Planning for Katrina Recovery

This originally was posted on PLANET and I am posting it here with Peter Marcuse's permission.

I think there is a major opportunity to influence the possibilities of building/planning for refugees from Katrina in the just announced FEMA project of building 30,000 units of temporary housing every two weeks till perhaps 300,000 units are built, fo refugees. They are supposed to be temporary, with a life span of up to 5 years. Now might be the time to start thinking, and perhaps to encourage organizing, among their residents as to what willl happen after that.

For some ideas, see #1 of the attached discussion. (You can ignore the descriptions before that; they were written for a German publication.) The other # (2-6) raise other questions about how planners ought to see the Katrina-related issues.

Peter Marcuse

Katrina, “disasters,” social justice and seven questions
- Peter Marcuse
- September 9, 2005
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Before Katrina, New Orleans was a city badly divided by race and class. 29.7% of the population was under the poverty line before Hurricane Katrina hit, and that included well over 30% of the African-American population, which was 67.9% of the total population. Housing conditions were similarly polarized, which explains why the homes of the poor and of African-Americans were so much more badly hit than of the white middle and upper class. Barack Obama, not a flaming radical but an eloquent African-American member of the United States Senate from Illinois, put it this way:
I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren't just abandoned during the Hurricane. They were abandoned long ago - to murder and mayhem in their streets; to substandard schools; to dilapidated housing; to inadequate health care; to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

The conditions that made Katrina such a deadly force could have been avoided. Without going into detail, wetlands between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico would have absorbed much of the shock of the hurricane. But those wetlands were reduced by 4,900 square kilometers since the 1930’s, and loss was running at 65 square kilometers of wetlands a year in the recent past. Real estate development, the laying of pipelines to transport oil from the platforms in the Gulf to the refineries inland, and transportation channels accounted for most of the loss. And then the damage caused by Katrina, which in personal terms affected the poor black population much more than themore affluent white, could have been avoided. A decent rescue operation after the fact could have much reduced the loss of life, but Michael D.Brown, the political appointee named to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had no obvious qualifications for his position – he had run an Arabian horses association before he was given the job – and the governmental response has been quite generally considered an absolute disaster.

And the danger was known; report after report raised flags of caution. Yet the budget that was requested was consistently cut. Most recently, the Army Corps of engineers asked for $27.1 million for levee maintenance and expansion, and even this most moderate request was cut to $5.7 million by an administration dedicated to lowering taxes and pursuing a vastly expensive war in Iraq.

It is too early to tell what will happen to New Orleans after the rescue operations are completed and the flood waters recede. There are already some indications. Dennis Hastert, Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has suggested it may be too expensive, and not worth while, to rebuild the city. And there are serious planning considerations that would raise questions also, not simply on Hastert’s cost grounds. Historical experience, however, suggests strong pressures to rebuild exactly as it was before. It is a little hard to see how this might happen. Apart from the rebuilding costs themselves, the costs of building levees, etc. that would have protected against a storm such as Katrina is estimated at some 18 billion dollars. One could envisage other scenarios: The Federal government, in an erratic display of leadership, could give a contract to Halliburton to rebuild the city, perhaps with Daniel Libeskind talking himself into a commission redesigning the French Quarter, the chief tourist attraction of the city. In any event, those parts of the city and region needed to continue major economic endeavors will be rebuilt, with massive government subsidies: the port, the oil pipelines, the refineries, the trade facilities. To the extent the rebuilding is left to the private sector, the result is predictable: those with the money (including from insurance) who see profitable opportunities there may rebuild. The poor, largely tenants and to a large extent extremely poor (part of the loss of life was because many did not own cars, had no money to pay for a way out, were living from paycheck to paycheck when they had work, and many were unemployed) will not be able to go back, except for the few really needed to keep the economy going, and the city itself will become essentially an all white and all middle and upper class. No doubt a result many in power would not find objectionable.

After that last sentence was written, the following appeared in the Wall Street Journal:

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.
The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."…

What the best solution would be is by no means an easy question answer, and there are many practical and technical questions that must be addressed. But the issues of race and class, the issue of social justice, runs through almost all of them. Consider what needs to be done:

1. Making the planning democratic.. Everyone and their brother is beginning to make suggestions as to what should be done, long-term, to New Orleans and the Gulf coast – from Dennis Hastert suggesting the abandoning of the city to Bush talking of immediate beginning on reconstruction planning (by FEMA?). Planners are taken by the idea of regional approaches, although we recognize the difficult issues of participation that would be involved in such planning. Yet little positive has emerged on how such a process of planning might be concretely undertaken. One possibility might be to make the planning process people, rather than place, based: ask those displaced where they might want to live, and consider relocation planning (perhaps even on a national basis—see below) as much part of the planning process as reconstruction in place. In the interests of justice, one might also want treat the wishes of displaced residents differently from those of investors or property owners, a ticklish queston—see the compensation issue below.

Try a thought experiment. Take the $18,000,000,000 it is estimated it would take to “rebuild” New Orleans in a sustainable fashion. Divide it by the population injured by Katrina; say 500,000. $36,000 each, perhaps $100,000 per household. Aggregate households by key characteristics or interests, just for example by “race.” Let the African American community, 67% of the population, decide how to spend the 300,000 x $36,000 allocated to it, or $10,800,000,000. And so on for each population group. Would the levees be rebuilt? Would a new town be founded? Would the risk of staying be taken, minimum repairs made, and the money used to buy cars for the carless, send children to college, bring families out of poverty? Or would the money be used to start a new life elsewhere?

And there are now a number of efforts to organize and give the poor of New Orleans a direct voice in the re-planning of the city. A group calling itself Labor Community United is one of those spearheading that effort. They face major obstacles: not only an elite that has very different ideas from theirs (see quote from Wall Street Journal above), but a Federal government not known for its concern with equity, and a constituency that is largely dispersed at the moment and thus hard to organize. Now they, and their allies, need the political muscle to win the major role in replanning New Orleans that a democratic process would require.

FEMA’s recently announced plan to provide 300,000 temporary trailers/mobile homes for refugees from the floods opens a whole range of possibilities. If it is done with sensitivity and planning and adequate resources,, it might mean that community ties might be preserved/restored in a new location. Access might still be provided to jobs in the old New Orleans. Resources might be provided to each household to reestablish themselves on a sound footing. The process could also be a practical way of permitting collective, democratic decision-making, since the temporary housing will be in large ”communities” which might mirror previous neighborhood solidarities. The newly relocated communities might then be allowed to plan for their own future, for the replacement of their temporary units by permanent ones, for the provision of public facilities, for all that goes into the construction of a good urban place in which to live. Those that wanted to return to their old neighborhoods in their old locations could; that is not inconsistent with others wanting to start fresh, creating new neighborhoods in new locations. And those wishing to re-establish themselves outside of the region could be given the equivalent resources to enable them to do so. That might be democratic planning indeed.

There is grounds for some pessimism. The planning seems to be in the hands of “giant global engineering firms including Bechtel National Inc. of San Francisco and Fluor Corporation, of Aliso Viejo, Calif,” who “admit they will not be applying too much creativity to these new communities.” But now would be the time to raise the issues.

2. Making the distribution of resources equitable: The compensation issue. Presumably substantial sums will be made available to help repair the damages and compensate for the loss of life after Katrina. But all damages are not alike. To begin with, property damage is different from personal injury or loss. No doubt the rich had greater financial losses than the poor; in judging compensation to the victims of 9/11, that commission decided to make awards based on prior income and income-earning capacity lost, a decision not made in the interests of social justice. Some business losses were covered by insurance; many new the risks they were assuming, were able to cover themselves against prospective loss, and have questionable claims for public assistance (distribution of emergency aid is in a different category). In general, one might differentiate between those who were exposed as a matter of a calculated risk and for a calculated profit, and those who were there simply because they had no choice, economically or socially.

3. Get the respective roles of local, state, and Federal governments right. Part of this is simply the technical question of reaching agreements, early on, among the different levels of government as to which should have what responsibilities. That is a managerial problem. But one thing is crystal clear: the resources of the cities involved are inadequate to deal with the catastrophe, as are the resources of the states involved. Simply on this account, the biggest share of the support must come from the national government. It is further only at the national level that a real socially oriented redistribution of resources can take place; decentralization of fiscal responsibility is inherently regressive in tendency. The national government must make the resources that are need available; decisions as to allocation need to be made democratically, and largely as the local level (local in terms of those affected, not those in place after Katrina).

4. Don’t slough off public responsibilities to private entities. That certainly goes for privatizing planning or land use controls or reconstruction or relief. This is not the place for private profiteering by the Halliburton’s of the world, or for star architects to be hired to tell the people of New Orleans what their city should look like.

But it applies to nonprofit groups too. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army and countless voluntary and charitable organizations have contributed mightily to helping out in the present emergency. It has long been public policy in the United States to try to maximize the role of private non-profits in at least the social service sector, and there is a growing disquiet, more visible in Europe than here, that such policies lead to an abdication of public responsibility and are motivated by efforts to hold down public costs, and taxes, rather than provide better or more efficient services. There is an ideological component to the belief, assiduously promulgated n some circles, that folk should make a charitable contribution for disaster relief, but the idea of raising taxes for the same purpose is disfavored. Yet public disaster relief and planning are classic arguments for an active public sector.

5. Figure out what went wrong, now, and be blunt. There is enough fault to go around, both in terms of past planning and development and engineering, and in terms of rescue operations. Should criticism be avoided, lest it inject partisanship into a human tragedy? Historically, there is enough political fault to go around, involving both Democrats and Republicans. In current terms, either one gets specific on who has responsibility, one ends with generalities like “the government let us down,” which can easily lead to “you can’t trust the government,” “we’re wasting our taxes,” “you can’t trust politicians”, etc. Yet in the interests of justice and democracy it is precisely the political sphere that needs to be activated, the participation in politics, electoral and otherwise, that should be encouraged. And if no politician or political party appears that seems satisfactory, that is also an important lesson, and perhaps incentive, for political action. It is, after all, in the political arena, not in the forces of nature or the market, that one can expect principles of social justice to be considered.

If developing wetlands reduced New Orleans ability to withstand hurricanes, shouldn’t questions be asked as to who allowed the development? If African-Americans are overly concentrated in low-lying areas, or have 50% fewer cars per capita than whites, or double the poverty rates, shouldn’t that be a matter of public discussion, with causes and responsibilities sought? If National Guard troops are needed today, and 3,000 Louisiana National Guard and 4,00 Mississippi National Guard are in Iraq, is it not appropriate for citizens to consider the implications? It is not some nameless forces of nature, but human doing, that has produced these results (As Mike Davis points out for almost all “natural” disasters), and the humans that have been the actors producing the results that should be held accountable?

5. Push the social justice aspect of disaster planning. Face up to the distributional trade-off issue, and put human lives above property damage, aid to the poor above compensation to the well off. . Risk assessment is a large field, and means are largely available to give at least working assessments of the risks of various natural disasters, and of the likely consequences of each level. To draw policy/planning conclusions from a risk assessment, trade-offs have to be assessed. For any given risk, they involved at least three estimates (I am not an expert at risk assessment; the matter is undoubtedly more complicated than this): The damage (in human lives – how measured? And property damage and social damage, etc.); the cost of avoidance or prevention (much in discussion about New Orleans); and the benefit to be gained by the use prior to the likely disaster. In each case, there are distributional questions involved, value judgments implicitly or explicitly made. What values should be used in comparing human lives to economic benefits? Economic benefits are not distributionally neutral, and cannot simply be averaged over a population; what’s good for “the city” will have different impacts on different groups within the city. And pertains to both benefits and costs; both are unequally distriuted, by class, race, gender.

6. Don’t generalize disasters. All disasters are not alike. Rescue and recovery operations do have much in common, warning systems for different kinds of disasters might have much in common, and general principles on such problems should be taught and experiences exchanged. However, to treat the recent tsunami and the attack on the World Trade Center both as “disasters,” without focusing on the very different causes of the two, is deceptive. Possibly a distinction can be made between purely natural disasters and purely human disasters, but there are very, very, few of either (again, see Mike Davis’ work). “Disaster planning” might well encompass the type of post-disaster issues mentioned above, and might encompass the environmental analysis of risks of key disaster-causing conditions. But there is no reason to believe that “disaster analysis” or “disaster planning” should be the right approach to look at the root causes of terrorist attacks, or of wetlands development, or of port locations. To the contrary: if disaster planning leads to a response to terrorism that is limited to fortifying high-rises and camera surveillance of public places, or designing concrete barriers with flower planters on top, then it is displacing serious analysis of the human factors that have produced or contributed to the disasters. In the end, the type of social and economic and political analysis that is needed for different kinds of disasters can only very awkwardly and insufficiently be analyzed or handled in discussions of “disasters” in general, and at worst can ignore or condone or accept as inevitable human conduct that is in fact often responsible for the most serious consequences of “ disasters.”

Both anti-terrorism planning and flood disaster rescue operations are now under the Department of Homeland Security. That obscures the very different nature of each. It equates video-camera surveillance with levees, political intelligence with wetlands protection, suggests that violent extremism is a natural and unavoidable force, like a hurricane, so only its consequences and not its causes can be dealt with. “Disasters” is a category defined by its results, not its causes. It is as if we embarked on an “anti-untimely death” campaign, created a Federal agency with that name, and put under it everything dealing with AIDS, infant mortality, hunger, war, murder, heart attacks, cancer, and traffic accidents. We should be aware of such nonsense, and its political and policy implications.

Peter Marcuse Home: 140 Greenwood Avenue
Professor of Urban Planning Waterbury, Connecticut 06704
Graduate School of Architecture, tel: 203 753 1140
Planning and Preservation
Avery Hall (office: 207 Buell)
Columbia University
New York, New York 10027
fax: 212 864 0410
tel: 212 854 3322

Pattsi Petrie, PhD, AICP