A house repaired next to two still-abandoned ones
Abandonment near Claiborne Avenue
Can a “Shrinking Footprint” Save New Orleans?
Bloomberg, January 23, 2006
While in small sections of ravaged New Orleans, contractors clog the streets with pickups and piles of new siding and roofing, a visitor is challenged to look into the future and see an old city spring to life.
About half the households were sunk in a watery miasma four feet deep or more last August. I recently toured the worst areas with local architect Allen Eskew, who favors a “shrinking footprint” to rebuild New Orleans. That’s post-Katrina lingo for consolidating the city in areas that are the highest above sea level. Understandably, the concept provokes rage within the poorest, flood-prone neighborhoods.
By early January, about 80,000 residents had returned to the city, about one-sixth of the pre-hurricane population. According to research by the RAND Corp., the figure may stabilize at about 272,000 three years from now — still only about half the population before the hurricane struck.
“We can’t maintain our old infrastructure with such a diminished population and such limited resources,” Eskew observed as we drove around the city.
When the “shrinking footprint” idea was first proposed by the Urban Land Institute think tank, former residents of the most-damaged neighborhoods reacted with fury. Because so many of the hardest-hit areas were predominantly black, the proposal became a racial lightening rod.
Rebuilding in risk-prone areas may defy rationality, but returning to the same house on the same lot, in the same street and neighborhood, is almost a primordial desire for many New Orleans residents.
‘The Bubble’
My tour of the city with Eskew graphically demonstrated the titanic challenges ahead.
We began in the section closest to the river, on the high ground that didn’t flood. It’s called “The Bubble” because this part of the city looks normal, even though only a few tourists stroll the French Quarter. Even in The Bubble, though, restaurants and bars struggle to reopen because the city can’t house people who earn service-job wages.
As we drove north, descending imperceptibly, the smudgy lines left behind by the floodwaters on the buildings we passed gradually moved higher. The scale of the destruction became more obvious, as did the piles of debris. Sad as it was, the mounds of garbage indicated that someone had at least returned and begun to clean up and make way for rebuilding. On too many streets, though, the boards hastily nailed over the windows before the storm reminded us of the many who have not come back.
Flooded Rooftops
Eskew hopes the planning process recently outlined by the Bring Back New Orleans Commission can “interweave racial and social justice” and find a sustainable size and form for New Orleans. But determining precisely what properties might have to be sacrificed will test the wounded city’s mettle.
Lakeview, one of the lowest parts of the city, was submerged to its rooftops long enough for the salt water blown from the Gulf of Mexico to turn almost all the vegetation brown. Some homeowners are valiantly cleaning up. Others have reestablished “home” in 8-by-25-foot FEMA trailers, propped tenuously in the front yard on loose piles of concrete blocks and wedged into place with bits of plywood.
Home-gutting contractors have stripped the walls and ceilings of some houses down to the studs and ripped out doors and windows to dry the interiors. I could see all the way through homes that, only four months earlier, were inhabited by families going about their everyday routines. These ghostly, skeletal homes are a symbol of commitment — a first, defiant step toward rebuilding, no matter what the odds.
Waiting Game
In theory, such houses can be salvaged. But Lakeview may prove too low to be affordably rebuilt. FEMA maps that establish supposedly safe elevations — ones that also will allow homeowners to get mortgages and insurance — have yet to be issued for New Orleans, though storm-ravaged Mississippi communities have had them since October.
Without a clear commitment to rebuild and strengthen the levees enough to guard against another major hurricane, “No one can guarantee which areas can be protected from floods,” Eskew said.
The Lakeview neighborhood was victimized by a major levee break along the 17th Street Canal. The wall of water carried houses for blocks, crumpling cars in its path to a third their former size. Crushed homes finally acted as a dam to stop the raging flow. In some of the remains I could detect a crazily tilted house shape, but others had simply shattered into fields of debris.
Demolition Delayed
Passing the remaining refugee tents in City Park, we headed toward the now infamous Lower Ninth Ward. Among the city's most damaged neighborhoods, it has become a touchstone of how deeply divided the city is about rebuilding and how distrustful its largely black population is of government — local, state, and national.
Some areas of the Lower Ninth that weren’t destroyed by the flooding have been “red-tagged” as structurally unsound and scheduled for demolition. Many regard the bulldozing as an effort to empty the “new” New Orleans of poor and working-class blacks that have lived in the Lower Ninth for generations.
‘Stop The Bulldozing!” signs have sprouted on houses throughout the ward and Common Ground, an activist group, has established an “aid center” in the battered remnant of what is probably an unsalvageable structure.
While I admire the gutsy way they’ve cut through politicians’ empty promises and ignored wasteful bureaucratic niceties, I fear they’re fighting a losing battle.