YES! Magazine

The Hopeful Thing About Our Ugly, Painful Polarization

An artist’s drawing of the American body politic in 2016 might picture furrowed brow, hand-wringing, hunched shoulders. Anxiety abounds, when not overridden by anger. Our extreme polarization is political, economic, social—but individuals feel it on a personal level. Small wonder if we seek relief in the hope that the social fracturing might be healed by one candidate or another.

Certainly, polarization in the U.S. pre-dates the Donald Trump candidacy. Our gridlocked federal government has for years struggled to guarantee that it will stay open for business and pay its bills, much less address the urgent climate crisis. An increasing number of state governments are going into dysfunction as well.

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Before we reach for a better place we need to how we got into such a tough spot.

Political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal researched polarization in the U.S. In Polarized America (MIT Press, 2006) we learn that, in the decades following World War II, Democrats and Republicans governed with a bipartisan spirit, and politics was known as the art of compromise. The scholars checked other measures in that era and found that economic inequality was also relatively low.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the income gap grew rapidly, and so did political polarization. In fact, the scholars found no other correlation matched so closely: political polarization seemed to be intimately linked to income inequality. So no surprise then that since the economic crash of 2007, inequality has accelerated right along with political polarization.

Especially with a Trump presidency and Republican controlled Congress, I see no policies in place or any likely to be passed that will substantially check inequality’s growth. So polarization is likely to get worse, and uglier. To stay clear-headed in the years ahead, we need to accept the reality of our present situation.

Gandhi used to remind his people that the British Empire would not go away through denying its existence. To end the suffering brought by the Empire, he thought it necessary first to acknowledge its presence. The next step: a creative response.

Political polarization seemed to be intimately linked to income inequality.

And what does a creative response to polarization look like?

In researching my book Viking Economics, I dug into the history of Sweden’s and Norway’s intense polarization in the 1920s and ’30s. I was interested because of the enormous achievements those countries had following their time of fracturing.

The Nordics managed an immense turnaround from the days when they experienced so much misery and oppression that they hemorrhaged population to the U.S. and Canada. Many Americans today trace their lineage to Scandinavian immigrants fleeing the hunger and lack of opportunity of their homelands. Now Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark are at the top of the international charts for economic well-being: high employment, debt-free grads of universities, paid parental leave, high wages, “best place to be an elder,” lack of poverty. They are even setting records for rapid response to the climate crisis.

It wasn’t the oil. Only Norway found oil, and that country had its breakthrough before the oil flowed. Nor can we say it’s easy to experience shared abundance if you’re a small and homogeneous country: A century ago, the Scandinavians were small and homogeneous —and had massive poverty and inequality.

To my surprise, I found that the decisive moment of breakthrough for the Swedes and Norwegians happened when their societies were at their most polarized.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Nazis openly paraded and spewed their anti-Semitism, embrace of violence, and hatred of democracy. At the same time, the Left had extreme opinions. Cities and towns were split. To live in that period was stressful and frightening.

Fortunately, a critical mass of people in Sweden and Norway chose a creative response. And that decision gave rise to the world’s most progressive nations.

That response had many dimensions, but four stand out: cooperative ownership models, wide agreement among the Left on a vision, inclusivity, and commitment to a nonviolent strategy.

Swedes and Danes first, with Norwegians following, built a large infrastructure of cooperatives: Farmers organized dairies, loggers built mills, fishers banded together to build larger boats and canneries. Together, families hired contractors and built apartment buildings. Consumers erected their own stores and banks.

Co-ops delivered tangible benefits, like retaining more wealth for workers and consumers. They promoted organizing skills and innovation, in that way increasing productivity. They developed a sense of power at the grassroots – a “can-do” spirit that was also once the hallmark of Americans’ self-image. Co-ops showed that capitalism was not the most effective way to make an economy work. Most important, perhaps, was the knitting together of networks of confidence when it seemed that the larger society was pulling apart.

The decisive moment of breakthrough for the Swedes and Norwegians happened when their societies were at their most polarized.

Swedes and Norwegians achieved majority support for a vision of an alternative economy to the one that that was failing them. That meant people could take action beyond angry protests; they could be for something as well as against something. Harnessing the positive energy that goes with an affirmative vision adds to the power of the movement.

Just as important, the broad unity of a positive vision makes it easier to mend the inevitable splits that come up in the life of a social movement. Feuding allies can be reminded that they need to mend their fences in order to achieve the vision that they hold in common.

At a difficult time when some Swedes and Norwegians were sharpening ideological differences, the creative responders valued inclusivity. An old fracture between town and country (industrial workers vs. farmers) was partially mended through coalition for shared goals. The Norwegian Labor Party, formerly restricted to union members, opened its membership to middle class people. When the Great Depression increased joblessness, unions decided members could retain membership even after they lost their jobs.

And importantly, Swedes and Norwegians strongly preferred nonviolent struggle for their confrontations and campaigns. When they were attacked by Nazis at their demonstrations, for example, they didn’t use those occasions to fight it out in the streets. When striking workers were repressed by government troops, they didn’t assassinate soldiers or blow up barracks.

Instead, the usual pattern of response to repressive violence was to escalate the nonviolent tactics. In 1931, Swedish soldiers shot into a march of striking workers, killing five and injuring five more. The workers’ response was to declare a general strike in the region, which then spread to the national level. That, in turn, led to a power shift from the governing economic elite to the workers and farmers who represented the democratic majority of the people.

In Norway workers and farmers used nonviolent tactics on such a large scale that they made their country ungovernable by the economic elite. The majority then took over, establishing democracy. They opened up the political space and invented what economists now call the Nordic model.

The U.S. has its own past experiences with major polarizations: The 1930s and the 1960s. In the ’30s Father Coughlin gave fascist rants on national radio broadcasts. The Ku Klux Klan grew in both the 1930s and 1960s, while extremist groups grew on the left as well. During the tension of the Vietnam war sons were disowned and pastors dismissed; even the Army reeled from the impact of division in the ranks.

Strikingly, those two periods also stand out in our history for progress. The former head of the American Sociological Association, Frances Fox Piven, lists gains that Americans take for granted that came out of those two eras in her book Challenging Authority: How ordinary people change America. Social Security, Medicare, limits on the length of the workweek, rights for people with different abilities, rights for Black people and others of color, rights for women and elders and children.

Those gains were the results of creative responses at heights of polarization.

Three of the creative response ingredients were present: ideas of nonviolence, inclusivity, and cooperative models. I believe even more progress would have come out of those periods had there been the fourth, a wide agreement on a vision for a just and democratic alternative to the prevailing poverty, war, and racism.

Clearly, Americans do know a thing or two about how to navigate a period of raw conflict.

So even though we are headed for more extreme polarization as President-elect Trump heads to the White House without the support of the popular vote, we know what to do. We know what the creative response needs to look like.

Build more cooperative alternative structures, with higher visibility

Americans are increasingly turning to cooperative economic alternatives, as producers, consumers, and generators of services. The heightened climate crisis stimulates more of this trend, building skills, relationships, confidence in the grassroots, and a sense of power.

As polarization deepens, co-ops and other civic groups need to proclaim themselves to be safe and reliable institutions to rally around. Such proactivity is more important now than even in the 1930s and 1960s because government and politicians are fast losing their legitimacy, heightening people’s anxiety as climate and other crises grow. Alternative sources of social solidarity need to drop old habits of modesty and brand themselves as reliable, robust nodes of the networks of goodwill that we need.

Expand inclusively

In a period of polarization, it is tempting to define oneself by a smaller and smaller circle, to retreat into a bubble, perhaps reinforced by Facebook and other social media. I suspect that during the 2016 presidential campaign there were many middle class liberals that did not have a single thoughtful conversation with a supporter of Donald Trump. That’s the opposite of smart navigation of polarization, which is to expand the circle, to broaden our acquaintance, to engage in ongoing dialogue with those our fear might lead us to dismiss.

Agree on a vision

I doubt that the Scandinavians could have designed the most successful economic model in history for delivering equality, individual freedom, and shared abundance if they had not first created broad agreement among the Left on their vision. For them, agreeing required study, research, compromise, intense dialogue, and willingness to pay attention to pragmatic results.

The good news for us in the U.S. is that we do not need to start from scratch in generating a vision. We can take the Nordics’ high-performance model and adapt it to our own needs and history.

Poll data indicate that majorities of Americans are already in agreement with many features of the Nordic model, including a narrower scale of income difference, single payer health care, free access to higher education, paid parental leave, and higher wages for workers. The overwhelming popularity of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the platform of his “Our Revolution” movement illustrates that.

Three of the creative response ingredients were present: ideas of nonviolence, inclusivity, and cooperative models.

So does the the release in August of the vision of the Movement for Black Lives, an organization that brings together some of the thinking of the grassroots phenomenon called Black Lives Matter. The economic dimension of the vision is remarkably in alignment with the Nordic model and is therefore an immediately available “rough draft” for progressives of all ethnicities to address. Many credible national groups have endorsed the vision of the Movement for Black Lives. It’s not about word-for-word agreement; the task is to create shared understanding of a model that will decisively improve equality and democracy.

Focus on an effective nonviolent strategy

Seeing through democratic pretense, which is what the Scandinavians did for themselves a century ago and we must do today, frees us to maximize power for change. Facing the truth that billionaire Warren Buffett acknowledged to the New York Times in 2006 empowers citizens for the task ahead. When asked by reporter Ben Stein about the speculation that there is class war in the U.S., Buffett said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” One implication of Buffett’s admission is that we need to shift from actions that make moral statements to nonviolent actions that exert actual power.

Social scientific research in recent decades suggests that our most powerful means, when an opponent is blocking change, is to organize a campaign. One-off protests make little if any difference. A nonviolent campaign, by contrast, makes a specific demand of a clearly identified target. It then organizes a series of escalating nonviolent actions, effectively clustered around a singular issue, until some or all of the demand is met.

Americans have extensive experience with nonviolent campaigns. Consider the civil rights victories in the 1960s, and even recently, the halting of the KXL pipeline.

Currently we see grassroots nonviolent campaigns at the Standing Rock Sioux camps. This cluster of campaigns—aimed at corporations building the pipeline along with the federal government giving them the land to do it, aimed at the banks that invest in fossil fuel infrastructure, aimed at politicians who favor oil infrastructure over indigenous rights-- for example, has become a full-blown movement.

The question is whether the many Americans who are deeply concerned for change will step up their strategic skills so more nonviolent campaigns will cluster into more movements and, as a whole, create an Era of Change.

This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine at https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2016/11/14/the-hopeful-thing-about-our-ugly-painful-polarization.

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Jessica Calix has tried to make the 33-foot travel trailer she and her son, Chago, share at a north San Diego RV Park feel like their old rental home in the Southcrest neighborhood.

She’s set up benches and toys outside for Chago and his friends to play with, strung lights over the trailer the way she used to over her front door, and hung up a smiling sun ornament that looks like the one they lost in the flooding that devastated parts of southeastern San Diego on Jan. 22, 2024.

But lately Chago has been asking Calix a question that breaks her heart, one that she doesn’t know the answer to: Will we ever live in an apartment again?

“I basically told him, ‘We’re not going to be able to move soon,’” Calix said, sitting outside her trailer on a recent evening. “How do I explain the current housing market to an 8-year-old?”

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Calix and Chago are among approximately 5,000 San Diego–area residents impacted by the historic downpour last January that led to dramatic flooding in parts of the city and county, with particularly severe damage in Southcrest and Shelltown. The mother and son were among hundreds of people who suffered severe property damage and displacement. Five people died.

While some flood survivors have been able to return home, many others are still struggling to recover, rebuild their homes, or find new places to live. Some survivors, particularly renters like Calix, have been forced to restart life elsewhere, with little hope of returning to their old communities.

Extreme flooding events, even in regions typically associated with dry weather like Southern California, are becoming more common as the climate warms. Climate change, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels, is changing weather patterns, leading to heavier and more dangerous downpours that can overwhelm infrastructure designed for more predictable times.

But Calix and others impacted by the disaster insist there is another force that exacerbated the flooding, one that also led to what many see as a disjointed and inadequate disaster response: decades of government neglect and indifference toward San Diego’s lower-income neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods, located primarily in southeastern San Diego where much of the flooding happened, are among the most economically stressed and environmentally burdened areas in the region. They were also historically redlined—a racist, government-sponsored practice that made it difficult for people in those neighborhoods to get financial services such as mortgages and insurance, and concentrated low-income and people of color in flood-prone areas.

Residents say the legacy of discrimination continues to this day through lack of city investment in flood-control infrastructure and inadequate disaster planning and support for those affected. The result is even greater hardship and precarity for people and communities already on the edge. The situation is also a microcosm of the inequitable distribution of risks from climate change, and an example of the challenges communities and governments must grapple with as floods and other weather-related disasters become more frequent.

“What happened on that day was a planning disaster,” says Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, a community organization whose offices in Barrio Logan were damaged in the flood. “That climate event happened throughout the county, but where was it felt, it was felt in the places where the city had failed to modernize and update its infrastructure.”

Alliance San Diego is among approximately 700 people and organizations now suing the city, alleging it failed to maintain stormwater infrastructure, and instead prioritized investments in wealthier communities. They point to a 2020 city report that said segments of Chollas Creek, which flooded during the storm, had not been maintained and had the potential to cause property damage. The lawsuit also notes the city’s admission of a severe lack of funding to maintain stormwater infrastructure. Last year, the city estimated it needed about $9 billion in infrastructure upgrades.

Nicole Darling, director of communications for the city, said it does not comment on pending litigation. But she said the city dispatched more than 300 staff members to clean out storm drains and inlets before the rainstorm, including critical drains in the Chollas Creek area. One segment, close to Beta Street in Southcrest, which suffered severe damage, was scheduled for upcoming debris removal at the time the storm happened, she said in an email.

Darling emphasized that the storm was historic and its impact unpredictable. “This was an unprecedented storm,” she said. “It was the fourth wettest day in history. We’ve never seen this level of flooding before.”

Guerrero and others participating in the lawsuit said they want the city to compensate survivors for their losses and do more to prevent the Chollas Creek stormwater channel from flooding. Some community organizers and flood survivors are demanding other changes as well.

Clariza Marin, chief financial officer for the Harvey Family Foundation, a community organization that has been on the front lines of helping those affected, said the response on the ground has been chaotic. She said local authorities need to work in collaboration with residents to create a disaster preparedness plan that reflects what community members need, so they can be better prepared for future disasters.

She and other residents interviewed said they also want the city and county to provide more support to help the many survivors, both homeowners and former renters, who either didn’t receive aid or didn’t get enough to help them rebuild their lives. This would include assisting people like Calix who were displaced from the floods but didn’t benefit from county and city financial aid to help them find housing. “All of our resiliency planning should be community driven,” Marin says. “It shouldn’t be about scrambling to tell (residents) what I can do for you, what you’re going to have to accept.”

Darling pointed to various efforts by the city to support flood survivors, including money for temporary lodging and help for small businesses. She said city officials have been attending public meetings and listening to community feedback since the disaster. She added that the city has also been distributing pamphlets to residents living in floodplain areas about how to prepare for potential flooding in the future.

Neglected Communities

Calix, who is part African American, liked the multicultural community in the area around Beta Street in Southcrest where she and Chago settled in 2020. The sounds and smells were familiar. She felt comfortable. She liked the cost of rent even more—$1,500 for two bedrooms, the same as she’d paid for a one-bedroom apartment in the northern, more expensive part of the city.

About 80 years ago, the federal government categorized large swaths of southeastern San Diego, such as Southcrest, as “hazardous,” declaring that the properties there were “high risk” for defaulting on loans largely because of the people who lived there: laborers, immigrants, and people of color.

Although redlining has since been outlawed, its impact continues to this day, with people in historically redlined communities experiencing higher rates of poverty and ill health than those in other non-redlined areas. Southcrest, Shelltown, and other neighborhoods that suffered flood damage, including Logan Heights and Barrio Logan, have disproportionately higher rates of residents living in poverty compared to other parts of the city. These residents are also exposed to other negative factors that can impact their health, such as pollution from diesel fumes, hazardous waste sites, and lead from housing, according to California’s Environmental Protection Agency.

It’s these types of economically and environmentally stressed locations that climate scientists say are most vulnerable to flooding, and where populations have the hardest time recovering from natural disasters. People of color and those living in mobile homes, in particular, are disproportionately exposed to flooding, research shows. And these same populations as well as low-income people in general, have the most difficulty accessing federal flood disaster assistance.

“We know that risks of climate change are absolutely higher in communities of concern or communities that are historically marginalized,” says Darbi Berry, director of climate and environmental programs at the University of San Diego’s Nonprofit Institute and director of the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative.

But southeastern San Diego is also a haven for people priced out from more affluent areas of the city. Some neighborhoods are full of paid-off homes where families have lived for generations. Low-wage workers and immigrants are also drawn here, looking for an affordable place to rent in a city where the cost of housing seems to rise by the day.

A Shocking Loss

Calix’s son, Chago, turned 8 the day the flood destroyed their rental home. The day started out normal enough. Calix dropped her son off at school in Point Loma, resisting Chago’s pleas to let him stay home for his birthday. It was drizzling, but she thought nothing of it. She promised to deliver some treats for him and his classmates later in the day and drove to a nearby party supply store.

But during her drive, normality ended. It started raining intensely. At an intersection, Calix noticed a car stuck in what looked like floodwater. By the time she got to the party supply store, she’d passed numerous other flooded streets and stranded cars. The store was closed and the parking lot flooded. Her mind leapt to the rental apartment she and Chago shared in Southcrest, 10 miles south. “Was it OK?” she wondered. “Were my neighbors OK?”

It wasn’t until five hours later, after the floodwaters receded, that Calix was able to return to Southcrest and find out. She encountered devastation: streets and homes caked in black sludge, cars piled on top of each other, dead animals, shellshocked neighbors—some of whom had narrowly escaped drowning. Her apartment looked like the inside of a muddy blender. Her and Chago’s furniture, clothes, and other possessions were destroyed, including her father’s ashes and recently opened Christmas presents.

“To see all that devastation at once, it was very desperate,” says Calix, who spent the next several days trying to salvage what she could: a couple of bikes, a pet snake. “There was probably more stuff I could have saved off the walls, things up in cabinets, but I had to just walk away. I couldn’t do it anymore. And neither could my kid.”

Renters in Peril

Some of the people who suffer the most in the wake of flooding and other natural disasters are renters—a population that accounts for one-third of U.S. households. Renters tend to have less wealth than homeowners, are less likely to have insurance to recoup lost belongings or the costs associated with displacement, and also receive less help from the government after disasters. To add insult to injury, research shows that rents for the lowest-income households rise significantly after floods.

In other words, the people with the fewest financial resources to weather losses from a natural disaster get the least help to recover, and then end up paying even more for housing if they’re lucky enough to find another place to live. In California, and in San Diego especially—where more than one in three households already don’t make enough to meet their basic needs, and where the average rent is more than $3,000 a month—losses and displacement from a flood can result in a compounding cycle of long-term financial pain and housing insecurity.

That’s the predicament Calix found herself in after the flooding. Even though she received $5,000 in emergency assistance from FEMA, that wasn’t enough to secure another apartment rental that she could afford on her salary as a massage therapist, she said. She was also in debt from having to replace clothes, toys and everyday items she lost in the flood, as well as extra gas and food while living in the hotels.

“It’s overwhelming … ” Calix says. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

The county and city of San Diego, with support from other local cities and community organizations as well as the federal government, have tried to mitigate the challenges facing displaced flood survivors. The county allocated $33.7 million to recovery efforts, including to help provide food, emergency lodging, fund home and infrastructure repairs, and help residents secure federal disaster aid.

Some of this funding went to a program that provided temporary accommodation for people in hotels after the flooding, and housed more than 2,200 people, or nearly 900 households, at its peak. That program ended in June. With about $7 million in support from the county and city, the San Diego Housing Commission then provided up to $15,000 in assistance to people still in emergency lodging near the end of the program to help them pay for rent, security deposits, and other expenses to relocate.

But there have been problems. Numerous participants in the temporary lodging program have complained they were housed in unsafe or unsanitary hotels and evicted or threatened with eviction because of payment delays from the contractor hired to run the program. Many people who needed accommodation didn’t even get the help because they didn’t know about the program, had trouble accessing it, or were afraid to seek help because of their immigration status, says Clariza Marin, CFO of the Harvey Family Foundation. Others left before they were ready because of conflicting information from FEMA workers that led them to believe staying in the hotels would jeopardize their federal aid money, Marin and Calix said.

The housing commission also limited who could apply for the financial assistance to those still in the program on May 23—a date by which many had left. That meant just 313 families initially received aid. The commission recently expanded eligibility to another 194 families who had applied but left the hotels earlier, offering them up to $5,500. But that doesn’t cover all of the approximately 900 families that were in the program at its peak.

Calix is one of the flood survivors and former renters who, so far, has not qualified for financial help from the housing commission. She decided to leave the program after three months because at the last hotel she stayed at, she felt unsafe. She was also hearing about other people getting evicted and got nervous that she and Chago would be next. She never applied for aid because she assumed she wouldn’t qualify. Now she’s angry that she, and many of her neighbors, have been left out.

“We’re all in a hole, and we’re trying to get out and they just keep, you know, letting us fall deeper,” she says. “To be told you get no help and other people do, it is very frustrating.”

Low-Income Homeowners Suffer Too

The disaster has been devastating for homeowners too. Many are low income and elderly and didn’t have any or enough flood insurance. Several of those who received money from FEMA said it wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the damage. According to Marin, some residents have been forced to take out loans, pay for repairs using credit cards, or live in flood-damaged moldy homes. Others have given up, abandoning or selling their residences to out-of-town buyers, she said.

Juan Chavez, a retired truck driver, has been trying to help his mother-in-law, 79, hold on to the Beta Street home she lived in for 30 years before the flood forced her to move in with him and his wife. She uses a wheelchair and has dementia. Although the home had some flood insurance, the payout barely covered the cost of basic cleanup, he said. Chavez estimates he and his wife, a secretary, will have to cobble together $100,000 of their own money to make the home livable again.

Across the street, Harold Roberts, 74, is still trying to get his home fixed after it was flooded with several feet of water. A caregiver for the elderly, he said he couldn’t afford the $6,000 a year he would have needed for flood insurance on his home, and the FEMA money he received only partially covered the damage. He lost his car and truck in the flood and spent six months at a motel in Chula Vista paid for by the county. Now he’s among dozens of his neighbors receiving assistance from the Harvey Family Foundation to restore their homes.

“A lot of families, for a situation that they didn’t cause, they’re forced to go into debt in order to save what little they do have,” says Armon Harvey, the foundation’s CEO. “They lost cars, they lost everything, and now they have to dig into their own pockets, into their savings, just to save their homes.”

Flood recovery is expensive. The average annual cost of flooding in the U.S. is more than $32 billion and rising. According to a recent study featured in the Fifth National Climate Assessment, California lost an average of $1.7 billion annually to floods as of 2020. That’s expected to rise to almost $2 billion by 2050. Yet federal disaster assistance typically doesn’t provide enough support to the people who need it the most, research shows.

A Last Resort

After several weeks in the hotel program, Calix learned that her grandfather was selling an old trailer. He offered to give it to her, if she paid for repairs and moving it. Calix saw it as her ticket out of the hotel program, and a chance at some kind of stability for herself and her son. She racked up more debts on her credit cards to pay for new tires, towing, and a parking spot at a local RV park.

Calix now pays about $1,600 a month for her spot at the RV park. She and Chago have to move to a different park every six months because stays are time limited. She said she’s grateful to have a place to live, but it feels temporary. She’s still in debt because of the disaster, and her credit score has suffered. If she had received $15,000 from the Housing Commission like some of the other survivors, she could have paid off her debt and stabilized her financial situation enough to get an apartment, she said.

“It would have made a huge difference,” she says. “We would be a lot further along. I’m basically falling behind and my stability is hanging on by a thread, to be honest, and that’s the truth of it. We really needed that help, and we’re not the only ones.”

The Harvey Family Foundation has been trying to stem the exodus of low-income renters and homeowners from the flood-struck areas. Over the past year, they’ve received about $700,000 in city and county funds and raised another $500,000 in philanthropic support to help repair homes in Southcrest, Shelltown, and neighboring communities.

So far they’ve completed 73 home repairs with 14 more in the pipeline. These include rentals, such as those owned by Tony Tricarico, 77, who before the flood rented 11 small apartments on his Beta Street property for between $1,200 and $1,400 a month.

The flood destroyed Tricarico’s home and all the rental units on the property. He had no flood insurance and didn’t qualify for FEMA aid. He was ready to give up and sell, he said. But the Harvey Family Foundation offered to help him restore the units if he didn’t raise the rents and offered them back to the displaced families. He agreed. So far, three units are fixed and rented, another three will be completed soon. At least one of the families is living in a trailer in a nearby alleyway waiting to return, he said.

“I wanted to help” the renters, Tricarico says. “I’ve known them 20 years, I’ve watched their children grow up.”

Much more funding is needed to help with repairs, Marin said. Even now she’s receiving calls from distressed homeowners who have run out of insurance or FEMA money, or are newly discovering mold or other problems in their homes caused by the floods, she said.

Investments in infrastructure to prevent future flooding and make San Diego’s most vulnerable communities more resilient to the effects of climate change are vital, Berry with UC San Diego said. Infrastructure projects should include green, nature-based solutions that remove concrete and create more spaces such as parks where excess water can be absorbed into the soil, she added. It’s also important that officials take care to avoid “green gentrification” that drives up housing costs and displaces low-income residents, she said.

A state initiative called the Transformative Climate Communities program is working to address this challenge by funding community-led development and infrastructure projects designed to simultaneously improve climate resiliency and bring economic benefits to California’s most disadvantaged communities. These include investments in affordable housing, bike lanes and walking paths, public transportation, and community gardens.

Fresno is one community that has successfully used this funding through its Transform Fresno initiative, Berry said. More recently, the San Diego Foundation and Environmental Health Coalition also received the funds to develop climate- and community-resilience projects in San Diego’s central historic barrios.

The dilemma is that more investment is needed and San Diego taxpayers are reluctant to fund infrastructure projects, Berry said. Measure E, which would have raised the city’s sales tax by 1 percent and generated up to $400 million in additional general-fund revenue, including for infrastructure, was narrowly defeated in November.

She said she’s hopeful that the passage of state Proposition 4, a $10 billion bond to help California pay for efforts to address the impacts of climate change, including flood control and sea-level-rise protections, will further improve climate resiliency in San Diego and elsewhere. But it won’t be enough, she said.

“We can’t keep waiting for disasters (in order) to respond,” she said. “We need to be proactive and not reactive, because we’re well aware that the reactive systems that we have are not sufficient … If we aren’t building resilience, it’s not going to get easier to respond” when disasters happen.

Back at the RV park in north San Diego, Calix is trying to keep herself and Chago focused on the positive. But she, like many other flood survivors, is worried about the next disaster. Worried that the city still hasn’t fixed the problems with its infrastructure. Worried that the local government has no plan in place to better help future disaster victims.

But, for her son, she takes a deep breath and tries to set those worries aside.

“At least we have a place to live,” she tells Chago. “At least we’re not living in a car or sleeping on friend’s couches,” like some of the other people they know.

At least they have each other. At least they survived.

Reporter Lauren DeLaunay Miller contributed to this story. This story is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. This story originally appeared in California Health Report.

A guaranteed income pilot project called the Chicago Future Fund (CFF) has just released its latest report. The project, run by Equity and Transformation (EAT) Chicago, is based in the city’s west side, where high unemployment and high rates of police activity, arrests, and incarceration have challenged local residents. CFF’s guaranteed income project provided $500 a month from March 2023 to February 2024 to 100 formerly incarcerated individuals.

Rachel Pyon, research director at EAT Chicago, who leads the CFF pilot programs, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about CFF’s promising results for employment, housing, stress relief, and more.

Watch the clip below.