$14 Billion New Orleans Plan May Strand Neighborhoods

Bloomberg, February 14, 2007

For months, New Orleans janitors, housewives and policemen have met in church halls and tents trying to envision a city that could rise from the trauma of Katrina.

Their collected opinions became part of a $14 billion proposal, rolled out by planners and New Orleans officials on Jan. 29, to avert the further abandonment of their hurricane-shrunken city. But this long-anticipated Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), like others before it, lacks the vision — and teeth — to save the city.

The city has desperately needed a plan to set priorities and funnel aid, but the reason it has taken so long is evident in the low-lying, upscale neighborhood of Lakeview. Ranch houses that sat for weeks in rafter-high water are now boarded up and weed-fronted. One tilts drunkenly toward a bandbox-tidy rebuilt one.

UNOP advocates a menu of incentives that would encourage citizens in these wettest neighborhoods to move to higher ground and cluster around rebuilt parks, schools and other facilities. (There is also aid anticipated for renters and owners of all incomes, and grants to upgrade flood-resistance.)

Who will tell those in the lowlands that their repaired homes, in which they have invested enormous faith as well as cash, will be left behind, probably without necessary infrastructure, as neighbors move to higher ground?

More than half the city’s evacuated population has yet to return, hence the “jack-o’-lantern effect”: local shorthand for the blocks of abandoned homes where only two or three families have begun to rebuild.

Getting neighbors to trade properties so they can move to the highest ground can work, but it requires that they think of themselves as stewards of -- and invested in -- a neighborhood rather than owners of fixed parcels of land. That's a tough sell anywhere.

Seven separate, and often competing, official plans have grappled with this dilemma, as well as dozens more “visioning” initiatives undertaken in the past 18 months by foundations, universities and some three dozen architecture schools around the country.

A Dozen Teams

The UNOP was supposed to find consensus on such tough issues. Sponsored by the city and the Greater New Orleans Foundation and aided by the Rockefeller Foundation, Concordia, a local planning and architecture firm, put together 12 teams to create a single vision for the city.

For the many neighborhoods less affluent than Lakeview, the plan offers a menu of aid to spur responsible rebuilding. But neither New Orleans nor Louisiana can afford what's proposed, and the ideas rely on categories of federal aid (like renter subsidies) that have been whittled to near nothing over the last 25 years.

Prudently, if only from an accounting standpoint, the plan pegs rebuilding projects to the rate at which neighborhoods repopulate. Unfortunately, this path fails to dispel the uncertainty that has paralyzed many potential returnees: What if I come back but the services my neighborhood needs fail to materialize?

Shrinkage Inevitable?

“We need a strategy for repopulation, not for shrinkage,” declared Karen Gadbois, a local activist who has represented her Carrollton neighborhood during the planning. Neither UNOP nor anything before has proposed a compelling economic-growth scenario for the city, so planning for shrinkage is prudent.

It is also politically incendiary.

In November 2005, the respected Urban Land Institute suggested moving returnees to the highest, least-damaged, best-drained land. Mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC) made a similar recommendation soon after.

But Sherman Copelin, president of the New Orleans East Business Association, wasn’t happy that BNOBC had designated his luxe but low-lying golf-course neighborhood a potential wetland.

“We organized,” Copelin told me on a recent visit. The resulting white-hot anger, unleashed in front of national media, caused Nagin and BNOBC to beat a hasty retreat.

The newest plan deploys new-fangled gimmicks to defuse the anger about shrinking the city’s footprint. As planner Peter Calthorpe put it, “we gave people information and let them create plans.”

“Speed Dating”

Planning firms presented themselves for citizen inspection in a giant tent in City Park and were subjected to “speed dating,” as one participant called it. Neighborhoods voted for the planners who looked best to them. It was like the TV show “Survivor,” though no teams were voted out of the tent.

This super-democratized planning feels your pain. Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer shepherded thousands of citizens through “congresses” that considered what-to-do ideas in huge computer-networked meeting rooms hung with giant video screens. (She's the founder and president of AmericaSpeaks, dedicated to empowering ordinary citizens.)

Her keyboard-wielding “theme teams” processed citizen “input” into sound bites, while she, standing at a high podium in red bangs and granny glasses, choked up: “What a human being needs to stay on the side of hope is to know that they are loved.”

The result? Difficult, longer-term issues are couched in ambiguities that help politicians save face, while video cameras zoom in on the real anguish of retirees who troop to these meetings from rickety FEMA trailers.

Citizen Input

The best thing about this process is that so many thousands participated. Even skeptics felt empowered. “We've been finding out how things work because we've been engaged,” Gadbois explained.

The plan now heads to the city council (which already has endorsed but not acted upon a planning effort it commissioned from Florida-based Lambert Advisory,), then to the mayor (who organized BNOBC, then repudiated it), then to the Louisiana Recovery Authority (which is brewing its own plan), with an outcome no one can predict.