Turf Wars in the Delta
Plotting a future for the new New Orleans isn't just about urban design. Try money--and politics
NEW ORLEANS--It was a thing marvelous to behold: the future in full color, projected onto twin screens in a hotel convention room where an overflow crowd packed four deep against the walls. Flashing before them was three months of work by the best and brightest in urban design, led by the superstar national planning firm Wallace Roberts & Todd, which resurrected the dying Baltimore waterfront and laid out a master plan for the national Capitol grounds way back in 1983.
What the crowd saw put the "new"back in New Orleans. Canals covered and converted into leafy bicycle and pedestrian paths crisscrossing the city. A gleaming $4.8 billion transit and infrastructure system, including rail links to the airport, Baton Rouge, and the Gulf Coast. For every neighborhood: a school, a park, and a retail zone.
But the dreamy PowerPoint presentation by the Urban Planning Committee of Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission ended in a cold splash of harsh reality. Despite Nagin's plea that the meeting be held in a "spirit of peace," police eventually had to handle the line of furious residents gathered at the microphone. Amid cries that the plan was too academic or did too little to help people trying to return, Harvey Bender, a 44-year-old resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, pointed a finger at committee Chairman Joe Canizaro, a prominent local developer. "I hate you, Mr. Canizaro, because you've been in the background scheming to get our land,"he said. "I'm going to die on my land."
In the City That Care Forgot, the plan for a grander future has run headlong into the politics of race, class, and power, which, as in most places, translates to money. Resistance to the commission's plan, even outright defiance, still exists, but that may be the least of its problems. There's been good news, to be sure, some of it just last week. But the Bring New Orleans Back blueprint faces a host of daunting questions--questions about flood protection, about controlling scattershot redevelopment, and about Washington's willingness to foot the bill to bring back the Big Easy. For now, all that seems certain is that the New Orleans of tomorrow will be smaller in size and population, most likely a whiter, wealthier city, and perhaps more of a tourist theme park than the rich cultural gumbo that made the Big Easy a unique American experience.
The future is unfathomable in part because the present is unfathomable. Downtown and the French Quarter are bustling, but of the 480,000 residents who lived here before Katrina, only an estimated 130,000 have returned. Approximately 50,000 homes were swamped by at least 4 feet of water. The twisted ruins of thousands of cars litter neighborhoods like Gentilly and Desire. Scores of schools, public and private, are closed. Mortgage delinquency rates have skyrocketed. Per day, the metropolitan area is losing $15.2 million in tourism revenue alone.
Starting over. While vast swaths of the city still lie in waste, New Orleans also has the feel of a pioneer town, populated by those lucky enough to be spared by last year's hurricanes or those with the insurance or savings to rebuild quickly. On Canal Street and in moneyed Lakeview, hammers and saws provide a steady soundtrack. It's no accident that most of the construction is taking place in the city's wealthiest and, with some exceptions, whitest neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods, many in the lowest and least valuable quarters of the city, were hit disproportionately hard by Katrina. So a city that was once 70 percent black is now closer to 50 percent black. A Los Angeles Times analysis showed that the wealthy and white also stayed closer to New Orleans, making their return much easier.
The slow pace of installing trailers--of the almost 20,000 ordered for New Orleans, fewer than 3,000 were occupied as of late January--has also impeded the return of residents. The lack of White House support for construction of levees able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane (Page 74) is also slowing the city's comeback. "If you want people to return," says Jay Lapeyre, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, "we have to know we're protected from a Cat 5, at least eventually."
"I'll be home." The hope of the Bring Back New Orleans Commission was that its plan would jump-start the recovery process by providing a rational road map for rebuilding. The plan's first priority is to focus the recovery effort on portions of the city that suffered little or no flooding. Specific pockets of high ground--portions of downtown, New Orleans East, and the Lower Ninth Ward--are targeted for high-density development of both homes and businesses.
Throughout New Orleans, residents would plan their neighborhoods with the assistance of a professional team; neighborhoods with few people left might be consolidated, while low-lying, more flood-prone regions could be converted to green space if planners can persuade homeowners to seek higher ground. The commission's plan gives neighborhoods just four months to prove residents are returning; otherwise, those neighborhoods run the risk of being left out of the city's planned redevelopment. The deadline has sparked outrage and ignited a race against the clock in the black community to get residents to return. While networks of friends and families are reaching out across the country, grass-roots rebuilding efforts are springing up in black neighborhoods, encouraged by a majority-black City Council, which has repeatedly argued that the whole city should be redeveloped. "The footprint of the city has become a civil rights issue," says Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans. "The city was racially polarized before the storm, so these huge decisions are certain to tap race concerns."
Headquartered in a ramshackle office in the Eighth Ward, the New Orleans branch of the community group ACORNis gutting up to 200 homes a day in poor parts of the city--homes they hope can be rebuilt. One of those belonged to 73-year-old Edna Alexander Berkley, who had to chisel through the attic of her home after the 17th Street levee collapsed. She has since relied on ACORN to gut her home and help guide her through the beginnings of the rebuilding process--like getting a permit from the city to rebuild. Now staying with her son, Berkley makes a simple vow: "I'll be home soon."ACORN's head man here, Stephen Bradberry, argues that the commission's plan pushes out African-Americans. "[Tourists] come because of the flavor of the people," Bradberry says. "New Orleans without black people will be Disney World on the river."
By the time the commission's plan is formally accepted by the statewide Louisiana Recovery Authority in coming weeks, as is expected, controlling the upstart construction could prove an all but impossible task. Officials fear a "jack o'lantern effect"--a patchwork of occupied and blighted homes across wide swaths of the city. City services could be scarce in some of these neighborhoods, while other partially rebuilt neighborhoods may be sitting on flood-prone land, like areas of New Orleans East near Lake Pontchartrain, that the city covets as green space.
Even if every resident followed the road map, committed to consolidating neighborhoods and abandoning dangerous parts of the city, the commission's plan of "infill" areas and development zones is still only a best guess of where it makes sense to rebuild. That's because the Federal Emergency Management Agency will be months late releasing new, revised maps showing which parts of the city are most prone to floods; the maps are now expected this summer, at the earliest. The maps will dictate which parts of the city are uninsurable--and difficult to rebuild in, as a practical matter--as opposed to which regions are relatively safe. Surviving homes that don't get grandfathered in under the old maps could be required to elevate, which can cost thousands of dollars. As time wears on, "the more we'll have people make precipitous decisions about rebuilding," says Reed Kroloff, dean of the Tulane School of Architecture, who's codirecting the urban plan. So the more the clock keeps ticking, the less the plan is, well, a plan.
And for the commission plan to work, it needs broad support from the White House and funding from Congress--and that process has been bumpy. To date, Washington has allocated $87 billion in Gulf Coast relief, and the White House requested an additional $19.8 billion for 2006 just last week. Billions more have been spent in federal flood insurance payouts. A relatively scant amount has been spent on housing. "We have 200,000 families that don't have a place to come back to," says Andy Kopplin, the executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
Limbo. The housing crisis in Louisiana has created a testy, on-again, off-again relationship between Louisiana and Washington. In January, the White House launched a stunning offensive against legislation that was to provide a funding mechanism for much of the commission plan. Authored by Republican Rep. Richard Baker of Baton Rouge, the bill proposes a big government fix: the Louisiana Recovery Corp. Funded by up to $30 billion in treasury bonds, it would buy up property from willing sellers, even those in the flood plain--potentially tens of thousands of parcels. The corporation would clean up contaminants and sell those properties to developers, whose projects would be guided by the commission's master plan. Originally the White House seemed friendly to the proposal, but last month, Don Powell, the federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, disavowed the bill as too costly and bureaucratic. Instead, the administration proposed that Louisiana use $6.2 billion in block grants--money the state wanted to pour into infrastructure and small businesses--to focus on the 20,000 uninsured destroyed homes above the flood plain, which the administration says are the most deserving of federal aid. The federal plan, Powell says, would eliminate the proposed LRC's bureaucracy. "Plus," he adds, "it doesn't put the federal government in the real-estate business."
The news sent Louisianians reeling. "It doesn't help the people who to their detriment relied on the levees," says Kopplin of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. The federal government has an acute responsibility to help all homeowners, Louisiana officials argue, because levee failures contributed massively to damage from Katrina--and the levees were built and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The proposal would have left the poor in particularly tough shape. Owners of homes with mortgages are required to carry flood insurance, but many poor forgo the cost of insurance once the home is paid off. Those who did so and were flooded by Katrina lost a risky bet. But without federal aid, uninsured families are facing an uphill battle.
The White House announcement spurred an intense behind-the-scenes lobbying effort by the Louisiana delegation and a phalanx of bankers and mortgage lenders. The Mortgage Bankers Association has argued that without a mechanism to buy and clean up as many as 200,000 devastated properties--many of which contain contaminants from the flood--the housing market will have little value. If homeowners begin defaulting on their loans, mortgage companies may choose not to foreclose rather than to take on the risk of absorbing polluted or worthless property. "Our guess is that many of these properties will simply be abandoned," says Kurt Pfotenhauer of the association. If that happens, they could remain in a state of legal limbo for years, with local municipalities eventually seizing properties for sale or demolition. As one congressional aide put it, without the Baker bill or something like it, "you'd have ruins. Just like Greece."
Last week, the White House switched course. After a series of meetings with Louisiana leaders, Powell announced that the administration would target $4.2 billion of the new $19.8 billion request toward additional block grants for Louisiana that can be used to repair housing. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, previously the most vocal of White House critics, took the microphone to give "a special thank you to the president." Theoretically, the state may now have $12.4 billion to direct toward housing: the earlier $6.2 billion block grant, the new $4.2 billion, and about $2 billion in hazard mitigation funds. Officials calculate they can offer homeowners as much as $150,000, minus insurance payouts, to rebuild or remodel devastated houses.
The money won't cover everything included in the Baker bill, notably billions of dollars' worth of commercial property. And the new $4.2 billion is still just a request to Congress, which has been skeptical of everything from New Orleans's geographical viability to Louisiana's long history of political corruption. So it's no sure thing. "The view of most members of Congress,"Baker says, "is 'We've fixed the Louisiana problem.'"
Making plans. If Congress ultimately approves the extra $4.2 billion, state officials hope the pool of money can be used to create its own minirecovery corporation that would provide homeowners with the option of a buyout or funds to elevate homes to new FEMA levels. "This money is going to be directed straight to our citizenry," Blanco said. In the meantime, though, Louisiana is hatching plans for how to best leverage the $6.2 billion it already has in hand. An idea offered by Nagin would use the $6.2 billion as a first phase to the rebuilding process. The cash would target homes across the region that flooded with at least 2 feet of water, offering owners buyouts at 100 percent of their prestorm value (minus insurance payments) or a grant to cover repairs. Owners of less damaged homes, rental units, and small businesses would be left out. If the extra $4.2 billion is blessed by Congress, Nagin says, some of it would flow to less severely damaged homes and rental units.
Whether or not Nagin's plan takes hold, the commission's ambitious blueprint for New Orleans "is going to be scaled back and done in phases," says Mel Lagarde, cochair of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. His hope, and the hope of many here, is that with a plan in place, city officials can come back to Washington with more ideas--and, of course, more requests for a whole lot more money. Sounds good, in theory at least. But the City That Care Forgot still faces plenty of stormy weather.
REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS In January, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission issued a dramatic blueprint for the city's future. The plan, heavily dependent on federal backing, would transform city neighborhoods by concentrating development on high ground while giving low-lying, devastated neighborhoods four months to prove they can return.
Immediate rebuilding Moderate to minor flooding. Neighborhoods on high ground where immediate redevelopment is encouraged.
Flood damage areas At least 4 feet of flooding. Neighborhoods that can't prove viability may be targeted as green space.
New development areas Underutilized "infill" zones targeted for dense population and commercial redevelopment.
[map labels]
Orleans Avenue Canal; London Avenue Canal; Industrial Canal; 17th Street Canal;
Tulane Univ.; Superdome; Convention Center
LAKEVIEW; FRENCH QUARTER; DOWNTOWN; LOWER NINTH WARD; ALGIERS; NEW ORLEANS EAST; GENTILLY
Mississippi River; Intercoastal Waterway; Miss. River-Gulf Outlet; Lake Pontchartrain
Source: Bring New Orleans Back Commission
This story appears in the February 27, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.