Rebuilding After Katrina: Can New Orleans and the Gulf Coast Face the Hard Questions?
Architectural Record, June 2006
In the chaotic weeks that followed the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, volunteers from all over the country kept stopping Bill Stallworth on the streets of Biloxi, Mississippi, and asking him if he needed help. Stallworth, a city councilman, was amazed that volunteers would show up without knowing where to go or how to help. “There’s got to be a better way to channel this,” he thought. He had met Sherry-Lea Bloodworth when both helped hundreds evacuate the city before the storm. With her two young children safely evacuated to her parent’s home an hour and a half away in Mobile, Alabama, Bloodworth was hired by Architecture for Humanity to become its Gulf Coast Coordinator. With a grant, some donated air-conditioning units, and some of the wandering volunteers, she and Stallwroth set up the East Biloxi Coordination and Relief Center in a flooded AME church.
With Stallworth’s knowledge of the community, Bloodworth and a horde of volunteers in short order divided the blasted blocks of East Biloxi into a grid, so that the Center could systematically organize and deploy teams from what became dozens of organizations from all over America. The Hurricane Relief Corps worked with Buddhist, Latter Day Saints, and Islamic Relief groups. Their first task was to help homeowners assess damage. (“The FEMA assessments were all done from the air and were not accurate,” she said in an interview at the center.) East Biloxi had been home to an aging population of various races and ethnicities, drawn for generations by the Gulf’s seafood bounty, mixed with relative newcomers from Vietnam, who had operated much of the fishing fleet and local seafood processing industries decimated by the storm. Aid groups assisted homeowners in removing ruined possessions, ripping out damaged finishes to dry the ubiquitous mold, and preparing homes for restoration.
By January, the Center had coordinated the cleanup of 1,000 homes and was able to send volunteers to help those owners of modest means rebuild. Many residents could not afford adequate insurance or had not been eligible for flood insurance. The Center demonstrates just how much well-organized volunteers can accomplish. Regrettably, the planning process for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is not readily transcending such ad hoc efforts.
Biloxi: Cottages, condos, or casinos?
Infused with ready cash and swarms of imported workers, three of eleven heavily damaged Biloxi casinos quickly reopened after the storm. They swarm with gamblers cocooned from the landscape of devastation in hastily constructed beige-painted halls jammed with slot machines. With visions of a rebuilding bonanza, officials quickly approved expansive gambling growth, which may lead to 20 new facilities. Charrettes — workshops that involved citizens in literally sketching visions for their recovered towns — conducted last October by the Congress for the New Urbanism (the report here) proposed infilling the flattened blocks of East Biloxi with cottages at much the same scale that existed. But a casino land rush has targeted the same streets now that officials have loosened zoning that previously confined casinos to small shorefront areas. Modest plots worth perhaps $50,000 began selling for five times that.
At the time of the charrette some thought that casinos and highrise condominiums could encircle the peninsula on which Biloxi sits, creating a storm-surge-resistant fortress. While naive at best, the perception of casinos and condos as hurricane bastions persists even though rains as well as floodwaters made most of the city’s existing highrises uninhabitable.
Many long-time residents realize that a city walled off from the sea by towers sitting on parking ramps isn’t much of a city. They remember a lowrise community of porched homes and modest motels facing the gulf through the entwined branches of ancient live oaks. On the other hand, observes David Hardy, AIA, of Biloxi-based Guild Hardy Architects, “When Harrah’s casino wants to do a billion dollar project, that’s hard to ignore.” The official acquiescence to a future that may bring a Florida-style wall of highrises caused Moule & Polyzoides, who had led planning after the CNU charrette, to resign. In too much of Biloxi, Elizabeth Moule, explained, “instead of building to the 20-foot height of a cottage, you are now allowed to build upwards of 20, 25, 30 stories.” She fears the upzoning will lead to “a disjunctive mess,” that won’t bring as much development as anticipated. “You’ve dislodged all the citizens who need to get back to their houses,” she explained, “while speculators sit on land waiting for what they think will be full market value. So you’ll see a tower here, a cottage there, and six parking lots.”
Distrust stalls New Orleans planning
In New Orleans, the blocks of intact-looking but empty houses seemed to stretch endlessly in the months after Katrina, as uncertainty about the prospects for rebuilding dragged on. Even as residents began gamely throwing out mold-encrusted furniture and carpets, the streets, lacking electricity, fell silent at night, with the darkness only occasionally dispelled by headlights. By late March, however, many neighborhoods bustled with cleanup activity, the narrow yards jammed with FEMA trailers propped on wobbly piles of concrete blocks.
As recovery quickened block by block, New Orleans’ official planning process, undertaken by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC), floundered under a national spotlight. Its urban-planning committee, led by Philadelphia-based Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT), in January proposed a moratorium on building in the hardest-hit neighborhoods until some clearer picture developed of how many people would come back. Enraged residents, exhausted by government failures and broken promises, declared the moratorium a death knell to their neighborhoods, and Mayor C. Ray Nagin rapidly abandoned the idea.
The BNOBC plan, however, inherited anger from an earlier Urban Land Institute recommendation that the city shrink its physical footprint so that it could efficiently serve — and levees could protect — what is predicted to be a far smaller population. Allen Eskew, AIA, of locally based architect Eskew + Dumez + Ripple, described the dilemma: “Prestorm, the city held 480,000 people, which was down from a 630,000 peak footprint in the late sixties. With the RAND Corporation projecting a stable population of only 272,000, this is a huge infrastructure to maintain in a city with limited resources for a such a diminished population.”
Though Eskew&rsqo;s formulation was a rational one, it was foreign to a city where people had gotten used to making their own way and where neighbors had long depended on each other. You were expected to call out to your neighbor, asking if she needed anything when you went to the corner store. If you didn’t wave hello as you passed by people beating the heat on the city’s ubiquitous porches, you were considered to be “walking over them.” On one desolate street, a woman had taken up her customary perch on her porch in spite of the fact that there were no passersby to greet and no neighbors to talk to. Under such circumstances the fierce desire of residents to return to exactly their own street and to exactly their own house — one their family may have owned for generations — was not surprising.
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