The fight over whether religion is a license to discriminate is back before the Supreme Court

Fulton v. City of Philadelphia is likely to deal a severe blow to LGBTQ rights.

By Ian Millhiser Feb 25, 2020
 

Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch (L) and Brett Kavanaugh attend the State of the Union address in the chamber of the US House of Representatives on February 4, 2020. Mario Tama/Getty Images


The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a hugely consequential case that could fundamentally change the rules governing when people with religious objections to a law may ignore that law.

Fulton asks whether religious organizations that contract with Philadelphia to help place foster children in homes have a First Amendment right to discriminate against same-sex couples. It is also the first case the Supreme Court will hear where a religious group claims the right to violate a ban on discrimination since Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation gave reliably conservative Republicans a majority on the Supreme Court.

The plaintiffs in Fulton include Catholic Social Services (CSS), an organization that used to contract with the city to help find foster placements for children but that effectively lost that contract after it refused to comply with the ban on discrimination. CSS claims it has a First Amendment right to continue to do business with the city even if it refuses to comply with the city’s anti-discrimination rules.

Fulton is a significant escalation from most of the Supreme Court’s previous cases asking when religious people may seek an exemption from the law. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), for example, the Supreme Court considered whether the law could prevent a private business owner from discriminating against a same-sex couple (the Court ruled in favor of the business owner, but on narrow grounds).

Fulton, by contrast, is a case about government services. The city of Philadelphia decided to contract with private organizations to help it provide a public service — placement of children in foster homes. If the city chose to provide this service entirely in house, it could certainly refuse to discriminate against same-sex couples. The question in Fulton is whether the city loses much of its power to control its own public services when it contracts some of those services to religious entities.

A decision for the plaintiffs in Fulton, moreover, could have implications that stretch well beyond foster care. The Fulton case involves an especially sympathetic plaintiff: a Catholic organization that helps vulnerable children find homes. But if the Supreme Court rules in favor of that plaintiff, it could potentially establish that a wide range of government contractors, from social service providers to military contractors, may discriminate if the company’s owners claim a religious justification for that discrimination.


On top of all that, the Fulton plaintiffs ask the Supreme Court to reconsider a seminal 1990 decision limiting when religious objectors may refuse to follow the law. Fulton could also lead to a massive expansion of the Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), which held, for the first time, that religious objectors may sometimes use those objections to limit the rights of third parties.

In other words, Fulton could be the next big blow in the fight between religious conservatives who seek broad legal exemptions, and laws seeking to ban conduct such as anti-LGBTQ discrimination without exception.
A brief history of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause

The First Amendment prevents the government from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. In Sherbert v. Verner (1963), the Supreme Court established that this free exercise clause prohibits the government from enforcing laws that impose a “substantial infringement” on someone’s religious beliefs unless the government’s reasons for doing so are supported by a “compelling state interest.”

Those last three words — “compelling state interest” — will be familiar to anyone who has studied American constitutional law. The Supreme Court also requires laws that discriminate on the basis of race to overcome a “compelling interest” test. When the Court uses the words “compelling interest,” it typically signals that the Constitution applies the highest possible safeguards against a particular kind of government action. Most laws that are subjected to a “compelling interest” analysis are struck down.

Yet something odd happened after the Supreme Court decided Sherbert. While the courts claimed they were applying the same “compelling interest” test in cases involving race discrimination and in cases involving religious objectors, the numbers do not bear this out. A 1992 study by James E. Ryan, now the president of the University of Virginia, found that federal courts of appeals heard 97 free exercise cases applying the “compelling interest” test between 1980 and 1990, and those courts rejected 85 of these cases.

Subsequent research by UCLA law professor Adam Winkler showed that this pattern continued into the next decade. Between 1990 and 2003, Winkler found, federal courts applying the compelling interest test upheld only 22 percent of free speech restrictions and 27 percent of laws that engaged in discrimination — but they upheld 59 percent of “religious liberty burdens.” These data indicate that “religious liberty” plaintiffs are far less likely to prevail than other parties who challenge the government’s actions under a “compelling interest” test.

A likely explanation for this disparity is that courts found the notion that any religious person could be exempt from nearly any law unworkable, so they were reluctant to read the free exercise clause too expansively. By 1990, this sense, that applying a strong “compelling interest” standard to religion cases is unworkable, won a majority of the votes on the Supreme Court.

“To make an individual’s obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State’s interest is ‘compelling,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Court in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), is “permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’” Such an outcome, according to Scalia, “contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.”

Instead, Scalia wrote, religious people have to follow the same “neutral law[s] of general applicability” that everyone else must follow. The law may not single out particular religious groups for inferior treatment. But so long as a law treats people of all religious beliefs exactly the same, the law is constitutional. Philadelphia may ban anti-LGBTQ discrimination so long as the ban applies equally to religious people and nonreligious people alike.

Smith, however, was not a beloved decision. In 1993, Congress enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert” and in a similar Supreme Court decision. RFRA, it should be noted, applies only to federal laws that burden religious objectors. Smith remains good law when a state is accused of violating the free exercise clause.

Moreover, as Winkler’s research suggests, RFRA did not cause the courts to fundamentally rethink their religion decisions — at least not right away. Religious liberty plaintiffs were more likely to win their cases after RFRA than they were before it was enacted, but most of these plaintiffs still lost. Most notably, the courts typically hewed to the view that a religious objection may not be used to undercut the rights of a third party.

But all of that changed with the Court’s 2014 decision in Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby held that certain companies, whose owners object to some forms of birth control on religious grounds, may refuse to obey a federal rule requiring them to provide birth control coverage to their employees. In effect, that meant that the “religious liberty” rights of the business owners trumped the right of the workers to have birth control coverage.

The Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby, moreover, suggests that courts should apply the same “compelling interest” test in RFRA cases that it applies in race cases. So courts must treat federal laws that substantially burden religious exercise with the same high amount of skepticism they give to laws about racial discrimination.

As Ryan and Winkler’s studies show, that’s not how courts have behaved in the past.
What the Fulton plaintiffs want

The Fulton plaintiffs make several legal claims, but one of their most aggressive claims is that the Supreme Court should reconsider Smith.

Recall that Hobby Lobby was an RFRA case, which means its expansion of “religious liberty” applies only to the federal government. If the Supreme Court overrules Smith, that would mean that state laws that trigger religious objections would also be subject to a strict compelling interest test. We would move closer to the world that Scalia warned of, where a religious individual might “become a law unto himself.”

Additionally, the Fulton plaintiffs claim that the city may not condition “benefits on the surrender of constitutional rights” — and thus the city may not screen its contractors to exclude businesses that want to discriminate on religious grounds. As noted above, a decision ruling in the plaintiffs’ favor on such grounds could have major implications for many government contracts.

It is very likely, moreover, that the Court will use Fulton to significantly expand the rights of religious objectors. Shortly after Scalia died in 2016, Justice Samuel Alito penned an opinion endorsing an expansion of religious objectors’ rights, and that opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Those three justices are now joined by two conservative Trump appointees, Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch. While it is unclear just how far the Court will go in Fulton, it is now likely that there are five votes to hold that organizations like CSS may discriminate against same-sex couples.

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING
Amazon is opening a supermarket with no cashiers. Is Whole Foods next?

The new Amazon Go store concept debuts on Tuesday in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

By Jason Del Rey@DelRey Feb 25, 2020

The new Amazon Go Grocery store concept opened in February in Seattle. Amazon


Two years ago, Amazon introduced the idea of high-tech, cashierless shopping with a store that was a cross between a 7-Eleven and a Pret A Manger sandwich shop. Now, Amazon is bringing the same concept to a full-size supermarket.

On Tuesday, Amazon will open the doors to a 10,000-square-foot Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, less than a mile from the tech giant’s downtown Seattle headquarters. It’ll be stocked with 5,000 different products — from organic fruit to grass-fed beef — and outfitted with cameras, sensors, and computer vision that eliminate the need for shoppers to fork over cash or plastic before walking out the door with their groceries.

The new store, which is the first of its kind in the US, highlights Amazon’s unsated appetite for gobbling up market share in the $900 billion US grocery industry, even after spending nearly $14 billion in 2017 to acquire Whole Foods and making same-day grocery delivery a free perk for Prime members last year. At the same time, the expansion of the cashierless store concept raises the question of when — not if — the technology will be ready for installation in Whole Foods stores, and what might happen to the chain’s thousands of cashiers when it is.

“There’s no plans to put this in a Whole Foods, for now,” Amazon Go’s vice president Dilip Kumar told Recode on a tour of the new store Monday. “For now, what we are focused on is this concept and see what customers think of it — [and] go from there.”

“You would understand why that’s an obvious question,” I told him.

Kumar laughed. “You would understand why I can’t comment on that,” he responded.

Twenty-five years ago, Amazon was simply an online purveyor of books making a radical bet on what the future of consumerism might look like. Just over two decades later, Jeff Bezos’s company has grown into the largest online retailer in the US (it’s now eight times the size of the No. 2 competitor); it’s a mainstream provider of entertainment through its Prime Video offering; and it’s the largest cloud computing company in the world.


But in Amazon speak, “it’s always Day 1,” which means the company is just scratching the surface of what it might accomplish. In the case of the grocery industry, though, Amazon’s grocery delivery service languished in business purgatory for a decade, unable to crack the code on the right economic model that would both be affordable to a mass customer base but lucrative enough to sustain the business. Still, the food and beverage category is too large for a company with Amazon’s ambitions to ignore, so first came the Whole Foods purchase and then the launch of Amazon Go stores.

Since the opening of the first Amazon Go store on the ground floor of the company’s downtown Seattle headquarters in January 2018, Amazon has added more than 20 new locations, with eight in New York City, six in Chicago, and four each in San Francisco and Seattle. Those stores sell breakfast items, sandwiches, salads, and snacks, and they are aimed at enticing busy working professionals in corporate districts on their way to and from work, and on lunch breaks. Many feature both local and national food and beverage brands, including some of Amazon’s own labels, like Happy Belly and Whole Foods’ 365 Everyday Value brands. (The new Amazon Go Grocery store also sells a cross section of local, mainstream, and private-label brands.)

Over time, Amazon’s online dominance has solidified a virtuous cycle, where new merchants with new products attract new shopping, and Amazon reaps the benefits of sales as well as shopper and seller data to help hone its retail machine. In the case of the Amazon Go brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon gains insights into its customers’ shopping behavior that it can’t already glean from shopping data on its website. Customers scan an Amazon Go app at a turnstile upon entering and can simply exit without checking out when they are done. Shoppers who want to pay in cash can ask a store associate to swipe them in, an addition to the original idea that was implemented after some municipalities banned cashless stores.

The original Amazon Go stores have received high marks from shoppers in online reviews, but their technology infrastructure is expensive to build out. That fuels speculation from industry analysts that Amazon Go might need to expand into a format where each shopper is spending more per visit. In fact, the original prototype for Amazon Go back in 2015 was a 15,000-square-foot supermarket that Jeff Bezos reportedly vetoed after a visit, according to a Bloomberg News report. “There were specialty counters where Amazon employees posing as baristas, butchers, and cheesemongers took orders and added items to Bezos’ imaginary bill,” Bloomberg reported. But Bezos didn’t like that customers would have to wait for their meat or cheese to be weighed and added to their bill when the whole point of the store was to eliminate wasted time at checkout.

Five years later, the supermarket concept is finally launching, but at two-thirds of the prototype size and with a simple format more reminiscent of a Trader Joe’s than a Stop & Shop, Kroger, Walmart, or even Whole Foods. There’s no deli counter, butcher, or bakery, likely because of the additional friction they’d add to a shopping experience that Amazon and Bezos imagined would be quicker than that of competing stores.

Produce items are sold by the unit or bundle rather than by weight, so that the cameras and computer can handle the price computations. But building technology advanced enough to accurately identify and associate unpackaged items with a specific shopper still proved a substantial hurdle.

Shoppers typically spend more time picking up, placing down, and just handling produce than they do with packaged items, which adds complexity to the computer identification process. And that’s not even taking into account the physical differences from one pear to another. “So how do you take into account color and shape and other characteristics ... to just be able to associate that to the right customer account?” Amazon’s Kumar asked rhetorically.

The new store will employ workers who unpack inventory behind the scenes and restock shelves and produce bins. Other staff will greet shoppers at the entrance and check IDs in a section where beer, wine, and liquor is sold. Amazon wouldn’t disclose how many people work on any given shift, but the company said it hired “several dozen associates” to work at the store. Amazon argues that Amazon Go stores aren’t eliminating jobs, but instead are shifting worker roles to different kinds of labor.

Still, the lack of cashiers — of which there are more than 3.5 million in the US — is notable when you consider that Whole Foods has around 500 stores. Whole Foods stores are typically two to five times the size of the new Amazon Go Grocery store, which means that even if it is successful, there’s no guarantee that the technology is good or cheap enough to be transplanted into the organic grocery store chain anytime soon. But when the tech is further developed, it would be surprising if Amazon doesn’t bring it to Whole Foods, especially if customers’ behavior signals they’d want it. And then, the cashier question is one Amazon will face again.

Amazon tells Sanders and Warren that warehouse workers can pee whenever they want

In a response to 15 US senators, Amazon defended its warehouse working conditions.

By Jason Del Rey@DelRey Feb 24, 2020

A woman works at a giant Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York. JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images

Amazon stayed on the defensive in a response to United States senators about its warehouse working conditions on Friday, disputing claims that its workers can’t take bathroom breaks when they need to and calling on politicians who haven’t visited an Amazon fulfillment center to take the company up on its offer of a tour.

Amazon also said it is “exploring the best way to make information about Amazon’s safety record public,” but argued that worker injury records submitted to the US Department of Labor contain “private and sensitive” details such as worker names and injury descriptions that are treated as confidential.

The eight-page response was sent on Friday to a group of 15 Democratic US senators, including Tammy Baldwin (WI) and Sherrod Brown (OH), as well as presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Two weeks earlier, the senators warned Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a letter to overhaul an alleged “profit-at-all-costs culture” that they say manifests itself in a punishing work environment for the hundreds of thousands of workers responsible for sorting, packing, and shipping customer orders. But this response letter, signed by Amazon policy executive Brian Huseman, will likely do little to squelch protest from worker activists and some progressive politicians who say worker complaints and injury rates speak for themselves.

Chief among the allegations Amazon faces is that the pace of work inside Amazon warehouses is so intense that some workers relieve themselves in bottles so that their performance doesn’t suffer. To address the allegations, the senators had asked Amazon to “cease including bathroom breaks as a ‘time off task.’” In its response, Amazon said that workers “are allowed and encouraged to take breaks as needed, in addition to their traditional breaks during a shift ... including time spent using the restroom.”

“If there are instances where our leaders cannot account for the whereabouts of an associate for a significant amount of time (‘time off task’), managers speak with the associate to understand if there are any issues that can be addressed by the leadership team (such as defective equipment or process defects),” the letter went on. “If the reason behind the ‘time off task’ is related to bathroom breaks, it is excused.”

The company also continued to maintain that injury rates of its workers are higher than the industry average because the company is more aggressive than its peers in recording injuries on the job.

“In 2016,” the letter read, “we decided to change our approach to recordkeeping and design a system that reported all injuries — no matter the severity — to remove elements of subjectivity and provide the data needed to drive comprehensive safety improvements.”

No word yet on a response from the senators.

Climate change and soaring flood insurance premiums could trigger another mortgage crisis

Officials fear “a huge foreclosure crisis” from FEMA flood insurance reforms.


By Jie Jenny Zou Feb 25, 2020


This story is part of a partnership with the Center for Public Integrity and WNYC/Gothamist.

NEW YORK CITY — When Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, Thalia Panton watched in disbelief as floodwaters careened down her quiet, tree-lined street in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Sparks flew from downed electrical lines as the rapids rose past her thighs.


The water receded as quickly as it appeared. But the damage was done. When the skies cleared, Panton was left with $60,000 in losses. The basement had flooded, damaging musical instruments her husband and son use for their gigs as well as electrical equipment that kept the house running. Panton and her neighbors didn’t get flood insurance until after Sandy because Canarsie wasn’t considered a major flood risk at the time of the storm.


Seven years later, as even more communities reckon with rising sea levels and catastrophic storms, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is encouraging homeowners and renters to “buy as much flood insurance as they can.” The agency provides more than 96 percent of all flood coverage through its National Flood Insurance Program, making it the sole option for most Americans.

Thalia Panton says flood waters from Superstorm Sandy reached the step she is standing on, resulting in $60,000 in losses. Jorge Garcia for Vox/CPI

Posters offering cash for houses are on nearly every street corner in Canarsie, an area that has long been a bastion of black homeownership. Jorge Garica for Vox/CPI

But FEMA is revamping the debt-ridden program to make it operate like a private insurer, raising concerns that coverage could become unaffordable for many higher-risk areas across the country. Agency officials have not said how many Americans could be affected. Private insurers champion the reforms as a way to modernize the NFIP, but the industry also stands to profit. Insurers are now competing directly with FEMA. Companies have also sold the agency on expensive deals with dubious benefits for taxpayers.

New York City officials warn that skyrocketing flood insurance premiums could trigger a foreclosure crisis in neighborhoods like Canarsie, which never recovered from the 2008 housing crash and was a hotbed of predatory loans that targeted black homeowners. Annual premiums in Canarsie — now an average of $600 — could jump to a range of $3,000 to $6,000 as soon as 2022 and become mandatory for more residents.

That expense could be out of reach for many in Canarsie already struggling to keep up with housing costs. “People are just going to be slowly picked off,” said Zachary Paganini, an urban geography researcher at the City University of New York. By forcing communities of color to shoulder the economic burden of escalating flood risk, the government is worsening inequality, he said.

While insurance is marketed as a way for households to bounce back, experts point out the policies do little to prevent disasters. Hundreds of thousands of homes could regularly face flooding from sea level rise by 2050, according to estimates. Heavier rains will threaten properties far from oceans. As the cost of flood protection soars, insurance could be what pushes people from their homes long before climate change does.
New flood reforms could mean less risk for the government, but also less protection for communities

Hurricane Sandy still haunts Ronald Temple’s home seven years later. A discolored line in his basement is a reminder of how floodwaters crept toward the ceiling, knocking out the heat for several grueling winters until he could afford to replace the equipment. On sunny days, unexplained puddles seep from the floor, a problem Temple says has only worsened since the storm. And in October, he discovered a rusted sewage pipe that will cost $10,000 to replace — a defect he blames on saltwater corrosion that isn’t covered by his flood or homeowners insurance.

“I’m really seriously thinking about moving,” said Temple, who immigrated from Sierra Leone in 1981 and has lived in Canarsie since 1997. His home borders a salt marsh that spills into Jamaica Bay, which divides Brooklyn from the southern edge of Queens. Canarsie wasn’t included in the city’s mandatory evacuation zone, but residences here were among an estimated 80 percent of homes on Brooklyn’s waterfront that were damaged during Sandy.

FEMA’s “advisory” flood map suggests far more risk in Canarsie than the “current” map, which would make flood insurance mandatory for more people and likely increase rates. FloodHelpNY.org

FEMA flood maps at the time of the storm, which were based on historical experience, classified fewer than 40 of Canarsie’s 12,000 buildings as high flood risk, which mortgage lenders typically require to carry flood insurance. Revised figures now suggest more than 5,000 buildings are at risk. The number of flood policies in Canarsie has increased since 2012, but the area remains underinsured.

“We’re not talking about people who have irresponsibly built a beach house because they want to have a second home on the shore — these are generational neighborhoods,” said Elizabeth Malone, a program director and insurance specialist at Neighborhood Housing Services of Brooklyn, a housing advocacy organization.

Roughly 85 percent of Canarsie’s residents are black, and the area is often seen as a bastion of black homeownership, which is on the decline in New York City. The neighborhood’s high number of single- and two-family homes gives it a sleepy, suburban feel. But just past the manicured lawns and paved driveways are signs of economic distress.

Bright yellow posters offering cash for houses can be found on nearly every street corner. Many residents — including a large share of immigrants and retirees — settled in Canarsie during the 1990s and 2000s at the height of subprime lending, receiving risky, high-interest loans. The area still has a large number of foreclosures compared to the rest of the city. Sandy likely played into that problem, experts say, causing some homeowners to default on their mortgages because they were unable to rent out flooded basements.

Many of Malone’s clients in Canarsie are choosing to forgo flood insurance because of the cost, she explained, not because they don’t believe the risk is real. Escalating flood risk could also cause home values to plummet, leaving families owing more on their properties than what they’re worth. “We will be underwater financially,” she said, “long before we are underwater physically.”

Annual flood premiums in Canarsie — now an average of $600 — could jump anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 as soon as 2022. Jorge Garcia for Vox/CPI

Canarsie has a high number of single- and two-family homes and is 85 percent black, with many residents longtime homeowners. Jorge Garcia for Vox/CPI

Complicating matters is the NFIP’s hazy fate. The program began in 1968 primarily because private companies were unwilling to insure floods. Since then, the NFIP has been America’s primary flood insurer, backing more than 5 million homes and businesses. Policies provide limited coverage for structural and equipment damages as well as loss of contents. But the program requires periodic congressional approval, putting it at the mercy of partisan politics. As a result, policy rules and conditions have continually shifted.

“They’ve been kicking the can for almost two years now,” Jainey Bavishi, director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, said of the standstill over flood insurance. Congress has been unable to reach consensus on the direction of the program, which some see as a lifeline and others as a liability. The NFIP has been temporarily extended 15 times since 2017, most recently in December, in lieu of a bill spelling out the program’s future. Previous attempts have been jarring: Congress tried to reform the NFIP in 2012, only to renege on most of those changes just two years later.

Right now, what NFIP customers pay is impacted by their location on a FEMA flood map and whether their property is eligible for subsidies. In most cases, mortgage borrowers in higher-risk zones must carry insurance and pay higher premiums. But structures built before the NFIP program designated an area as high risk often receive subsidized rates, a congressional compromise not to penalize owners for construction that complied with existing standards.

“WE WILL BE UNDERWATER FINANCIALLY, LONG BEFORE WE ARE UNDERWATER PHYSICALLY.”

In 2015, New York City officials appealed new FEMA flood maps that would drastically expand high-risk areas, making flood insurance mandatory and more expensive for thousands of New Yorkers. FEMA is working with the city to finalize new maps, but it’s unclear what they will look like and how long the process will take.

Risk Rating 2.0, an initiative that FEMA began working on in 2017 and plans to implement in October 2021, could have further effects on costs here and in other higher-risk parts of the country. Under the initiative, premiums will be priced to fully reflect flood risk, a move FEMA says would make the NFIP more financially sound but experts worry could make coverage less accessible. The revamp is part of a long-simmering effort to transform the program so it operates more like a private insurance company.

The NFIP is also relying on private consultants and proprietary computer models used by top insurance companies — a first in the program’s 50-year history. The overhaul marks a radical departure from the current pricing structure. FEMA has divulged little about the initiative, worrying lawmakers and housing advocates who say the agency is keeping the public in the dark.

FEMA has yet to provide specifics about premium changes. But New York City and outside experts say the agency’s decision to set prices based on risk signals big increases for higher-risk communities — the places that need flood insurance most.

In an interview, FEMA Deputy Associate Administrator David Maurstad said the goal of Risk Rating 2.0 is to deliver “rates that are fair, easy to understand and better reflect a property’s unique flood risk,” which can also help the public figure out whether an area is safe to live in.

The initiative will reduce premiums for policyholders of “lower-value homes” who are “paying more than they should be paying,” he said, and those who take measures to flood-proof their properties like elevating homes on stilts.

But Maurstad was less clear about the fate of high-risk, coastal areas like Canarsie, where property values are high but rising premiums could easily upend fragile households. “There comes a time when you have to evaluate the program and make these types of hard changes because they’re important for the sustainability of the program,” he said. Only Congress has the authority to make NFIP policies affordable, he added.
New York City officials fear a “huge foreclosure crisis” from flood reforms

What worries New York City officials is that communities like Canarsie could be left on their own to shoulder rising costs. “If we transition to risk-based pricing immediately, it would lead to a huge foreclosure crisis, and that’s exactly what we do not want to do,” Bavishi said. “We feel very strongly that this is at its core about environmental justice.”

City officials are lobbying Congress to provide vouchers or some other discount on NFIP premiums for those who cannot afford them. FEMA itself has acknowledged how cash-strapped Americans are — a 2018 agency survey found many US households would not be able to cover a $500 emergency expense.

Under the current NFIP, retrofitting a building is one of the few ways to qualify for premium reductions. A city study estimated a typical Canarsie homeowner would have to shell out up to $100,000 to modify a home, which would entail making the basement uninhabitable. The expense is out of reach for nearly everyone but real estate developers, who are increasingly building in the city’s most flood-prone areas.

Scholars like Paganini point out NFIP’s “one size fits all” approach means “working-class people increasingly can’t afford the cost of living by the coast, but wealthier populations can.” The program also ignores the impact of discriminatory mortgage lending on communities of color.

Instances of “environmental gentrification,” where luxury development displaces low-income residents following a natural disaster, have played out in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and storm-prone Miami-Dade County in Florida.

In New Orleans, many low-income housing developments with higher population densities have been replaced by two-story, townhouse-style buildings, leaving many residents impacted by Hurricane Katrina unable to return. Bottom: B.W. Cooper housing project. Top: The Marrero Commons housing development, which replaced B.W. Cooper. Mario Tama/Getty Images

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, supports FEMA’s pricing shift as a way to communicate risk to the public, but only if premiums are made affordable through some kind of program and the agency ramps up investment in flood prevention.

“You can have as much insurance as you want — the water doesn’t care,” said Anna Weber, a policy analyst for the group. NFIP shouldn’t punish vulnerable communities for living in risky areas, especially when racist real estate practices like redlining have long steered people of color into undesirable neighborhoods, Weber said. “Flood insurance has the potential to be the linchpin in our climate policy. Right now, it’s a liability.”

FEMA often cites a study showing every $1 spent on disaster mitigation returns $6 in benefits. But the agency spent $8.3 billion on such efforts from 2007 to 2016, a small portion of its total budget over the same period. Agency pamphlets outlining “low-cost” do-it-yourself projects to minimize flood risk tell property owners to “consult local architects, engineers, contractors, landscapers, or other experts in design and construction,” as well as secure “permits or other regulatory approvals” before making any changes.

Such an undertaking isn’t an option for Thalia Panton. Now retired, she lives on a fixed income — a chunk of which goes toward the $60,000 debt her family racked up from Sandy. Flood insurance has done little to alleviate the anxiety she feels when menacing clouds gather in the sky and start pelting the cement with rain.

Thalia Panton on her front porch. Jorge Garcia for Vox/CPI

“I haven’t been made whole, and I guess I’ll never be made whole,” Panton said. Her voice hardens when she’s asked whether she has considered leaving Canarsie. “I have no interest in selling my home, and I don’t want flood insurance to force me out. I don’t think that it can. I will find a way around it.”
Companies profit as flood insurance goes private

The NFIP was financially solvent for much of its history. But since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it’s accumulated billions of dollars in debt, borrowing more and more from the US Treasury as disasters hit.

The insurance industry, whose abandonment of the flood market nearly a century ago was a major reason the NFIP was created, now see the program’s woes as an opportunity to make money.

Much of what FEMA has been doing to recast its flood insurance program in recent years follows recommendations from the insurance industry. If the NFIP operated more like a private insurer, upping its rates, it would be easier for companies to compete for the less risky and more profitable policies they wanted. The NFIP would also pay for deals the industry has been trying to strike with the program for years.

Reinsurance, for instance. Every year, to avoid being overwhelmed by claims, private insurers like State Farm transfer some of their risk to reinsurers like Munich Re, handing over a cut of premiums in exchange.

The Reinsurance Association of America lobbied Congress in 2012 and 2014 to confirm FEMA’s authority to purchase reinsurance and to take out catastrophe bonds, a newer form of risk transfer. “Cat bonds” are high-stakes gambles that Wall Street players like hedge funds make on Mother Nature. If a storm devastates, investors could lose their cash, which goes toward paying claims. But if a storm underwhelms, investors keep their cash and take a hefty profit, leaving insurers to foot bills on their own.

Consumer advocates warned that a government agency entering into these deals amounted to easy Wall Street profits that would cost taxpayers money. Robert Hunter, a former NFIP risk manager and Texas insurance regulator, said reinsurance makes “no sense” for FEMA, which can borrow from the Treasury at low interest rates set by the federal government.

By comparison, reinsurance prices are set by private companies that need to turn a profit and tend to raise rates after major disasters. And countries that have relied on cat bonds have found the deals don’t always pay out as expected.

Nevertheless, Congress urged FEMA to see if reinsurance and cat bonds could work for the NFIP. For answers, the agency turned to Guy Carpenter, a company that brokers those very deals.

The resulting FEMA report in August 2015 found reinsurance would be more expensive than borrowing from the Treasury but could encourage private insurers to start competing with the NFIP, offering flood policies of their own. This could help the federal government reduce its share of flood risk over time as private insurers step up, the report found.

Months earlier, Guy Carpenter unveiled a new specialty practice to sell insurance products to big government clients to “relieve the burden on taxpayers” — meaning the company stood to profit if FEMA took its recommendation.

That’s exactly what happened.

Kenneth Davis shows a reporter the damage in his basement from flooding after Superstorm Sandy on November 3, 2012, in Canarsie. Davis said the flooding happened within 10 minutes, tossing heavy items, including an upright piano, from one side of the room to the other. Bebeto Matthews/AP

By September 2016, Guy Carpenter had its first deal with FEMA. It’s been involved in all the NFIP’s private sector deals since, helping the program secure nearly $6 billion in coverage for potential storm losses through reinsurance and cat bonds.

FEMA’s Maurstad said the deals have strengthened the NFIP’s finances and helped it avoid accumulating more debt. Guy Carpenter declined requests for an interview. Its parent company, Marsh & McLennan Companies, is now expanding its insurance offerings to include private flood policies that compete with the NFIP.

Consumer advocates wonder what FEMA expected other than a sales pitch. “Guy’s constantly involved in big deals for reinsurers,” said Hunter, now director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America. “Of course they’re going to say, ‘Here’s a wonderful idea.’”

Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, defended the new direction of flood insurance. Private insurers will provide consumers with more choice, he said, which could encourage greater adoption of flood coverage. Both reinsurance and cat bonds are reliable transactions that have helped the NFIP become more financially sound, he added.

But it’s not clear whether the benefits outweigh the costs. FEMA has paid roughly $886 million in premiums to the private insurance industry so far. This doesn’t include additional millions in commissions and fees FEMA has paid to a long list of contractors like Guy Carpenter to execute each deal, which the agency declined to fully disclose.

In the four years FEMA has purchased reinsurance, it has collected payment once. The agency recouped $1 billion in 2017 after hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Neither of the agency’s two cat bonds to date has resulted in a payout.

David Birnbaum, executive director of the Center for Economic Justice, argued that FEMA’s deals are about political expediency, not taxpayers. “If I can operate the NFIP using reinsurance and not have to go to the Treasury to borrow more money, that’s accomplishing two things,” he said. “It means I don’t have to involve Congress, number one, and number two, I don’t have to publicize that we’re losing money.”
“There’s no incentive for insurers to encourage to build back better”

Pressure to privatize the NFIP has been mounting for years, but efforts have sped up under the Trump administration. In 2017, Congress canceled $16 billion of the program’s debt at the insistence of the White House, which claimed debt forgiveness was necessary to keep the NFIP running and “enable the private market for flood insurance to expand.”

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget provided a laundry list of NFIP reforms to help “stimulate development of private insurance markets,” many of which have now found life in Risk Rating 2.0.

More options for flood insurance could be good for some customers. But consumer advocates worry private insurers will “cherry-pick” the NFIP by insuring only low- to moderate-risk policies, which generate bigger profits. The NFIP could enter a “death spiral,” Birnbaum said, leaving it on the hook for the riskiest and least profitable policies.

That could further jeopardize the program’s stability and the availability of flood insurance for those most at risk — people living in places like Canarsie.

Houses on Avenue L in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Jorge Garcia for Vox/CPI 

The corner of Rockaway Parkway and Glenwood Road, near Canarsie’s subway station. Jorge Garcia for Vox/CPI

Cherry-picking appears to be happening in Florida, which has heavily promoted private flood policies. Data shows private insurers covered 8 percent of policies statewide but only paid 3.8 percent of flood claims from 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which suggests they are backing less risky properties. Guy Carpenter itself agreed cherry-picking was inevitable, noting in its 2015 FEMA report that private insurers as “profit-seeking entities” were mostly interested in “lower risk, high net worth property owners.”

To gain an advantage, some insurers are hiring the same firm FEMA is using to revamp the NFIP. KatRisk produces catastrophe models, proprietary programs that price and assess risk. The firm’s models are being used by FEMA to develop Risk Rating 2.0 as well as private insurers in North Carolina looking to offer flood coverage for the first time. KatRisk co-founder Dag Lohmann said his firm aims to be “impartial and independent” and provides all users with “the same scientific input.”

Operating the NFIP like a private insurer comes with downsides that FEMA itself has outlined. A 2011 report by the agency found privatization scored poorly on affordability and ranked as the worst option for reducing public exposure to floods. That’s because, experts believed, the private sector could undermine efforts to make properties less flood-prone.

Adaptation efforts have already suffered as a result of insurance, according to research by Paul O’Hare, a researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK focused on climate resilience. He found homes in the UK that repeatedly flooded were often reconstructed the same way each time and insurers routinely denied requests by homeowners to rebuild to a higher standard.

“There’s no incentive for insurers to encourage to build back better,” O’Hare said. Similar issues plague NFIP policyholders in the US.

The mismatch speaks to a larger issue of who is responsible for protecting communities from future disasters. By recommending that property owners buy as much insurance as they can, FEMA puts the onus on individuals. But that distracts from what experts say is really needed to reduce flood risk: large-scale government action.

Sitting in her neighbor’s living room one autumn night, Thalia Panton and other Canarsie homeowners commiserated about their uncertain futures and the little government support they’ve received. Federal officials recently greenlit construction of a six-mile-long sea barrier along the eastern shore of Staten Island, another area in New York City hit hard during Sandy. But discussions about a far less extensive barrier to protect communities like Canarsie are in their infancy.

“It’s been seven long years,” Panton said, “and not a lot has happened.”

Jie Jenny Zou is a reporter with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, DC.

Jorge Garcia is an independent photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. In 2015, he founded the NYC Street Photography Collective.

Listen to the accompanying episode on WNYC here:

The continuing disaster aid crisis in Puerto Rico, explained

The House passed an earthquake relief bill that has yet to be taken up by the Senate. Meanwhile, hundreds wait in tents for aid.

By Catherine Kimcatkim0525@gmail.com Feb 24, 2020

A man rides his bicycle pass by a collapsed house in Guanica, Puerto Rico, on January 15, 2020, after a powerful earthquake hit the island. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP/Getty Images


GUÁNICA, Puerto Rico — Puerto Ricans are still living in tents more than a month after earthquakes hit the southern part of the island on January 7, damaging more than 800 homes.

The earthquakes were devastating for an island still working to rebuild from the damage caused when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017. Earthquake recovery efforts have been slow, frustrating many. To try to speed things up, the House of Representatives passed an emergency aid bill in early February — a bill the Senate does not seem likely to take up.

In part, the bill provides block grants dedicated to reconstruction; without these funds, the southern part of the island faces major delays in long-term recovery. Homes that have crumbled from the quakes will remain piles of debris, and Puerto Ricans will be forced to remain in tent shelters with minimal resources and access to health care.

These tent shelters, which were intended to be temporary, were set up by the Puerto Rican government after a 6.4 magnitude earthquake hit the island, an earthquake that was followed by a series of aftershocks — including a 5.9 magnitude quake just four days after. And the shelters, and those who live in them, remain at the mercy of more difficult to predict quakes: Even now, earthquakes of at least a 3 magnitude continue to shake the shorelines of Puerto Rico daily.

The situation is untenable, which is why the House bill was initially a source of hope for those looking to the federal government for aid. But it now appears no such aid is immediately forthcoming, and Puerto Ricans affected by the earthquakes — lacking a say in federal policy as residents of a US territory — find themselves with little recourse.
Why the House’s Puerto Rico aid bill has stalled in the Senate, briefly explained


The House bill, which passed 237-161 on February 7, allocates $4.7 billion for disaster recovery: $3.26 billion would go toward community development block grants to help long-term reconstruction; $1.25 billion to restore infrastructure; $100 million to restart school operations; $40 million to disaster nutrition assistance; and about $20 million to assist with energy needs. The bill also contains tax breaks to help the island that is struggling with more than $70 billion in debt.

These are all hefty financial promises, considering that only about $1.5 billion of the $20 billion in aid for Hurricane Maria had been released by the end of 2019.

“Our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico need our help,” said House Appropriations Committee Chair Nita Lowey ahead of a vote on the bill. “Unless we step up to the plate right now, we further jeopardize their safety and security. With this bill, we can provide families and communities swift relief and put Puerto Rico on the path to long-term recovery.”

Father Melvin Diaz Aponte inspects the damage to his church in Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, following January’s 6.4 magnitude earthquake. Eric Rojas/Getty Images

Despite the bill’s passage in the House, it’s unlikely the Senate will take it up, several senators told Vox.

Many cite concerns about Puerto Rico that mirror those held by the White House, namely, that Puerto Rico has a history of corruption and mismanagement. And while the fairness of that characterization is easily debatable, it is true that some of the island’s officials have been accused of mismanaging resources: Several cabinet members, for example, were fired by the governor after a warehouse full of supplies for Hurricane Maria was found untouched in January.


“Puerto Rico has a long history of inadequate financial controls over regular government operations, which forced the Congress to appoint a financial control board in 2016,” a spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget said in early February. “Multiple high-profile cases of corruption have marred distribution of aid already appropriated and have led to ongoing political instability on the island.”

This stance led the White House to say President Donald Trump would veto the House bill if it were to pass in the Senate.

Despite this, there are some senators who have signaled a willingness to pass aid legislation. Most recently, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) announced he’d spearhead a new, bipartisan aid bill — although it remains unclear what it will look like or how it will be different from the House version.

#PuertoRico needs more help after the recent earthquakes added to its already existing challenges.

From my role on the Senate Appropriations Committee we will work on an aid plan that can pass in both the Senate & the House & be signed by the President.— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 10, 2020

“I hope the Senate will do its own disaster relief for Puerto Rico,” Rubio wrote in a statement to Vox. “I’ve already talked with Chairman Shelby, who is the chairman of the spending committee. He agrees we want to do something here. We’re going to be working on coming up with a spending plan for Puerto Rico aid that can pass the House, pass the Senate, and the President will sign.”

The question, however, is whether there is any bill the president would sign.
Earthquake victims’ quality of life is harmed by the aid delay

Another White House criticism of the House legislation is that it was passed too quickly. The reality, however, is that the people affected by the earthquakes have already been waiting too long for adequate aid, Helga Maldonado, regional director of Escape — a nonprofit organization that works to prevent child and domestic abuse in Puerto Rico — told Vox.

Maldonado and Escape have been working on the ground to provide food, sanitary supplies, and psychological support to earthquake areas. Increasingly, the burden of recovery has fallen on the shoulders of citizens like Maldonado as Puerto Ricans wait for more substantial federal aid than they have received so far.

Here in the city of Guánica, the epicenter of the earthquakes, at least 350 people have been living in tents provided by the government for the past month. Inside the white tents that flap in the wind, people sleep on cots and store their few belongings in plastic boxes. A single medical tent is stationed at the entrance of the shelter, with a handful of quarantine tents lined up next to it. Religious groups and nonprofits regularly set up tents on the edge of the encampment, providing over-the-counter medicine, sanitary products, water, and other necessities. 

Puerto Ricans rest in a tent shelter in a baseball stadium parking lot in Yauco, Puerto Rico, waiting on aid after a powerful earthquake hit the island. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP/Getty Images

FEMA has provided some aid to those affected by the earthquakes: As of January 16, the agency granted 7,573 applications and approved about $17 million for individual and household assistance programs. In a statement to Vox, FEMA also noted that each individual received an average amount of about $2,290.

Maldonado, however, tells a different story. So far, she said she’s seen most FEMA grant recipients receive between $500 to $600 — nowhere near enough money to rebuild a house. Those who feel they should have received more can file an appeal, but to do so, they have to pay a structural engineer out-of-pocket to check the state of their homes — a service that could cost up to $1,500.

And while Congress delays on providing additional aid to Puerto Rico, the people in these shelters simply spend their time waiting, including 49-year-old fisher Marcos A. Villa Lassala.

He’s said he’s trying to be patient, but he never anticipated living in a tent for this long. He wears a wristband that indicates his house has experienced some damage (green means little to no damage, yellow means mild damage, and red means unlivable conditions), and says the walls in his house are cracked and the balcony fell. Engineers sent by the government told him that his house was safe to live in, but given the structural damage the building suffered, he strongly doubts the evaluation.

“I thought I was going to receive help a lot quicker,” he said. “And even when I do receive any sort of financial help, I have to be slow to rebuild because I have to make sure that all the quakes are over and done with because there’s no point in building a home if it’s just going to come right back down.”

Though he finished filing paperwork right after the first waves of earthquakes, he’s yet to receive money from FEMA — and anticipates that a $500 check won’t be nearly enough to begin repairs. Although he understands bureaucracy is delaying the government’s response, he said he wished the aid process “was based on the people and what the people need.”

When the government fails, it’s the community that has to step up

The people of Puerto Rico are no strangers to the government’s delay in helping post-natural disasters. Following Hurricane Maria, some communities were left without electricity for almost a year because a long-neglected power grid took a particularly hard blow.

And the island has only recently received more than a small fraction of the $20 billion approved by Congress for long-term Maria recovery. (The Department of Housing and Urban Development finally lifted an $8 billion hold on disaster aid last month.)

That delay has meant delays in rebuilding. For instance, more than 850,000 households experienced damage to their home structure due to Maria — and about 30,000 families still live under makeshift blue tarp roofs two years after the hurricane.

The delays in Hurricane Maria aid meant community organizers knew that they had to prepare for future disasters, Maldonado said. Escape was ready when the earthquakes hit: following Hurricane Maria, the organization steadily began to collect canned goods in a warehouse, preparing a makeshift food pantry.

Preparations like these meant that when the earthquakes came, those in need could immediately receive the sort of aid seen in the viral videos of ordinary Puerto Ricans driving to the southern part of the island to deliver supplies such as food and water.

This day was dominated by Samaritans who gathered supplies, left their homes and headed into the earthquake affected zones to hand out what they could. We saw them everywhere along the southwestern coast. pic.twitter.com/6MGYumlMjb— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) January 12, 2020

But while the people may have learned from the tragedies of 2017, Maldonado said the government has failed to learn from its mistakes.

“It’s frustrating because the response didn’t change,” she said. “You think that it’s the logical [response] to start preparing themselves for something else seeing that they weren’t able to respond to Maria, but it’s really sad to see that the government has been benefiting from this state of emergency. They’re filling up their pockets and in a way dancing on the pain of other people.”

The unity among Puerto Ricans is inspiring — but equally frustrating — because this responsibility shouldn’t lie on the shoulders of ordinary citizens, according to Patricia Matos López, a community organizer with the group Bici-Caño.

“The government always tells the people ‘We are going to help you, give you the funds,’ but it never comes,” she said. “You need to move, contact organizations and get the help to the people. Be real — not for the money, not for the votes. Be real and give us the help we need.”  

A man in Guánica crosses a field of rubble created by a building torn apart by January’s 6.4 magnitude earthquake. Alejandro Granadillo/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Internal reports from FEMA reveal that the agency acknowledges it failed the people of Puerto Rico, especially after Hurricane Maria. According to one report, FEMA emergency-supply warehouses around the island were nearly empty prior to the hurricane, and the agency had not held a disaster planning assessment since 2012.

This time around, FEMA has said it has learned from the mistakes of the past and “remains committed to supporting the government of Puerto Rico with its ongoing recovery efforts from Hurricanes Irma and Maria and to helping people before, during and after disasters.”

Activists, however, say that more needs to be done — especially because an unfair mental burden falls upon organizers, who are often also victims of the natural disasters, when the agency fails.

Maldonado said she’s personally had to deal with the layers of trauma caused by both being victim and a caretaker of others. Although her house survived the earthquake, she said she was disheartened to see the destroyed buildings in her town of Yauco. She told Vox she hasn’t been able to personally visit the tent shelters in Yauco yet because she’s not mentally or physically ready, but she’s taking “baby steps” to prepare herself.

Maldonado, however, said she and other community organizers will continue their work because the government has given her no other choice, adding that Hurricane Maria and the recent earthquakes have made it clear that people in the community can only count on each other.

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Earthquake experts lay out latest outlook for the ‘Really Big One’ that’ll hit Seattle

BY ALAN BOYLE on February 15, 2020 

A color-coded computer simulation from 2016 shows how researchers think tsunami waves propagated from a magnitude-9 Cascadia subduction zone earthquake in the year 1700. Scientists believe such quakes occur every 500 years or so on average. (NOAA / Pacific Tsunami Warning Center)

Earthquake experts say current building codes don’t reflect the riskiest features of the Seattle area’s geology — but the outlook for survivability looks a lot better if the Really Big One can just hold off for a few more years.

That’s the bottom line from a session focusing on Seattle’s seismic hazards, presented at ground zero today during the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting. The session — titled “Is the Coast Toast?” — followed up on a 2015 New Yorker article that painted a grim picture of the possibilities, based on studies of the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia subduction zone.

The Cascadia subduction zone, centered along a submarine fault just off the West Coast, is known to be capable of generating magnitude-9 quakes, based on the geological and historical evidence for a massive tsunami that reached Japan in 1700.

Seismologists estimate that such quakes and tsunami waves occur roughly every 500 years on average. “We say that there’s approximately a 14% chance of another approximately magnitude-9 earthquake occurring in the next 50 years,” said Erin Wirth, a geophysicist at the University of Washington and the U.S. Geological Survey.

To assess the potential effects of a Cascadia mega-quake, Wirth and other researchers are conducting a six-year, $3 million study known as the M9 Project.

One of the project’s experiments involved running 50 simulations of Cascadia quakes under a variety of conditions. The researchers found wide variation in the effects, depending on whether the undersea fault ruptured in a direction pointing away from Seattle (which would be good) or toward the city (which would be bad).

Another issue has to do with the fact that Seattle is built atop a sedimentary basin with relatively soft soil, which would amplify the strength of a seismic shock.

“A good analogy is, this is like a bowl of Jell-O,” Wirth said. “If you have a bowl of Jell-O, or a Jell-O mold on top of a plate, and you shake that plate, the Jell-O is so weak it’s going to move much more than the plate that you’re shaking. That’s kind of what’s happening here.”


And as if that weren’t bad enough, the Cascadia fault is so extended that the resulting quake is expected to last for about 100 seconds. That’s significantly longer than the duration of a typical California earthquake, and that adds to the bad news, said UW engineering professor Jeffrey Berman.

“Our building code is all built on the California experience, because that’s where we’ve had a lot of earthquakes and a lot of building and infrastructure damage,” Berman said. “So we haven’t really incorporated long-duration effects in building codes that are in use in the U.S., because we haven’t really had long-duration earthquakes. … We’re hoping that our work will actually go to change that.”

Earlier analyses of earthquake effects pegged the risk of collapse for buildings up to 20 stories tall at less than 10%. The M9 Project’s updated analysis, which takes account of longer-duration quakes as well as the Seattle area’s sedimentary basin amplification effect, would raise that projected risk to somewhere between 20% and 50% depending on building height and the standards followed for construction.

The good news is that building codes are due to be strengthened nationwide.

“They’re national codes,” Berman explained. “They have to go through a pretty intense vetting process, and they get adopted by local jurisdictions and modified. That process just takes time. This research will appear, but it won’t appear until 2023, likely. Now the city is holding some discussions on what to do, given our findings. It should be doing things ahead of that time, but that would be outside the national building code process.”

In reply to questions about where he’d rather be during a mega-quake, Berman noted that low-rise buildings in Seattle — say, up to three stories tall — would “do relatively well” in the event of a magnitude-9 quake. And when it comes to higher-rise buildings, the risk is lower for structures built after the mid-1980s.

“There was a really big transition that followed a couple of bigger earthquakes in California, and there were really big changes in the building code,” Berman explained. “So I think that’s what I would look at first: to stay out of buildings that were built before 1984 or so.”

That being said, Berman advised against obsessing over the Really Big One.

“You know, life is full of risks,” he said. “The risk of dying in a building in a earthquake in Seattle is less than [the risk of] dying in a car, if you get in a car and drive on I-5 today, right? It’s about learning and doing better as we move on, not necessarily being paralyzed.”

The loneliness of Elizabeth Warren: 'I feel like I'm living in a movie'

Alex Seitz-Wald and Ali Vitali

Elizabeth Warren was hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail in central Washington with her husband last fall and texting nature photos back and forth with Jay Inslee, the state's governor, who at that moment happened to be hiking in the San Juan Islands with his wife.

© Daniel Acke Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Iowa

Inslee had recently dropped out of the 2020 presidential race, while Warren was fresh off a sizable rally under Seattle's Space Needle, making them a part of a very small club of people on planet Earth who know what it's like to be put through the peculiar wringer of trying to become the leader of the free world. So they got lunch and talked about climate policy.


"It's a very personal experience to run. Running for president can be thrilling but also very lonely," Warren told NBC News in a recent interview.

"The candidate stands alone," she added, opening up about the experience of running. "Everyone else, they have good advice, you know, plenty of people around. But it's the candidate who's got to go out onstage. It's the candidate who has to make the final decision and stand by the fallout. And that makes it really tough."

Warren, a consummate call-everyone-she's-ever-known-on-their-birthday type, is hoping to get through the rigors of a presidential campaign and back atop the field with a little help from her former rivals-turned-friends.

"With everyone who's dropped out that I've spoken with — which I think is close to 100 percent of them — it's been in part to thank them for running and to say, as only another candidate can, I know it's hard," she added.

On the campaign trail, Warren goes out of her way to mention incorporating the signature policy issues of "Cory" (Booker) or "Julián" (Castro). It's a nod to the people she sees less often these days, but it's also a tactic to bolster her pitch that she can build coalitions from the constituencies of the candidates who've dropped out while also drawing a subtle contrast with front-runner Bernie Sanders' more strident brand of progressivism.

Sanders says he has little tolerance for what he sees as frivolous pleasantries. "If you have your birthday, I'm not going to call you up to congratulate you," he told The New York Times editorial board.

And while it's common for candidates to reach out to opponents who drop out and offer gracious platitudes, Warren's conversations with some former candidates have gone deeper.

Former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland sparred frequently with Warren over health care before he dropped out days before the Iowa caucuses. One debate back-and-forth between the two even got so tense that Delaney's "cause of death" on Wikipedia was changed to "Senator Elizabeth Warren." Still, when he dropped out, his phone was ringing — from everyone, but memorably from Warren.

"Everyone was very nice. It was just that the call with her was quite lengthy and quite in-depth," he said. "That demonstrated to me that she has a trait that you don't always find in politicians, which is that she's not entirely self-absorbed. She actually listens."

An aide to another Democratic politician called the approach "micro-touches," using the parlance of the sales world, which has long been part of Warren's modus operandi.

Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics

Running for president is weird. You're everywhere and nowhere all at once, smashing through time zones and news cycles with little sleep and less privacy. Almost every interaction with another human comes freighted with the possibility and peril of becoming a viral moment.

"I feel like I'm living in a movie that is running at high speed with everything coming by so quickly," Warren said.

The people who understand this best, of course, are the other candidates. But there's not much time nor trust on the campaign trail to sit down and commiserate over a beer with someone you're trying to defeat.

Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York are part of the even smaller club-within-a-club who know what it's like to run as a woman.

"Kamala and Kirsten, in particular, ask me am I getting rest? Am I eating? And am I having some fun out there?" Warren said.

But she's also gotten mathy with Andrew Yang, with whom she says he has a running joke about using some of the same data sources in their writing (she said she was impressed with his book).

It's part of a rhetorical effort to pitch herself as the only candidate who can bring together all of the Democratic Party. It was once seen as a "unity pitch," but Warren's allies and aides now talk about it as a push for coalition building, one bolstered by Warren's frequent warnings about returning to the "factionalism of 2016."
The race to see who will be the next President of the United States is well underway. Here's a look at the steps along the way that lead to Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020.

Slideshow by photo services

Warren has back-burnered the unity pitch after disappointing finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire in favor of hammering Mike Bloomberg at the last debate, which earned rave reviews and an influx of campaign cash but didn't lead to a win in Nevada. She'll have another shot at Bloomberg in Tuesday's debate in Charleston, South Carolina, but she was never expected to do particularly well in Saturday's South Carolina primary, although she can hope for better on Super Tuesday, March 3.

Warren in particular singled out Castro, who endorsed her and has become her chief surrogate since he ended his own campaign. They've known each other since the Obama era, when they'd have lunch and she would skip the small talk to push Castro, who was running the Department of Housing and Urban Development, on what she thought he could be doing differently. "Push harder, harder, harder," she told him.

Warren will need a lot more help to regain a clear path to the nomination and, despite the outreach, has received the endorsement of only one former candidate, Castro, while Sanders has those of two (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Marianne Williamson), as does former Vice President Joe Biden (Reps. Tim Ryan of Ohio and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts).

But she takes joy in little moments, like when people on her staff noticed that a recently hired former aide to Harris still had a "Kamala" sticker on the back of her phone. "Someone laughed and said, 'You're supposed to replace that with a Warren sticker.' And my view was, no, it's OK. It is a part of the energy that they bring to our team," Warren said.

She sees a lot of phones in the hours of selfies she takes on the campaign trail with supporters, which she says both keep her grounded and are difficult, because people share their personal struggles and appeal for help.

Did she expect that when she thought about running for president?

"It has been better and worse than I thought it would be, simultaneously," Warren said.

Who caused the opium war? British merchants of Canton, argues new book by Singapore academic


A faction of merchants known as the ‘Warlike party’, not colonialist British policy or Qing dynasty intransigence, cause conflict that forced emperor to cede Hong Kong and open doors wider to trade, Song-Chuan Chen writes

Peter Neville-Hadley Published:12 Jun, 2017

A 19th century painting of Canton harbour and factories.

A faction of British merchants there orchestrated the first opium war, 

a new book argues.


Merchants of War of Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War
by Song-Chuan ChenHong Kong University Press
3.5 stars

The cover of Song-Chuan Chen’s book.


Until the mid-19th century, European ideas of China came largely from the exaggerated reports of Jesuit missionaries written hundreds of years earlier and from Marco Polo’s mostly fanciful account of his travels in the 13th century.

Both parties had self-promotion in mind, Polo aiming for reflected glory by describing an empire of marvels where he claimed to have held high office, and the Jesuits seeking continued support for their mission by describing a bountiful land where a philosopher king and an administration of literati ruled a vast population ripe for conversion.

How China played a part in the birth of globalisation in the 16th century
13 Jan 2017

But from the 1830s, a new and supposedly authoritative source of information about China emerged in the form of British merchants who were trading in Canton (Guangzhou). From one frustrated faction in particular came a competing view of a backward, ill-governed China, contemptuous of foreigners, willing to offer insult to British honour, and resistant to the great British crusade for free trade despite the cost to ordinary citizens keen to engage in it.

William John Huggins’ 1824 painting The Opium Ships at Lintin (present-day Neilingding Island).

In Merchants of War and Peace, a new history of the events leading up to the opium war of 1839–42, Professor Song-Chuan Chen of Singapore’s Nanyang Technical University offers a new alternative. He ascribes responsibility for the war not to commonplace culprits such as colonialist British foreign policy or Qing dynasty intransigence, but specifically to a coterie of British merchants who came to be known as the “Warlike party”.

During the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1654–1722), European merchants were welcomed with gifts, but by the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1735–96) the mood had changed. The Qing emperors, aliens from beyond the Great Wall to China’s northeast, were sensitive to their outsider status and knew that several previous dynasties had been overthrown by peasant uprisings. Like today’s emperors, they feared the collusion of “hostile foreign forces” with domestic discontent.

A painting of the Kangxi emperor, who welcomed foreign merchants.

The result was the 1757 decision that all foreign trade should be restricted to one port. The merchants and officials in Canton who lobbied for a monopoly used arguments about Qing security to win the argument.

Just as the British merchants controlled the information about China that reached London, so the Chinese merchants in turn controlled the Qing’s understanding of foreigners. The end result was that a troubled British government in danger of losing a vote of confidence was goaded into a war in which it had little conviction, and the Qing learned too late that the 19th century’s superpower was Britain, not China.

Book review: Opium and Empire, by Richard J. Grace
11 Oct 2014

The foreign merchants chafed against high port taxes, pay-offs to innumerable officials, and duties on personal items brought in to China. But as Professor Chen points out: “Officials involved themselves very little in the trade, and neither did they regulate the market. At most, they forbade the exporting of gold and silver, limited the amount of silk foreigners could buy, and banned the import of opium.”

Even these prohibitions were never properly implemented. The merchants’ present-day counterparts would tell them they never had it so good.

Occasional moments of dryness and repetition in Chen’s otherwise lucid narrative are relieved by lively language quoted from struggles in the pages of the Warlike party’s Canton Register and the Pacific party’s Canton Press.

A painting of the Qianlong emperor, under whose rule attitudes towards European merchants changed.

The Pacific party’s morally righteous anti-war view was that China might set what laws on trade it pleased, although this was coupled with the more self-interested observation that conflict always harmed trade. “Deceive ourselves as we please, we are smugglers,” wrote one anonymous contributor to the Canton Press in October 1835.

Abstruse debates about the meaning of yí, used to denote the British in Chinese official correspondence, provided almost comical examples of Old China Hand oneupmanship. Did it mean “foreigners”, “tribes from the east” or “barbarians”? The latter interpretation was favoured by those determined to find insults to British honour as an excuse for military intervention to increase trade.

In remarkably erudite exchanges, foreigners quoted Confucius, Mencius, official documents, and the 11th-century poet Su Shi on one side of the case or the other. But in the end the Warlike party won, its petitioners selling the British government of the day a narrative of wounded honour and national interest which disguised their own commercial imperative.

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10 Apr 2017


It also provided a successful plan for the conduct of the war based on intelligence gathered during trading trips, thus proving that the Qing had been quite justified to restrict them in the first place.

The merchants of the recently dubbed “nation of shopkeepers” won all their demands: open ports, the right to year-round residence in them, and more.

But it was the British press that coined the now time-honoured but misleading title of “opium war”, and it wasn’t until after further conflict that yí was finally forbidden in official correspondence.

As Merchants of War and Peace shows us, the war of words is still going on.





Peter Neville-Hadley
Former China resident Peter Neville-Hadley is the author of multiple guides and reference works on China, and writes on Chinese culture and on cultural travel in general for assorted periodicals. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The Sunday Times (UK), and numerous other newspapers and magazines around the world.