There is no debate about the physical devastation of Hurricane Katrina. By all measures it was the most costly and widespread disaster in American history. Over 2,000 people died in August 2005, and in excess of $100 billion in residential and commercial property was damaged in an area stretching from the East Texas Galveston Coast to Pensacola, Florida. But the toll on the nation socially, economically, and politically was deeper in 2010 when most of the papers in this volume were solicited (this Special Issue initiated by Planners of Color Interest Group, a recently formed entity within the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning). The damages to the national psyche post-Katrina remain deep and troubling for the United States. What kind of nation can preach democracy and justice to the world and can't deliver it to its own people?
What the world saw live on television from New Orleans was the raw underbelly of America. Poor black people herded like sheep and treated like undesirables was not an America that the world expected or American citizens wanted to see. For the remainder of the Bush term in the White House, his Administration and its conduct in response to this terrible disaster was marked by failures. These failures were writ large by constant television coverage of New Orleans.
Co-editor Edward J. Blakely served as Director of Recovery (or Czar as he was dubbed) during the difficult and painful period when New Orleans was under deep scrutiny. Co-editor Chester Hartman co-edited (with Gregory Squires of the George Washington University Dept. of Sociology) a 2006 comprehensive volume of commissioned pieces, There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, andHurricane Katrina (Routledge). Blakely took kudos and lumps for his work in New Orleans. In part because when he got to New Orleans the debate was whether, for both physical hazard and social reasons, the city should be rebuilt. Moreover, the trauma he encountered in New Orleans was mirrored in the other states on the Gulf hit by Katrina. In every case, the politics of race and space were played out in very raw terms for most of the world to see. The papers in this Special Issue offer deep and rich insights into what the post-Katrina battles are about and how, why, and where people were not housed – which became the bedrock of the local debates in the states most affected, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The articles that follow reflect on these dilemmas. They don't offer answers, but put the questions squarely on the American political system as to what it can and cannot do at this juncture in the nation's maturity.
Leigh Graham gets to the heart of New Orleans and in many other places similarly situated with “Advancing the human right to housing in post-Katrina New Orleans: discursive opportunity structures in housing and community development,” which traces the story of who had “the right to return” to New Orleans. Returning to New Orleans for low-income public housing residents was a right taken away from them by fiat. The Bush Administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development decided prior to the hurricane to demolish over 70 percent of New Orleans' public housing. This decision was one thing in a city that had houses either vacant or available where people could be moved to while new and better housing might be provided. But after Katrina there was no housing, so the public housing residents had no place to go. Owners and some renters who had resources were not similarly disadvantaged. Since the public housing was racially homogeneous (95percent African-American), not rebuilding these houses was effectively black removal. Graham examines this tragedy as a “civil rights” movement. Poor blacks mobilized with some inside and outside assistance to claim their re-housing in their former communities as a right. Graham leans on the Myra Ferre's work and the concept of discursive opportunity, along with another French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's social field, as the lens for his analysis. In sum, the low-income public housing residents had few champions from the left national community who advocated better mixed-income housing for all public housing residents as a national goal. But in New Orleans public housing residents who favored such a long-term policy noted that they were being displaced now and their ability to return to any form of housing was being undermined. So, as the famous economist John Maynard Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead” – an observation true for public housing rights in the short run in New Orleans. The poor are not welcome in the Big Easy anymore.
Two of the articles take us outside New Orleans while remaining in the sphere of Katrina rebuilding. Shannon Van Zandt et al's article “Mapping social vulnerability to enhance housing and neighborhood resilience” offers social analysis tools to explore, pre- and post-disaster, the social vulnerability and likely impacts of disaster on people and assets in any community. The analytical template is examined in Galveston, TX, with references to and data from many other disasters. It is a straightforward template allowing for clear analytical constructs for pre-disaster planning to avoid the kind of tragic scenes in New Orleans. In a sense, getting ready and future-proofing is more important than post-disaster rebuilding because of increased resilience. The bottom line in this article is that the same tools needed to deal with low-carbon and more socially just communities are the tools for resilience.
Jeffrey S. Lowe's “Policy versus politics: post-Hurricane Katrina lower-income housing restoration in Mississippi” is an extension of the New Orleans story. Mississippi racial equity statistics in some dimensions are worse than New Orleans and Louisiana. While the places were different, the plight of the poor is the same. Inthe case of Mississippi, Lowe shows how business interests were placed ahead of low-income re-housing of the poor by the housing funds being diverted. Simply put, Mississippi not only reduced the amount of disaster CDBG recovery funds allocated to housing from 65 to 52 percent, it also diverted $770 million for affordable housing restoration to economic development activities Thus, by spring 2009, only 20 percent of disaster CDBG recovery funds spent on housing recovery went to increase the supply of housing for lower-income households. Like New Orleans non-profit organizations in and out of Biloxi, the main place of concern mounted strong legal and political counter-attacks against the actions of the State government. But much like poor people in New Orleans, low-income people in Mississippi are marginalized out of Mississippi, unable to return home.
“Rebuilding housing in New Orleans: the Road Home Program after the Hurricane Katrina disaster,” by Timothy F. Green and Robert B. Olshansky is anexcellent follow-on from the Graham case of publicly housed New Orleanians. The Road Home program was an oxymoron. No program could have been invented, as Green shows, to be more diabolical with respect to home-owning residents getting settlements to rebuild their destroyed homes. Green shows that the program was so complex that applicants even more than five years after its commencement still dispute who was eligible and what benefits they might receive. Over $8.6 billion dollars were allocated for this program in 2010 with the entire national HUD Community Development Block Grant programs for all cities getting $9 billion. The program, as Green shows, was costly, since it allowed people to sell their home to the State of Louisiana or rebuild anywhere. This led to increased home vacancies in NewOrleans, and many people with awards found the $150,000 too little, without agood insurance settlement, to build. Moreover, the banks took their mortgage payments prior to the recipient getting any money. It was an expensive and inequitable fiasco. As Graham says, “Further, by … affecting some neighborhoods and demographic groups unequally, the RHP may have changed the very character of the city it was designed, in part, to rebuild.”
Michelle M. Thompson's article, “The city of New Orleans blight fight: using GIS technology to integrate local knowledge,” provides a useful description of how data (in this case GIS technology) can and should be used to elicit and permit citizen participation, particularly important for lower-income and minority populations, which tend to be outside the standard planning participation modes and processes, and especially useful in dealing with disasters of all sorts, in this instance Hurricane Katrina. The model is easily transferable to other communities. She also outlines the important role local higher-education institutions can play in these situations.
The issue closes with Blakely's paper, “Recovery of the soul: rebuilding planning in post-Katrina New Orleans.” The aim of this paper is to provide a context for thedeep social and political problems unearthed in New Orleans but all too characteristic of some areas of the Southern United States that are still deeply divided places well after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. New Orleans, he argues – and by extension many urban areas that were struck by Katrina – had no long-term strategic plans to guide the cities and little internal zoning or other regulatory apparatuses like housing and economic development programs to realize forward-thinking ambitions. This challenge, he suggests, rests on deeper underlying inequities that have to be dealt with in order to do any proper planning that deals with the social and economic issues reflected in large percentages of African Americans in too many Southern cities living in public housing, poorly educated and unskilled. Insum, disasters hit the most vulnerable people, and they expose the weaknesses of any social system anywhere in the world. We are seeing similar tragedy on a global scale in Australia, New Zealand, Haiti, Chile and Japan. Nations that solve their socioeconomic problems are future-proofing their communities and their national natural, economic and housing assets.