OP/ED: The Difficult Recovery of New Orleans: An inspiring past
Posted August 6, 2009 | Contact pr@nthp.org or 202-588-6141
By Jack Davis | September 16, 2007
Published in the Chicago Tribune.
Living in New Orleans these days is not easy. Things cost more: electricity, waiters, insurance, lumber, carpenters. The restaurants have truncated schedules. The musicians work in other cities. Many people are still in trailers.
And hanging over the city is a constant worry that its slow recovery will stall, that brave neighbors will get discouraged and leave, that City Hall incompetence will finally drive away the last businesses and volunteers, that the resurgent criminals won't be stopped.
But the individuals rebuilding the houses and the blocks and the neighborhoods that make this a world cultural treasure are patient, persistent. They have been repairing their lives largely without government leadership for two years since Hurricane Katrina. And they will continue.
The future of New Orleans lies with these people. But they need help. They need their disconnected mayor and his arrogant recovery chief to acknowledge that the whole city cannot be rebuilt.
New Orleans can have its 21st Century rebirth, but only if it looks to its 19th Century map for inspiration. New Orleans must become a smaller place that concentrates its tolerant people and its vibrant music and food in the areas along the Mississippi River that were too high to be flooded when Katrina broke defective levees. It's not too late to make this happen, especially considering that most of the returning population has concentrated on the high ground anyway, and especially if local officials show some backbone.
Orleanians can find signs of encouragement: Louisiana will have a better governor in January; several billion dollars of federal home-rebuilding money will get into more hands over the next year; and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will get to work on its $14.7 billion project to build flood barriers, scheduled to be finished in 2012. The city is getting a spiritual and economic boost, and new items for its menus, from Hispanic workers who have become the recovery workforce.
New restaurants and shops have appeared, the vast majority on a strip of high ground as much as a mile wide that was created over thousands of years by silt deposits from spring floods of the Mississippi River. This is where the city kept itself until the 20th Century, when real estate speculation and post-World
War II sprawl took it into the lowlands.
The strip contains most of what tourists remember as New Orleans. These are the neighborhoods that look good today: new paint, new roofs, new fences paid for by prudent purchases of homeowners insurance, erasing the hurricane's wind and rain damage, actually making some streets look better than they have in 100 years. Nearly all the houses are occupied. The oak trees that were in shock in 2006 are luxuriant today.Still, the central business district is disquietingly tranquil: Companies have left for Houston, Orlando and Baton Rouge. Affordable worker housing is scarce.
The percentage of students returning to the city's public schools (40 percent) is smaller than the overall population return (66 percent). New Orleans is not quite kid-friendly.
A disaster tour through the flood zone shows how much harder recovery will be for the lower-lying parts of the city, the majority of its area. Lakeview and Gentilly were floodable land outside the 19th Century city, developed when new levees along Lake Pontchartrain gave the illusion of protection, surviving as long as they did only because Katrina waited until 2005. Some determined owners have come back -- green lawns and new mailboxes in a wasteland of weeds and gutted ranch houses with missing doors.
A sno-ball stand has opened at 26th Street and Fleur de Lis Drive in a neighborhood with no families and no lights -- an expression of misguided faith that this neighborhood, too, will come back. It's the same elemental attachment to place that drives striking new images by painter Robert Warrens, a Lakeview resident until Katrina, that show stunned people in flatboats trying to find their landmarks and save their treasures.
Why doesn't someone tell these courageous pioneers in the lowlands that this won't work?
City government's plan for recovery has been not to have a plan, other than: Everybody come back any way you can.
The opposite idea had emerged only days after Katrina -- that New Orleans conserve its shrunken resources and serve its smaller population by building more densely and sustainably on the safer, higher riverfront areas. These have plentiful empty lots, reusable industrial sites and opportunities for midrise housing with, for nearly the first time, a view over the top of the Mississippi River levee.
The advocates of this "smaller footprint" were silenced by being called racists, accused of wanting to keep blacks from returning. And they were ignored.
Lost was the chance to use the patterns and textures of the old city to create new neighborhoods along the waterfront. If these had become new homes for both the displaced black middle class of New Orleans East and the displaced white middle class of Lakeview, the city would have found itself integrated in new ways. And if the rebuilt or restored housing projects near the French Quarter were actually changed from low-income ghettos to mixed-income communities as planned, New Orleans could start to become a place where being black would be less of a disadvantage.
It's still possible to make a fairer, diverse place, especially because the concentration of poverty that was too great a burden for city and state has partly shifted to Georgia, Texas and elsewhere. Especially with the new Hispanic population.
But the city has to do a smarter job. So does the state. Louisiana officials didn't try to impose on New Orleans their bold recovery blueprint for the rest of hurricane-damaged south Louisiana, which wants new development to avoid the recent patterns of sprawl into wetlands and other low-lying areas.
The consequences are starting to sink in: Unless the city takes a smaller shape, limited recovery dollars will be spread thin or wasted. The necessary rebuilding of the water supply system, for instance, will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than it should because it is being designed to serve the whole geography of the old city.
While City Hall won't yet warn returnees away from bad bets on neighborhoods unlikely to come back, the market for home insurance and mortgages is doing just that. And the Corps of Engineers last month released new maps that repeated the obvious: The below-sea-level areas will still be at greater risk than the higher ones even when the new flood protection plan is in place.
All these signs should tell the homeowner in Pontchartrain Park to take her Road Home grant, sell her lot to the state and buy a new condo four blocks from the river in Bywater. She would be dry even if the Katrina levees broke again.
The state and the city actually have mechanisms to drive this shift from high-risk to low-risk neighborhoods.
The state has begun buying the houses of people who want to take their grants and insurance settlements and live elsewhere, including elsewhere in New Orleans. The city has taken faltering steps toward reinvigorating the moribund New Orleans Redevelopment Authority to rebuild vacant and abandoned properties under its control in safer places. It can launch neighborhood revitalization plans while banking properties in low-lying areas for appropriate later development, if the safer land is ever used up.
The mayor's recovery director has talked vaguely but tantalizingly about investing $1.1 billion in 17 specific neighborhood projects, many on high ground, to stimulate other rebuilding. A design competition produced provocative new ideas to rebuild the downtown riverfront and add new housing.
On the good days, Orleanians are encouraged by even small evidence of progress -- newly planted cypress trees in Audubon Park, new street signs on St. Claude Avenue -- and they believe passionately that their place and their culture deserve a future. They know they have friends around the nation and the world. They will greatly appreciate a decisive local government that does big things wisely.
Jack Davis, a vice president of Chicago Metropolis 2020, lives in New Orleans and Chicago. He and his family just finished Katrina repairs to their home, which is above sea level.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a non-profit membership organization bringing people together to protect, enhance and enjoy the places that matter to them. By saving the places where great moments from history – and the important moments of everyday life – took place, the National Trust for Historic Preservation helps revitalize neighborhoods and communities, spark economic development and promote environmental sustainability. With headquarters in Washington, DC, nine regional and field offices, 29 historic sites, and partner organizations in all 50 states, the National Trust for Historic Preservation provides leadership, education, advocacy and resources to a national network of people, organizations and local communities committed to saving places, connecting us to our history and collectively shaping the future of America’s stories. For more information visit www.PreservationNation.org.
