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Which elements that you and your colleagues have studied are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt?
There was so much damage to the city, so many critical infrastructure elements that need to be repaired or replaced, it is difficult to know where to begin.
“Whether” New Orleans will be rebuilt is not even an option; why is this even part of the question? I think I’ve addressed this in previous posts, so I will not bother here. The “how” is much more important. From all the discussion in the Environment and Urban Planning research group, I’d have to place the levees and housing first and foremost.
Now, the Army Corps of Engineers has done some work on the levees, but not what needs to be done, which is they need to be completely redesigned and rebuilt. The old system has already proven itself inadequate, and we can expect more storms in the Gulf of Mexico of the same or greater severity. The levees need to be upgraded, they need to incorporate designated flood zones to mitigate stress on the levees and canals, and they need to institute a program of wetlands restoration to provide a buffer against storm surges.
Housing. Obviously, it needs to be rebuilt. We decided on mixed-use zoning as a priority, but based on Mary’s post a couple of weeks ago, about the FEMA-sponsored bus service between Baton Rouge and New Orleans coming to an end, I think this needs to be a somewhat lesser priority. Rent controls need to be put in place. The only reason New Orleans residents, residents who have jobs in the city, are still living in Baton Rouge is that rent in New Orleans has doubled or tripled from pre-Katrina levels. Residents are being shut out of the city because of greed and immoral opportunism. Rents need to be returned to their pre-Katrina rates so that the residents and workers can return to the city. Only then should attention be paid to working on the neighborhood zoning.
Obviously, there are many other things that need to be done. Police services need quite a bit of work, hospitals and other public institutions need repair and upgrades, the issue of literal mountains of garbage and toxic waste needs to be addressed. But for my money, it’s the levees and housing. Make sure the city is safe, and make sure that people can afford to return. Achieving these two things at the beginning, and the other problems will be much easier to address.Tyler, I wrote about creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to South Africa, Peru and Greensboro, NC for our research group. I'm not sure of the cost, but the cost is greater if we don't deal with issues of race in this country eventually.
Nancy Lynn
“Which elements that you and your colleagues have studied are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt?” Based on my research group, there are two important issues that are most important in deciding whether and how New Orleans will be rebuilt. The two issues are race, gender, age and class and levees and engineering.
Race, gender, age and class
It doesn’t matter how New Orleans is re-built if the people making those decisions are white, rich, able-bodied males and only those who are able to return to the Crescent City are white, rich families. Race, gender, class and age continue to be the “elephants in the room” in rebuilding New Orleans that no one wants to talk about, everyone is afraid to talk about and they continue to be the secrets that keeps us apart. Most whites, including liberal ones, do not want to live next door to African-Americans or Latinos, rich or white. We must also realize that New Orleans isn’t just the south or the “deep south” or the “dirty south”, it’s the deep, deep and dirty south. With the recent elections, analysts now believe the Republican Party’s strength is centralized in just a few southern states, which include Louisiana. So, while the U.S. has become the most multi-cultural, multi-ethnic in its history, certain southern states are still locked in a black versus white, rich versus poor, young versus old mindset.
Michael Eric Dyson in his landmark book, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, writes about this disparity in the reporting on Hurricane Katrina. The reporting of the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina were equivalent to episodes of Mad TV, showing many images of African-American men with no shirts on, babies without clothing and diapers, close-up images of the swollen, red eyes of Americans who had not slept for days and elderly residents sitting in wheelchairs almost dead. Missing were the thousands of other Americans, Latinos, indigenous tribal communities, Vietnamese, Filipinos and whites. It must also be stated that many of the folks who died were elderly, physically-challenged residents of New Orleans. Children, the elderly, the physically-challenged and others are dependent on the Federal government and laws and systems are in place to help them. In the African value system, the elderly are considered griots that are looked to for wisdom and advice. The American people turned away as children, who represent our future, and griots, who are the reflections of our past and seers of our future, were not treated with full-humanity! In not responding for five days, the American government was sending a clear sign that it is moving back to a Darwinian concept of existence – “survival of the fittest” mentality – with echoes of Nazism – Aryanism. In other words, we are moving backwards from acting like human beings to non-being. These should not be the tenets of the American democratic system. To that end, A Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to ones in South Africa and Greensboro, NC, should be created to record the oral experiences of the Katrina survivors, to record the lives of the Katrina dead and to work on destroying the inherent racism that exists in New Orleans.Levees, engineering and the environment
A wonderful article by the Tulane Environmental Law Journal, www.saveourwetlands.org/cansaveno.html, summarizes better than myself the importance of levees, engineering and the environment in rebuilding New Orleans. The article outlines 10 main steps that need to be taken to rebuild New Orleans:
1. Draw the maps. Not just a flood protection plan. At the direction of Congress, the Corps of Engineers is presently engaged in a hurry up offense to design hurricane protection for New Orleans and South Louisiana. Without knowing what our restoration goals can and will be, and without making any conscious decisions about human development in response. To be sure, we need to know what the engineering possibilities are. But they beg the question, engineering to do what? Right now, we have the cart before the horse.
2. Review the bidding. The Corps and other agencies have projects pending that could seriously compromise an all-out effort to restore the coastal zone. Morganza to the Gulf is one; several port and waterway expansions are in the wings as well, new MRGO’s (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) in the making. That Congress already authorized them is not persuasive. Like MRGO, they were authorized in a very different day under very different circumstances. Katrina changes the equation. They need to be looked at again, new restoration map in hand. They should be consistent with the future, not the past.
3. Free the upstream sediments. The Mississippi today at the latitude of New Orleans carries about 80 million tons of sediment a year. An impressive figure, until we realize that a century and half ago it carried about 400 million. We can set aside whether those 400 million tons were natural background or were bumped up by land clearing (although the diaries of Marquette and Joliet, floating down the Mississippi in the 1600s, reported silt and mud raging in from the Missouri so violently that it made their passage dangerous and discolored the waters for days). The point is that most of those silts today lie behind dams on the upper watershed. We need them, and the Mississippi is their natural conveyor belt. The bumper sticker should read: Free the Mississippi 400 Million.
4. Free the rivers. Which, until today, we have tiptoed around with a few, very expensive freshwater diversion structures whose efficacy has been further compromised by their capacity and politics. Too much money goes to too much hardware with too little output. We do not need to regulate outflows from the Mississippi with complex machinery. We can cut sills in the levees to replicate natural crevasses, and let the river do its thing.
5. Cut the upstream fertilizers. This can be reduced by 50% within 5 years, then by 50% again. Upstream agriculture is locked into a prisoner’s dilemma of chemical nutrients, most of which end up polluting the Louisiana coastal zone. The upstream states are in denial, so is Louisiana for that matter, and EPA is in hiding. It is time to insist. A less polluted river is not a matter of aesthetics. It is a matter of survival.
6. Heal the marsh. This is hemorrhaging from the inside out. Push in the spoil banks. Crevasse the ones that remain. Plant grass. Pretend we’re farmers. We can build wetlands, if necessary, by hand. Not fully—manmade marshes still come out looking a little weird—but we need to rebuild a base for natural processes to then improve upon. A coast fully ceded to open water will be harder to restore.
7. Stop the bleeding. We will have to make historic commitments to hold onto even the base of coastal wetlands we currently enjoy, an order of magnitude beyond the ambition of Coast 2050. Meanwhile, we continue to permit dredging and filling of the same wetlands for access canals, waste dumps, new subdivisions and the like. Every acre of the coast we allow to be destroyed is certain loss. Attempts to mitigate these losses produce poorly, when they produce at all. More often they simply produce payments to the state, a sort of coastal-destruction tax. An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of restoration.
8. Make space for natural processes. Elevate roads and railroads. Open new floodways. Move oyster leases, consolidate energy, port and navigation facilities, zone development within protected areas and let the rest rebuild. We shouldn’t try to storm-proof the coastal zone, and the more we try to storm-proof the more we will lose.
9. Dare to think retreat. Coastal residents should be able to live where they wish, for as long as they wish. But they are also threatened, more each year. Some were wiped out entirely by Katrina and Rita. The hurricanes predicted for the next two decades will obliterate more. We should be able to maintain, on a sustainable basis, the docks, processing plants and other investment of a working bayou, if only through insurance. A sustainable economy is compatible with a sustainable zone. But residential development another thing. People and structures in the most vulnerable areas should be offered the opportunity to relocate in protected areas, at full and fair compensation. The costs of such a program will be more than offset by the savings in the attempt to protect these same residences forever, and in reduced losses to future storms. The more we delay this process, the harder it will be.
10. Face global warming. It is real. And it makes everything else we do to save the coast infinitely more difficult, if not impossible. What would such a plan look like, and what are its chances? Impossible to say, but not hard to guess. With enough bed load, use of the main rivers, active marsh healing and zero-base tolerance for new harms, we should be able to hold our own, building some deltas, shrinking some others, a process not unlike the one that created South Louisiana over many thousands of years. We could maintain. We could even grow the zone in places vital to the protection of New Orleans. And in that growing and maintaining we would support, once again, a renewable resource-based coastal community long after the oil and gas industry has run its string.
Natalia, thanks for posting the article, it shows that artists' like the Dave Matthews Band can truly help to make a difference in housing construction in the lower Ninth Ward. I hope other well known entertainers will also make challenge grants.
Dan
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