Hurricane Recovery Platform

SGA COALITION ENDORSES HURRICANE RECOVERY PLATFORM
As the nation pours money and other resources into the Gulf Coast region, our coalition and allies have become increasingly convinced of the need for an overarching vision of the outcomes expected of the recovery effort. With so many of our constituencies engaged in the region and in the associated policy discussions, Smart Growth America's coalition has embraced a comprehensive set of principles and recommendations that we believe should guide both the rebuilding and future policy discussions.

We must not only meet immediate needs, but also seize the opportunity to redevelop communities in ways that are more secure, economically viable, egalitarian, and environmentally sound. Our nation's ability to deliver this vision is made all the more possible by the communities, practitioners, policy thinkers and advocates in this movement who have spent the last decade gaining hard-won experience in inclusive, big-picture planning, growth and redevelopment. Click here to read the platform: http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/SGARecommendations.pdf (pdf format) and learn how you and your organization can sign on, or click here for more information on rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina: http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/katrina.html

NATIONAL SMART GROWTH COUNCIL WEIGHS IN ON POST-HURRICANE RENEWAL
At their annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Sept. 30, the National Smart Growth Council agreed to make post-Katrina redevelopment the focus of its efforts in coming months. The advisory council includes mayors, a county executive, bankers, business leaders and developers and is chaired by two former governors, Chrisitine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Parris N. Glendening of Maryland. Council members agreed that they could have the most positive impact by reaching out to their counterparts--business leaders, governors, mayors, etc.--in the affected regions, and by offering their expertise and connections in the rebuilding process. Governors Glendening and Whitman also have penned an op-ed expressing the council's of view. Here's an excerpt:

"Many of the proposed policy responses to Katrina from right, left and center look a lot like business as usual in today's polarized landscape. As former governors from both major parties, we are concerned that such conventional thinking is not up to the significant national challenge before us. ... Looking in the rear view mirror, we see policies and practices that contributed to the severity of the storms' effects the loss of natural buffers, the building in vulnerable areas. We had a housing policy that concentrated the poorest people in low-lying land, and a transportation system that failed the 200,000 in metro New Orleans without cars.

Looking forward, though, we can imagine a new metro New Orleans ... . This is a critical moment. If we can make these strategies work here if we can learn to plan with nature, eliminate the man-made contributions to natural disasters, tear down barriers to opportunity for those who lived in concentrated poverty, resurrect the fine planning and design traditions that created the cherished fabric of New Orleans we can tackle similar challenges in our other major cities and coastal areas."

POLICYLINK RELEASES TEN POINTS TO EQUITABLE REBUILDING AFTER KATRINA
PolicyLink, a Smart Growth America coalition member, and a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing policies for achieving economic and social equity, has released a terse and helpful list of its policy guidelines following the hurricane, as places like New Orleans prepare for a massive rebuilding process. Recommendations include: rebuilding New Orleans and other devastated areas so that all communities are mixed income communities, equitably distributing the amenities and infrastructure investments that make all communities livable, prioritizing health and safety concerns, and more. Click here for the full list of recommendations: http://www.policylink.org/EquitableRenewal.html

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www.brookings.edu/metro

October 12, 2005

Rebuilding New Orleans, Tackling Poverty: the Federal Role in the Wake of Katrina
Two new releases from the Metropolitan Policy Program offer ways in which the federal government can best invest in the recovery of the New Orleans region and, additionally, address the endemic concentrated poverty found all too often in other cities around the country.

The first, New Orleans After the Storm: Lessons from the Past, a Plan for the Future, offers a federal agenda for rebuilding the region, based on its unique social and market characteristics and physical topography. The paper shows that past federal policies helped to concentrate poverty and facilitate development in flood-prone areas, rendering the deluge all the more tragic, and mandating a federal rebuilding role. Congress and the administration should adopt a coherent, cost-effective approach-leveraging existing programs for the most part-to rebuild the New Orleans region with a clear outcome in mind: transform the once-struggling region into a high-road economy with quality, sustainable development and distinct mixed-income neighborhoods.

Looking beyond New Orleans, the second report, Katrina's Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America, reminds leaders that concentrations of poverty, similar to those in New Orleans, still pervade many cities across the country and recommends that federal leaders embrace an array of existing policy tools to restore economic choice and opportunities for families in these neighborhoods. Though New Orleans has been in the headlines, a disaster in Cleveland, Miami, or St. Louis would, unfortunately, likely yield similar images of the poor in distress.

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http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20051012_concentratedpoverty.htm

New Orleans After the Storm: Lessons from the Past, a Plan for the Future

October 2005

Before dawn on the morning of Monday, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina-a Category 4 storm with winds up to 145 miles per hour-shifted slightly to the east and roared into the central Gulf Coast just east of the city of New Orleans.

What followed-after an illusory day of relief that the city had been spared a direct hit-was a nightmare that shook the nation.

Tens of thousands of mostly black New Orleanians who had remained in the city were seen climbing to their rooftops as the floodwaters rose, notwithstanding massive pre-storm evacuations.

Thousands and thousands of modest houses in low-lying urban neighborhoods and others in white and black suburbs were inundated, while the higher-value French Quarter and downtown remained dry. And all the while more than 20,000 people-again, mostly poor African Americans-waited, sweltering, in grim conditions in the New Orleans Superdome as water and food ran low, begging for relief.

In sum, a shocking onslaught of images of human suffering pierced Americans' complacency, forcing them to grapple with enduring issues of race, class, and the city as had no event in years.

What went wrong in New Orleans, and how should the nation respond? Clearly, it will take years to sort through the chaos of August and September 2005 to fully answer those questions. But it is possible-even in the near aftermath of the hurricane-to draw some initial conclusions about why Katrina wreaked such havoc, as well as to derive from New Orleans' past some lessons for the future and use them to inform a plan for rebuilding a better New Orleans.

This report draws such conclusions, proposes such lessons, and outlines such a plan.

Drawing on an analysis of New Orleans' recent development history, New Orleans After the Storm: Lessons from the Past, A Plan for the Future shows how the region's past development trends exacerbated the catastrophe, and suggests how the region might rise again on a better footing by undoing the mistakes of the past.

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http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20051012_concentratedpoverty.htm

Katrina's Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America

by Alan Berube and Bruce Katz
October 2005

Executive Summary

Hurricane Katrina's assault on New Orleans' most vulnerable residents and neighborhoods has reinvigorated a dialogue on race and class in America. This paper argues that the conversation should focus special attention on alleviating concentrated urban poverty-the segregation of poor families into extremely distressed neighborhoods.

Overall, nearly 50,000 poor New Orleanians lived in neighborhoods where the poverty rate exceeded 40 percent. New Orleans ranked second among the nation's 50 largest cities on the degree to which its poor families, mostly African American, were clustered in extremely poor neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward. In these places, the average household earned barely more than $20,000 annually, only one in twelve adults held a college degree, four in five children were raised in single-parent families, and four in ten working-age adults-many of them disabled-were not connected to the labor force.

Areas of concentrated poverty are not confined to New Orleans. Despite improvements in the 1990s, nearly every major American city still contains a collection of extremely poor, racially segregated neighborhoods. In cities as diverse as Cleveland, New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, more than 30 percent of poor blacks live in areas of severe social and economic distress.

These neighborhoods did not appear by accident. They emerged in part due to decades of policies that confined poor households, especially poor black ones, to these economically isolated areas. The federal government concentrated public housing in segregated inner-city neighborhoods, subsidized metropolitan sprawl, and failed to create affordable housing for low-income families and minorities in rapidly developing suburbs, cutting them off from decent housing, educational, and economic opportunities.

A large body of research has demonstrated that concentrated poverty exacts multiple costs on individuals and society. These costs come in the form of: reduced private-sector investment and local job opportunities; increased prices for the poor; higher levels of crime; negative impacts on mental and physical health; low-quality neighborhood schools; and heavy burdens on local governments that induce out-migration of middle-class households. Together, these factors combine to limit the life chances and quality of life available to residents of high-poverty neighborhoods.

With a set of smart policy tools and a booming economy, progress was made in the 1990s towards reducing concentrated poverty in America. Yet recent federal actions, such as the gutting of the highly successful HOPE VI program, reductions in funding and flexibility for the Housing Choice Voucher program, and proposed cuts to the Earned Income Tax Credit, threaten to reduce mobility for low-income families and erase the advances made in the 1990s.

Congress should consider several policy options to put the nation back on track towards alleviating concentrated poverty, by supporting choice and opportunity for lower-income residents in distressed neighborhoods. Options include: restoring funding to the HOPE VI program; increasing support for housing vouchers; piloting a "housing-to-school" voucher initiative; adopting President Bush's proposed homeownership tax credit; targeting affordable housing to low-poverty areas with the assistance of regional housing corporations; and expanding the EITC to help working families afford housing in better neighborhoods.

Though these policies alone cannot erase the gaps between rich and poor in America, creating more neighborhoods of choice and connection would offer millions of low-income Americans-especially children-a true chance at social and economic mobility.