The Relationship Between Housing Conditions and Social Vulnerabilities

Based on the history of the real estate market in the US, the social systems have been a major factor in determining housing conditions. The term Social Systems is used to describe how societies organize themselves to facilitate survival and prosperity (Meyer et al., 2015). If we look at communism, capitalism, feudalism, or socialism, we will see that the economy was the core foundation of all of these social systems. With such power, the economy ends up shaping our political environments, which determine the social norms and the dominating cultural values (Meyer et al., 2015).

Unfortunately, socioeconomic inequality and segregation have been among the defining features of our social systems throughout history. This can especially be seen in the wealth and property distribution in our societies nowadays. Social vulnerabilities are not accidental; they are firmly rooted in everyday life, and they are better understood as a process unfolding over time rather than an invariant or inherent set of characteristics (Emrich & Cutter, 2011; Simms et al., 2013).

Consequently, there has always been an unequal distribution of risks across communities in the US. For example, many catastrophic events related to natural hazards, such as Hurricane Katrina and the Saragosa tornado, have shown how colored communities with poor housing conditions suffer the most from disasters (Uekusa, 2018; Méndez et al., 2020; Abukhalaf, 2021; Cohen et al., 2021). Social vulnerability has two main components: 1) exposure to the hazard, and 2) sensitivity or susceptibility to the hazard effects (Cutter, 1996; Emrich & Cutter, 2011; Birkmann et al., 2013).

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