This booklet offers guidance to relief committees that may be promoting subsistence gardens. Appendix I contains a questionnaire and a list of cites and states that replied. Appendix II contains forms used in various garden projects.

JOANNA C. COLCORD and MARY JOHNSTON worked in the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.

This booklet brings together recommendations for community action to meet emergent unemployment. It includes a list of the books and pamphlets quoted.

JOANNA C. COLCORD was the director of the Charity Organization Department at the Russell Sage Foundation.

This booklet provides general principles for charity work. It discusses lack of male support, disability, children, volunteer visitors, churches, city aid, new applications, pensions, budgets, loans, pauperizing, and prevention.

FREDERIC ALMY was secretary of the Buffalo Charity Organization.  

In this pamphlet, Joseph Lee explains why playgrounds are necessary, how they should be constructed, and how to get people in the community interested in creating them.

JOSPEH LEE was known as the “Father of the Playground Movement.” He is the author of “The Home Playground,” published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

In this pamphlet, reprinted from the Proceedings of the Second Annual Playground Congress of the Playground Association of America, Joseph Lee discusses the ideal home playground.

JOSPEH LEE is considered the “Father of the Playground Movement.” He is the author of “Play and Playgrounds,” available on the Russell Sage Foundation site.

This booklet contains six papers from the National Conference of Social Work, which took place in Washington, DC, in May 1923. Four papers describe developments in particular sections of the United States. Two papers offer a national perspective. Together, the papers bear testimony to the similarity of children’s needs everywhere.

This booklet provides advice on reforming Independence Day celebrations. It includes illustrated descriptions of safe celebrations; a list of state laws and city ordinances regulating the manufacture, sale, and use of explosives; and a collection of programs and suggestions.

LEE F. HANMER was associate director of the Department of Child Hygiene at the Russell Sage Foundation.

“Soaking the Middle Class tells the complex story of disaster recovery in a White middle-class suburb. It is driven by the chilling narrative of the water rising, escape, and inspiring and awesome stories of rebuilding. But not everyone rebounds the same. Behind an appearance of homogeneity are forces—both structural and individual—that widen gaps in wealth and resources. As an ever more volatile environment threatens to soak us all, this book is essential reading for how to create a broader and more equitable safety net.”
—MARY PATTILLO, Northwestern University

“A powerful book about one of the most urgent problems of the century: how to avoid going under in an era of catastrophic climate change. Drawing on an unusually deep and extensive study of an inundated suburban community, Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris show how class-based inequalities determine who bounces back from disaster and who gets bogged down or displaced. Soaking the Middle Class is timely and important for everyone who calls this warm, wet planet home.”
—ERIC KLINENBERG, New York University

“As climate change causes more extreme weather many middle-class Americans assume that their financial and social resources, their insurance, as well as help from the government, would protect them from financial ruin should they be caught in a disaster. In this eye-opening sociological account of how Hurricane Harvey affected one middle class suburb in Houston, Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris show that the disaster had very unequal effects, with some people able to build back better, and others not able to get back on their feet. Soaking the Middle Class is a cogently argued and wide-ranging book that opens our eyes to how disaster puts us all at risk.”
—MARY C. WATERS, Harvard University

Extreme weather is increasing in scale and severity as global warming worsens. While poorer communities are typically most vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change, even well-resourced communities are increasingly vulnerable as climate-related storms intensify. Yet little is known about how middle-class communities are responding to these storms and the resulting damage. In Soaking the Middle Class, sociologists Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris examine how a middle-class community recovers from a climate-related disaster and how this process fosters inequality within these kinds of places.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped record-breaking rainfall in Southeast Texas resulting in more than $125 billion in direct damages. Rhodes and Besbris followed 59 flooded households in Friendswood, Texas, for two years after the storm to better understand the recovery process in a well-resourced, majority-White, middle-class suburban community. As such, Friendswood should have been highly resilient to storms like Harvey, yet Rhodes and Besbris find that the recovery process exacerbated often-invisible economic inequality between neighbors. Two years after Harvey, some households were in better financial positions than they were before the storm, while others still had incomplete repairs, were burdened with large new debts, and possessed few resources to draw on should another disaster occur.

Rhodes and Besbris find that recovery policies were significant drivers of inequality, with flood insurance playing a key role in the divergent recovery outcomes within Friendswood. Households with flood insurance prior to Harvey tended to have higher incomes than those that did not. These households received high insurance payouts, enabling them to replace belongings, hire contractors, and purchase supplies. Households without coverage could apply for FEMA assistance, which offered considerably lower payouts, and for government loans, which would put them into debt. Households without coverage found themselves exhausting their financial resources, including retirement savings, to cover repairs, which put them in even more financially precarious positions than they were before the flood.

The vast majority of Friendswood residents chose to repair and return to their homes after Hurricane Harvey. Even this devastating flood did not alter their plans for long-term residential stability, and the structure of recovery policies only further oriented homeowners towards returning to their homes. Prior to Harvey, many Friendswood households relied on flood damage from previous storms to judge their vulnerability and considered themselves at low risk. After Harvey, many found it difficult to assess their level of risk for future flooding. Without strong guidance from federal agencies or the local government on how to best evaluate risk, many residents ended up returning to potentially unsafe places.

As climate-related disasters become more severe, Soaking the Middle Class illustrates how inequality in the United States will continue to grow if recovery policies are not fundamentally changed.

ANNA RHODES is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rice University

MAX BESBRIS is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison