Groups Heavily Impacted by Hurricane Katrina and How They were Affected

SOCI 1001-Principles of Sociology
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What happened?
The Hurricane Katrina Aftermath video describes the struggles the residents went through in rebuilding their lives after the devastating disaster. On August 29, 2005, Katrina grew into a dangerous level-5 hurricane. She blew through the levee system holding Lake Pontchartrain back, resulting in massive floods that completely flooded the city, destroying homes, displacing tens of thousands of residents, and killing about one thousand residents (The New York Times, 2013). With the city destroyed, the federal government sought to help the residents rebuild through the 4.2 billion dollar housing project dabbed The Road Home. While the project was promising to the residents, it quickly faced several challenges, such as extensive red tape that made it impossible for them to receive the funds quickly and the failure of the ICF program to process the claims adequately. Discrimination issues came to light as black neighborhoods received less money than their white counterparts. Also, they received the money in batches within five years, making complete rebuilding impossible (The New York Times, 2013).
Two ways social factors contributed to the situation
One of the social factors was race. According to the video, race formed the basis of determining the amount of rebuilding money to be disbursed. The settlement favored white people, who received eight thousand dollars more in reconstruction money than African Americans. The move was attributed to black people having allegedly less expensive homes, clearly discriminating. Hence, this saw selective return migration as more African Americans could not afford to rebuild (Bell, 2016).
The social-economic status of the residents contributed to the struggle to rebuild. The devastating weather events destroyed New Orleans. In an attempt to rebuild, the comm...