Getting By and Getting Out: How Residents of Louisiana’s Frontline Communities Are Adapting to Environmental Change

ABSTRACT

Scholars argue that U.S. programs and policy designed to help households adapt to or move away from environmental risk were not designed to address climate change. Others demonstrate that disaster response upholds and produces structural inequality. This article examines how existing mitigation and adaptation policies fail to respond to lived conditions of residents and communities on the front lines of environmental change and perpetuate inequality. Based on interviews with residents in the lower bayou communities of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, and professionals working in the study area, we identified three factors that influence the outcomes of mitigation and relocation initiatives. First, we found that adaptation is a dynamic, ongoing process which can lead to the need for multiple types of assistance for a given property or household over time. Second, program timing and how residents make decisions about whether and how to rebuild or relocate are misaligned. Third, current programs deny resources to frontline communities by creating participation barriers for low- and moderate-income households. The findings affirm the need for more flexible policy guidelines if assistance programs are to transform communities in ways that respond to resident priorities and the realities of environmental change.

KEYWORDS:

• relocation
• climate adaptation
• frontline communities

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the residents of Terrebonne Parish who generously shared their time, viewpoints, and experiences of life in their communities for the purposes of this project. Without them, this project would not have been possible. We also thank the state and parish planners, university researchers, and nonprofit and business leaders for their expertise and insights on the challenges and opportunities facing Terrebonne Parish and their efforts to create safer and more resilient communities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The state-recognized Native American tribes in Terrebonne Parish include the United Houma Nation, the Grand Calliou/Dulac band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, the Isle de Jean Charles band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, and the Point-aux Chien Tribe.

2. The descendants of the original Acadian settlers became known as Cajuns. The name today denotes a culture and forms of living and language as much as ancestry (Gramling, Forsyth, & Mooney, 1987; Gramling & Hagelman, 2005).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by The Water Institute of the Gulf [under project award 2000249131]. This project was paid for with federal funding from the Department of the Treasury through the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA)’s Center of Excellence Research Grants Program under the Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies of the Gulf Coast States Act of 2012 (RESTORE Act). The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Treasury, CPRA, or The Water Institute of the Gulf.

Notes on contributors

Marla Nelson

Marla Nelson, PhD, AICP, is a professor of Planning and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans. She has published widely on the impacts of and responses to industrial and occupational restructuring in U.S. cities and regions, human capital and interregional migration, and post disaster recovery and redevelopment. Her current research focuses on adaptive migration as a critical site of action and examines how planning and policy can produce more just outcomes for residents and communities on the frontline of climate and environmental change. She received her BA in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and her MCRP and PhD in urban planning and policy development from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Renia Ehrenfeucht

Renia Ehrenfeucht is a professor of Community & Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on how communities and spaces change. She researches shrinking cities, and how communities lose population, including how residents and professionals respond to the intersections of environmental, economic and social forces. She also investigates public space use and design, examining the conflicts that arise and opportunities people find in everyday spaces, and the controversies over rights to the streets. She has looked at food trucks, street work, monuments, responses to homelessness among other topics. She has written two books, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation in Public Space (with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris) and Urban Revitalization: Remaking Cities in a Changing World (with Carl Grodach), and numerous journal articles.

Traci Birch

Traci Birch is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Louisiana State University. She currently serves as the Interim Director of the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio, a multi-disciplinary research institute focused on the long-term stability of communities and landscapes in dynamic coastal environments. She earned a PhD in urban studies with a focus on environmental management from the University of New Orleans, where her work focused on the intersection of ecosystem management and land use planning. She also holds a Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of New Orleans, and a BA from Baldwin Wallace University. Her current research focuses broadly on developing frameworks for climate adaptation, cultural preservation and well-being in the face of accelerated climate change, and is informed by post graduate practice in community disaster recovery and community development policy.

Anna Brand

Anna Brand is an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the historical development and contemporary planning and landscape design challenges in Black mecca neighborhoods in the American North and South. She is investigating how redevelopment paradigms in the 21st century reflect ongoing racialization and her work interrogates the gendered, racialized and resistant constructions of the built environment over time. Her work on post-Katrina New Orleans examines how racial geographies have been reconstructed after the storm through disciplines such as urban planning. Her comparative work on Black mecca neighborhoods traces historical and contemporary productions of racial landscapes and resistance to these constructions in New Orleans, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago and Washington DC. Brand received her PhD in Urban Planning from MIT.