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From the time of Noah to now, people have struggled for their homes. Faced with threats their homes will be lost, they have fought to preserve them. In the aftermath of loss, they have confronted rebuilding. Because a “home” is much more than a “house,” the loss encompasses everything, including neighbors, buildings, trees, and a collective way of life. These struggles are going on in many parts of the modern world, as globalization, environmental disasters, development, government seizure of land (for example, by use of eminent domain), conflict and economic pressures all force people out of their homes.
The negative reverberations of displacement can be grouped in three domains: excess mortality, economic setback, and loss of collective resiliency.
Excess mortality is a term doctors use to indicate that people in a particular group are dying at higher rates than those in other groups. People who have been displaced die at much higher rates than those whose lives are stable. The displaced die in several waves. The most vulnerable – babies, pregnant women, the elderly – will die during the upheaval, killed by accidents, lack of food, dangers in the environment, and other crisis problems. In the second wave, people with other vulnerabilities, like advanced heart disease or hypertension, will die from aggravation of their illnesses. In the third wave, people will die from the consequences of both long-term stress and the side effects of managing stress through the use of drugs or other substances. African-American in the United States, who are likely to have suffered from upheaval, have a life expectancy that is about 5 years shorter than white people.
By economic setback, we mean the loss of economic capital in homes, stocks and bonds and businesses, as well as the intellectual capital to manage businesses and assets. Economic setback due to upheaval takes many forms. There are economic losses due to upheaval. Insurance, for example, rarely covers all of one’s losses. People that are displaced may be relocated to less advantageous locations. A relocated business may not be able to make it in the new location. This is especially true of businesses that were marginal. In our study of urban renewal, a particularly tragic economic loss – which was also a cultural setback – was that jazz clubs located in black neighborhoods were rarely able to re-establish themselves after urban renewal. In fact, the black entrepreneurial class was so severely undermined that it has taken decades to produce a new cadre of business people.
Collective resiliency is a capacity of a people to recover from an injury. Collective resiliency is critical to the survival of populations. This capacity is created by people as they live together in a place. By working, celebrating and sharing with each other, they develop language, cultural and survival knowledge that is unique to their situation. Upheaval tears apart social networks and destroys social capital, both of which are crucial to making it possible for people to work together to repair their losses. If people are dispersed and lose their previous networks, they also lose the tools of language and culture. Their ability to rebuild is seriously comprised. People, united with their neighbors, can rebuild in a few years. People who have lost their neighbors must start from the beginning and rebuilding will take a much longer time.
Upheaval reveals the profound connections that people have with their homes. As in the myth, they are the source of our language and our society. These connections are our roots, and upheaval causes a profound state of shock that we have called “root shock.” Root shock, in people, is defined as the traumatic stress that follows the loss of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem. The nature of root shock is captured in these words of a survivor of the murderous flood that wiped out Buffalo Creek, West Virginia in 1972:
We did lose a community, and I mean it was a good community. Everybody was close, everybody knowed everybody. But now everybody is alone. They act like they’re lost. They’ve lost their homes and their way of life, the one they liked, the one they was used to. All the houses are gone, every one of them. The people are gone, scattered. You don’t know who your neighbor is going to be. You can’t go next door and talk. You can’t do that, there’s no next door. You can’t laugh with friends. You can’t do that no more, because there’s no friends around to laugh with. (quoted by Kai Erickson, in his book, Everything in its Path, p. 196)
In any instance of displacement, communities face an urgent need to re-establish the collective home.
Many communities are fighting to prevent displacement
Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn www.developdontdestroy.org
is an organization formed to fight a plan to take homes in a Brooklyn neighborhood and replace them with a sports arena and high-rise developments. The planned development will use the power of eminent domain to seize people’s homes. The development will be supported by Liberty Bonds, issued to promote development in the aftermath of 9/11. All of this is going forward without local government approvals.
Residents of Bedford Dwellings, a public housing project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were faced with displacement due to the HOPE VI program. This program was designed to demolish “distressed housing projects” and replace them with low-rise, mixed income housing. People in Bedford Dwellings did not want to be forced out of their historic neighborhood, the Hill District. Through their mobilization efforts, they were able to convince the developers to build housing off the site and permit people to move to their new homes prior to demolition of the old one. See two articles “The Housing that Community Built” by Patricia Murphy and “Be it ever so humble” by Mindy Fullilove at the Shelterforce website
http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/sf138.html
Rebuilding in the aftermath of loss
NYC RECOVERS was an alliance of organizations that joined together in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attack to promote collective recovery. Each partner organization incorporated social and emotional healing into its ongoing activities. These included such projects as: Holiday Healing, Rebuilding Hope, Decorate the City, and Take a Deep Breath/September Wellness (the observance of the first anniversary).
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 Promoting Collective Recovery
Find the Rivers is an organization that is rebuilding the Hill District, which suffered from urban renewal in the 1950s and continuous disinvestment through the latter half of the 20th century. Find the Rivers seeks to link the hilltop neighborhood to the Allegheny and the Monagahela, two of Pittsburgh’s famous rivers. For information about this creative initiative, see the organization’s website, www.findtherivers.org.
Learning More
“All for the Taking” is a film by George McCollough about urban renewal in Philadelphia that highlights the disruption in people’s lives caused by the city’s massive Neighborhood Transformation Initiative.
“Urban renewal is people removal,” is a film about urban renewal is in Newark, New Jersey. Made by filmmaker Sara Booth, and produced by Mindy Fullilove, this film was awarded “Best Short Documentary,” at the Trenton Film Festival.
Copies of these films are available through the Root Shock Institute.
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