privatization and commodification of water, access to health care and insurance, reconstruction
of damaged communities, increased competition for scarce resources such housing, food, energy, etc.,
marginalization of already marginalized communities, price gouging, predatory lending, banking and insurance
redlining, and “wind vs. flood” insurance tug of war.