Envisioning “Complete Recovery” as an Alternative to “Unmitigated Disaster”

Abstract

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused massive destruction throughout the Gulf Coast of the United States. While the disaster itself caused many deaths and billions of dollars of destruction, the grave failures of disaster relief and post-disaster rebuilding have eclipsed the storm in the damage they have done. By contrast, after a massive explosion destroyed the Roombeek neighborhood in the town of Enschede, The Netherlands responded with a broad national consensus on the need to rebuild and the right of all residents to return to the devastated area. Deep community engagement provided the basis for planning. An awareness of social process helped keep cooperation and teamwork going well, even after the post-disaster “honeymoon” phase was over. These and other strategies ensured the town's successful recovery. By 2007, seven years after the original disaster, the devastated area had been rebuilt in a manner that respected both the great tragedy that and the people's vision for its future.

Keywords:

• disaster
• Enschede
• Katrina
• New Orleans
• recovery

Notes

These processes are not all equally well known to the American public, nor is their cumulative impact—what my colleague Rodrick Wallace has called “synergistic damage accumulation”—fully appreciated. The African slave trade, which dragged people from their homes in Africa and sold them into slavery in the Americas, took the liberty of 12 million who arrived alive. It is estimated that twice that number died on the journey within Africa and during the middle passage across the Atlantic. After the slave trade was banned in 1808, an internal slave market developed in the U.S., which regularly sold slaves from Virginia and other more Northern states to the lower South. Emancipation restored people's liberty, but at a great disadvantage of owning no land and having no education. There was massive movement after the war as people sought to reunite with family, go to school, find land or work, and begin their new lives as freedmen. This hopeful epoch came to a violent end with the institution of Jim Crow laws, which made African Americans second-class citizens, stripped of their right to vote or to be protected in the courts. The two Great Migrations represented people's efforts to make new homes in the city, where they might have more economic and political opportunity. This effort, too, was thwarted by the reification of segregation in the cities. Redlining, instituted in 1937, aggravated segregation by steering investment away from African American ghetto neighborhoods. Urban renewal then found these to be “blighted” and ordered them cleared for “higher uses.” Catastrophic disinvestment in the 1970s and 1980s represented the active removal of assets—from fire stations to banks and supermarkets—from minority and poor neighborhoods. Many of those displaced by urban renewal and catastrophic disinvestment moved into housing projects, and became vulnerable to a new “improvement” scheme, this one called HOPE VI. At the same time, poor and minority neighborhoods that had maintained some of their historic buildings and charm were targeted for gentrification, and the poor forced to move again. In sum, the efforts of African Americans to free themselves and become first-class citizens have not only met with resistance, but also have been actively undone by government programs operated in close cooperation with business leaders. See, especially, Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caolina Press, 1998) and Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), on the institution of segregation, Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up Neighborhoods City Hurts America and What We Can Do About It (New York: Ballautine/New World, 2004) on urban renewal, Wallace and Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses: How New York was Burned Down and National Public Health Crumbled (London: Verso, 1998) on catastrophic disinvestment, and Powell and Spencer, “Giving them on old one-two, Gentrification and the K.O. of impoverished urban dwellers of color. Howard Law Journal, (Winter 2000).” on gentrification.

Fullilove introduced the concept of “root shock” in order to explain the social, cultural, and emotional consequences of the loss of the near environment. Indeed, as many authors have argued, the near environment provides an external homeostatic system, that maintains the individual's well-being. It has also been observed that complex human habitat plays this role in supporting the organization of larger social groups. For example, a home helps a family function, a well-organized assemblage of housing, services, and businesses helps a neighborhood function and so on. Because social organization is tightly linked to human health, we find that physical organization influences human health in its ability to support productive interpersonal relationships, among other factors.

Rodrick Wallace and Deborah Wallace have an extensive body of work on the effects of forced displacement on health. Their book, A Plague on Your Houses, offers an excellent introduction to their findings, as it describes the unintended consequences of forcing poor people out of their homes in the South Bronx in the 1970s. Among these consequences, they argue, was the widespread and rapid dissemination of AIDS in the South Bronx, New York City and the region. Because of the region's dominating position in the U.S. urban hierarchy, the unleashing of an important epidemic in New York City had severe consequences for the nation's health.

During the course of the fieldwork on the long-term consequences of urban renewal, the CRG team heard a number of planners and politicians point out that “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”

The concept that “moving is good for you” is embedded in the thinking of U.S. federal government. Two examples may suffice to make this point: (1) the HOPE VI project is breaking up so-called “distressed” federal housing projects, dispersing their residents to areas of less concentrated poverty; and (2) HUD funded a large study, called “Move to Opportunity,” in which residents of housing projects are given Section 8 so that they can move elsewhere.

Many people took up the theme that dispersal of the poor from New Orleans was a blessing in disguise. Among the first were Barbara Bush and David Brooks. Former First Lady Barbara Bush, during a visit to the Houston Astrodome shelter, said: “What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” In similar vein, David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times, wrote an op/ed piece called “Katrina's Silver Lining” (September 9, 2005), which argued that poor people had been separated from their dysfunctional neighborhoods and could be dispersed among middle-class people, thereby creating more opportunity for their children.