Rebuilding After Katrina: Can New Orleans and the Gulf Coast Face the Hard Questions?
Architectural Record, June 2006
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Neighborhoods on stilts?
The October Charrette participants in Mississippi had an especially hard time coming to terms with FEMA advisories that demanded raising houses 15 feet or more — especially as many homes that had been raised according to earlier advisories were swept away by the 30-foot-high storm surge. The Biloxi charrette proposed rejecting the FEMA elevations (which are, at least for a year, advisory) in favor of as-yet-unproven “submersible” construction. This meant that the plans widely publicized from the early charrettes, with their classical town squares and trolleyed boulevards lined with trees, don’t offer a realistic way to face the key rebuilding question. “It’s one thing to make places physically attractive, but one of the messages I am delivering is, can these plans make towns that will survive future storms?” asked Gavin Smith, the Director of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s Office of Recovery and Renewal. “They must marry the mitigation element to the design element.” He advised that coastal communities consider not only elevating buildings but “relocating vulnerable properties or guiding development away from hazardous areas.”
The idea of entire neighborhoods perched on stilts, hard to take as it may be, has spurred almost no consideration locally of the obvious alternative: setbacks and no-build buffer zones advocated by planners and coastal geologists since Hurricane Camille smashed into the Gulf Coast in 1969. “The simple answer to hurricanes is to keep people from building on the oceanfronts,” says Robert Young, an associate professor in the department of Geosciences at Western Carolina University in Collowhee, North Carolina. “Setbacks would reduce a lot of damage especially from smaller hurricanes.” The rub is, adds his colleague Joe Kelly, “that this is a very political realm, where there are a lot of displaced and financially injured voters, and politicians who want to help them, even if it’s not in the public good in the long run.” (He’s a geologist at the University of Maine who researched the vulnerability of the Mississippi River and the Gulf coast for the National Academy of Sciences.) For this reason, says Young, “You’ll notice that scientists are rarely invited to participate in the rebuilding commissions.”
The extraordinary cost of Katrina may force a paradigm shift on coastal development, especially if the number of violent storms continues to grow, as many scientists predict. Rebuilding also is highly dependent on the continued availability of federal flood insurance, which is supposed to pay for itself but saw a staggering $23-billion loss for Katrina alone — costs taxpayers have had to pick up. This figure does not include the tens of billions paid out by private insurers as well as rebuilding aid that will total more than $34 billion once Congress finalizes its latest package (it had not at press time) not to mention emergency operations and recovery aid.
Reinventing storm resistance
Even with the new aid billions, it is likely that some communities will not fully recover, which makes the formerly unthinkable thinkable. Governments could buy demolished properties at pre-Katrina values and bank them as either a flood buffer or designated only for development that recognizes the site’s vulnerability. This is an idea that has never been taken seriously before, though it was floated in the “shrinking footprint” scenarios for New Orleans.
Young suggests taking the buyout process out of politics by establishing a commission along the lines of the one used to decide which military bases should be closed as obsolete. “It would decide what should be rebuilt and what shouldn’t,” he explained, adding that there is precedent for these actions in England and Wales. He also proposes that residents who insist on living in areas of known vulnerability assume the entire costs of insurance and of rebuilding public infrastructure, which in too many locales has been replaced again and again. “The people building are not the ones paying. It is the taxpayers.”
New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Gulf still struggle to build trust, and convene leadership in a way that values a necessity for change while respecting peoples’ values and desires. Almost nothing was done to improve hurricane readiness after the devastations of Camille, and that pattern, without credible leadership, threatens to repeat itself. For many, a path-of-least-resistance rebuilding that avoids the hard questions looks like the only rebuilding alternative. Perkes, on the ground in Mississippi, finds himself pulled in opposite directions daily. “We’re exploring innovations and new practices,” he says, working with Mississippi State and other colleges. “We’re looking at opportunities to build differently. But sometimes you just want to help people make sure they’ve got a good kitchen layout.”