New Orleans Recovery Case Study

8/14/2019 New Orleans Recovery Case Study

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New Orleans Recovery Case Study

(Manuscript Under Review)

by

Ray Mikell

Affiliation: University of New Orleans


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Abstract:New Orleans Recovery Case Study (Manuscript Under Review)

After Hurricane Katrina's storm surge inundated New Orleans in August 2005, national opinion makers

began debating the possibility of shrinking the city's physical size. Formal proposals to do this were

created later, after local civic elites and governmental authorities debated the matter. These proposals

failed, but in the process helped fuel an increase in local civic engagement. Unfortunately, this study

argues, the effect of this increase was muted due to fractured relations between these groups, and these

groups and city government. More specifically, the research suggests that Mayor Ray Nagin's

administration failed to successfully engage with newly resurgent neighborhood groups, squandering

an opportunity to increase cross-city cooperation. The study uses a variety of methods, most

prominently among them social network analysis, in examining these concerns. Recent research on

civic engagement and urban resilience informs this study. The piece concludes with a list of

recommendations for post-disaster policymaking and research on civic engagement in post-disaster

planning and administration.


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New Orleans Recovery Case Study (Manuscript Under Review)

Few, if any, of the national pundits and opinion leaders who wrote about New Orleans in the

wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the historic city bothered to ask its citizens about plans for

the city's recovery. Thousands of homes were still underwater from storm surge infiltration when the

unsolicited advice regarding the city's future came anyway, fast and hard. It came from self-appointed

experts and frequently-cited authorities alikefrom journalists and pundits (Garreau 2005), as well as

economists (Glaeser 2005), geologists, architects, planners, and countless Internet bloggers. Many of

these opinion makers suggested that New Orleans did not need to be (or would not be) rebuilt; if not at

all, then certainly not in its entirety. Dennis Hastert, then speaker of the U.S. House of

Representatives, bluntly summed up the arguments just two days after the storm's August 25, 2005

landfall. "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed" (Katel 2006).

These individuals were advising that New Orleans shrink its physical size, something that no

large city had apparently done after a disaster in modern-era history, at least in dramatic fashion (Vale

and Campanella 2005). Despite this intimidating historical hurdle, and the fact that most residents of

the Crescent City's flooded areas were still evacuees, a debate also ensued among the city's civic elite

over whether to "shrink the footprint," as the idea to shrink the citys physical size came to be known.

The issue made its way to the top of local policy agenda about three months after the storm, when

architects, developers and academics--mostly from other cities--came to town to advise a mayoral

advisory panel called the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB) about recovery efforts. Yet

just two years later, pre-storm status quo reigned in New Orleans. All the furious debate changed

nothing.

The talk did have one unintentional side-effect, however. It led to renewed civic engagement in

heavily flooded areas, especially those with more middle class populations. Existing neighborhood

organizations increased their membership numbers, and new umbrella organizations were formed.


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Soon, national universities and foundations began working with them. This increase in engagement

was seen locally and nationally as a focus of hope for the city and its recovery.

Before going further, it is worth noting that post-Katrina recovery efforts have won little in the

way of scholarly attention, especially when compared to how much attention the initial, botched

emergency response received. Despite the fact that the citys sometimes Byzantine politics is as much

the stuff of popular legend as its Mardi Gras, the case of New Orleans' recovery era may well have

wider relevance, especially as regards the role of civic engagement in urban resilience.

There has been a resurgence of interest in civic engagement among academics in public affairs-

related disciplines in recent years. Most recently, Putnam (2007) has suggested that what he terms

social capital--a combination of ties between individuals and groups in a community, along with the

norms and trust engendered or bolstered by social network ties--is often lacking in areas with ethnic

and socioeconomic diversity. In education policy studies, Stone, Henig, Jones and Pierannunzi (2001)

and Orr (1999), have suggested that citywide policy is likely to be ineffective without strong intra-city

and cross-sectoral ties among citizens, community groups, government and administration and private

sector leaders and organizations.

While New Orleans may not be as racially diverse as the largest cities in the United States, it

has certainly had its share of racial and socioeconomic division. Unfortunately, as a social network

analysis study administered in connection with project suggests, this limited the efficaciousness of

more citywide recovery efforts. This division appeared to contribute to a marked lack of intra-city,

cooperative relationships among citizens, community-based groups, government leaders and

institutions and other private organizations. Whatever the case, it is argued in this study that a lack of

strong intra-city relationships likely kept the renewed civic engagement from having more of an impact

on the city's recovery than may have been possible. Mayor Ray Nagin and his administration,

meanwhile, declined to engage with more active neighborhood groups. The result was a noticeably


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slow and spotty recovery. What the city lacked was, in short, what Comfort (2006) suggested that New

Orleans sorely needed--something she called governance, a model of civic engagement that includes all

sectors of its population, including citizens, government leaders and civic elites. She echoed Burns and

Thomas (2006), who attributed the citys failures before and after Katrina to its lack of an urban

regime; this being loosely defined as a coalition of government leaders, important private sector actors

and other interests of the sort Stone (1989) saw as essential for effective urban governance. Diverse

interests did not share long-term policy goals, but instead formed smaller or ad hoc coalitions similar to

Helco's (1978) issue networks for what were typically one-shot initiatives.

This lack of a citywide policymaking coalition or of authenticgovernance had earlier led to the

demise of proposals to shrink the city's footprint, as well as to the backlash that resulted in an increase

in neighborhood-level civic engagement. Consequently, the social network analysis study and

recommendations regarding research and policymaking are preceded by a half-descriptive, half-

analytical examination of the post-Katrina planning process, including the backlash sparked by initial

proposals to shrink the city's size. This section features an introduction to demographic, historical and

geographic material that was of import to the footprint debate, and that continued to inform relations

among neighborhood groups and government in New Orleans. Finally, sections below are informed by

literature on post-disaster resilience, as well as civic engagement and social capital. Data gathered

though multiple methods is featured, including documentary evidence, observation (e.g., of planning

meetings) and survey data.

A lethal cocktail: The role of race, class and homeownership

As almost anyone who paid attention to media accounts of Katrina's aftermath might have

predicted, race and class issues were bound to be important variables in New Orleans' post-storm

planning and recovery process. Prior to the disaster, the city had been overwhelmingly African-

American, with a 67.5 percent black majority, according to 2004 U.S. Census estimates. Most of the


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serious flooding occurred in majority black neighborhoods besides, due in part to legacy of racial

segregation and discrimination that forced or created incentives that led black residents, particularly

lower-income blacks, into less desirable (typically, lower-lying) neighborhoods (Lewis 2003,

Campanella 2006). Some of these areas were still marked by severe poverty, including the Lower

Ninth Ward, whose extreme floodingand the isolation of its poorest residents after the stormmade it

an international symbol of American urban poverty and racial injustice.

As suggested by Campanella (2006), the story of New Orleans' race relations of the last half of

the 20th Century echoes the larger southern and American urban experiences. Its early racial history

and establishment under French and Spanish colonial authority was more unique, and gives the citys

history a comparatively exotic character. From its earliest years, the city had a significant population

ofgens de couleur libres (free persons of color). After the Supreme Courts sanction of state and local

de jure segregation inPlessy v. Fergusona case heard in part in New Orleans, with plaintiff Homer

Plessey, a descendant of the free Creolesformer slaves and Creole blacks were put on the same

separate-but-unequal footing (Thompson 2009).

Nevertheless, it was technology as much as the law that led to increased residential segregation

in the following century. First, the automobile made moving to areas further from the city center

easier. More importantly for New Orleans, the invention of the Wood Screw Pump in 1913 made it

possible to expand housing into areas formerly deemed unsuitable for human habitation. The

population thus began a march toward Lake Pontchartrain, albeit a slow one, due to the expense of

building flood control systems. The march quickened after the end of World War II, with one of the

largest and certainly the wealthiest areas settled then being the predominantly white Lakeview.

(Curiously, it was deemed attractive despite its low-lying setting, due mainly to its vicinity to Lake

Pontchartrain.) Many middle class black residents moved into neighborhoods in the Gentilly area, to

Lakeview's east.


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White out-migration eventually shifted to suburbs outside of Orleans Parish, but black residents

largely stayed within its borders. That white flight, and enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,

led to a potential side benefit for black residents; namely, black electoral dominance of local

government by the 1980s. No strong biracial electoral coalition ever developed. Instead, a pattern of

racial bloc voting with some racial crossover voting developed after the late 1960s in mayoral

elections, a pattern that held even in cases where both candidates were African-American (Liu and

Vanderleeuw 2007). This did not, however, translate into black economic dominance.

One result of the racial, and associated economic and political, separation that increased over

the decades was continued distrust of white elites among black residents, distrust that helped fuel talk

of a white political takeover and land grab post-Katrina.1 Certainly, urban renewal of the past half

century had a more negative impact upon blacks. A predominantly white group of New Orleanians

helped give birth to the battle for American historic preservation during the 1960s, when they fought

the proposed Vieux Carre Expressway, which would have run past Jackson Square. Their victory,

however, was a loss for residents in the historic, predominantly black Treme neighborhood, located

north of the French Quarter. An Interstate overpass was built there instead, and Treme's Claiborne

Avenue commercial district never fully recovered (Lewis 2003, 111-12). A large swath of the thriving

black middle class Sugar Hill neighborhood in Gentilly to the northeast was also demolished to build

an Interstate overpass.

Race was always a potential wrench that could be thrown into plans, then. A stress on race and,

to a lesser extent, lower-income status obscured other potentially important variables, however. One

was homeownership, and not only in Lakeview, but also in predominantly black and mixed race

sections of Gentilly. This was also true of Eastern New Orleans, which became a black middle class

haven in the 1980s. Meanwhile, before Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward had a higher rate of

homeownership than the city average. All of these areas experience catastrophic flooding, not just the


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Lower Ninth Ward. Gentilly and Lakeview, meanwhile, had higher percentage of elderly residents

than the city average, as well as a higher percentage of homes occupied by their owners for more than a

decade. Homeownership, age and length of residence all created at least a latent potential for strong

civic engagement (Rhoe and Stewart 1996).

Despite commonalities, homeowners in these disparate sections did not form demographically

mixed, cross-city coalitions to fight those proposing a smaller footprint. Still, what you had here was a

political minefield to cross all the same. There were issues of due process involved, issues of

environmental and racial justice, as well as of fiscal concern to address. Future public revenue was on

the line, in an already fiscally stretched city. Environmental sustainability and public safety shared the

stage with a host of other compelling issues.

That some civic leaders would seek to undertake serious land-use reform was not unusual.

Lewis and Mioch (2005) suggested that disasters have always acted as catalysts for spurring urban

areas to reduce their vulnerability, and to rewrite policies regarding development policies for disaster-

prone areas. This only stands to reason, the authors suggested, given that disasters seen as "natural" are

often largely the result of factors including inadequate planning, ill-regulated population density,

inappropriate construction practices and ecological imbalance, among others. "The solutions to

reducing vulnerability of urban areas, therefore, are not found on the drawing board alone, and lie in

improving decisions made in managing the growth and development of cities" (2005, 50).

On the other hand, according to Vale and Campanella (2005, 345-47), the very notion of urban

resilience in the wake of a disaster has been less typically driven by planners or any authorities than by

property owners, in a sort of socioeconomically productive form of denial. Consequently, they put

pressure on authorities to rebuild cities as they existed before disasters. As will be shown, homeowners

would play a central role in blocking plans for a smaller New Orleans footprint. A chronological

account of the birth and evolution of that proposal is presented below.


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The planning process: From shrinkage to"clustering"

The first formal smaller-footprint plan was introduced in New Orleans in late November 2005

by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a Washington, DC-based policy think tank with membership largely

taken from the real estate development industry. It sent a group of 50 architects, real estate developers,

academics and elected officials to New Orleans for hearings. The team interviewed some 300 residents

and held a "town hall" style meeting. It later presented its recommendations to the Bring New Orleans

Back Commission (BNOB), which had been created after Katrina to serve in an advisory capacity to

Mayor Ray Nagin. The BNOB, in turn, consisted of leaders from government, business and finance,

religious institutions and the legal community.

To most ULI members, closing or limiting redevelopment appeared only rational. All they

needed to hear, really, was that most flooded sections had been built on drained swampland, and had

long ago sunk below sea level from subsidence (Hart 2007). The team consequently suggested

rebuilding in stages, with immediate rehabilitation suggested for areas that remained largely dry after

Katrina or which were more lightly flooded, with moratoria on rebuilding elsewhere. The ULI team

simultaneously recommended the creation of a quasi-public recovery authority granted eminent domain

powers. The agency would have the power to decide whether to allow rebuilding or force buyouts

based upon factors including the extent of flooding in the past fifty years, the possibility of future

flooding, and historic value.

Residents and evacuees of flooded areas reacted badly to the ULI's recommendations--about as

badly as, or worse than, they reacted to earlier post-storm talk of moving the city's beloved New

Orleans Saints professional football team to San Antonio, Texas. Residents of these areas felt as if

planners wanted to punish them for failures of the federal hurricane and flood control system, failures

not acknowledged by the federal government until the release of an interagency study in June 2006. It


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soon became clear that New Orleans City Council members found the ULI's proposal objectionable

regardless (Mann 2006).

The BNOB leaders decided, based upon the harsh reaction, to move on. In so doing, they

consulted with planner John Beckman of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based firm Wallace Roberts &

Todd, who had worked with the city previously. He suggested that closing large swaths of the city was

"planning for failure" (Mann 2006). Even so, he went on to propose another rebuilding moratorium,

this one lasting four months. What made his proposal distinct was that it required citizen participation.

During the moratorium, neighborhoods would be required to prove their viability, even if most

residents had not returned. Finally, Beckman recommended the creation of another recovery agency

with eminent domain and buyout powers.

These plans were quickly rejected. It is essential to understand, first, that the BNOB proposal's

viability hinged upon the receipt of billions of federal dollars. Unfortunately, legislation proposed in

the U.S. House of Representatives by then-Rep. Richard Baker (R-Baton Rouge) that would have

provided these billions never made its way to the president. In January 2006, President Bush signaled

that he would veto the larger recovery bill on the grounds that its potential long-term expenseup to

$80 millionwas far too high (Baum 2006).2 The commission received a death blow when Nagin, who

was soon to face a reelection battle, publicly distanced himself from its proposals (Baum 2006, Mann

2006).

Two other planning processes followed the BNOB, including a New Orleans Council-funded

effort called theNew Orleans Neighborhood Redevelopment Plan, more popularly as theLambert

Plans, after a Miami, Florida real estate consultant who helped steer the project. This was a linked

series of plans created by flooded neighborhoods. To the council's dismay, the Greater New Orleans

Foundation challenged the plans' legitimacy on the grounds that a more authentically citywide plan was

required for receipt of federal recovery funds. This led to a local, state and federal agreement to back


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yet another citywide planning effort, the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP). Deliberative meetings

were held beginning in August 2006 within 13 planning districts and citywide, as well as in multiple

cities to involve more Katrina evacuees.

This process reintroduced the footprint issue in an understated, albeit clumsy, manner via

survey questions. At the first citywide meeting, for instance, participants were queried as to whether

they considered keeping the city's pre-Katrina layout as "important" or "very important," or the reverse.

A majority of the mostly white, middle class crowd answered that it was not very important. Later,

more demographically representative gatherings led to a seeming consensus in support of "clustering;"

that is, for increasing density within more populated or rapidly recovering sections of flooded areas

(UNOP 2007a, 5).

In March 2007, after the UNOP's approval by the city Planning Commission, the city's then

relatively new "recovery czar," planning professor Ed Blakely, produced a detailed, neighborhood-

centered recovery plan based on the clustering concept. His plan was to spur neighborhood

development by encouraging commercial development in 16 zones in all major city sections. By mid-

2008, however, funding for the plan seemed doubtful.

A matter of perspective: Rationality, science and NIMBYism

What had gone wrong here? First and foremost, planning leaders failed to deliberate and

engage with citizens, and thus reconcile their perspectives with those of citizens who had returned to

flooded areas (ones more likely to be homeowners). A headline in the city's Times-Picayune

newspaper for an article about the ULI plan suggested that there should have been no such problem. It

read, "Experts include science in rebuilding equation: Politics noticeably absent from plan." Politics

ended up entering the equation anyway, for residents saw at least some of the science as either not

applicable to their situation or up for debate.


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Among reduced footprint advocates, talk of levee failures was cast aside in favor of what was

termed a common-sense admonition against building below sea level. Advocates pointed to late 19th

Century maps of the city as showing that the city's dry and lightly flooded sections corresponded

remarkably to the city's older footprint. Accordingly, they saw the city's future in its past. Ironically,

though, it had been the audacity of building a city on such an unlikely site that lent New Orleans much

of its initial cachet (Lewis 2003). Admirers saw it as an oasis of civilization in the harshest of

environments, not a model of sustainability. The question now being asked was, in effect, Is there no

place to draw a line, no limit at which residents can agree to stop fighting nature?

In pondering the matter, one could do worse than to first consider Eastern New Orleans, site of

some of the deepest post-Katrina flooding, and to consider in more detail the claims of residents that

the area was deserving of rehabilitation. Sections that had been unsettled until the late 1970s had

sustained heavy flooding in earlier storms, including Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969. Meanwhile,

the Michoud fault line, located south of the area's residential sections, was leading the area to sink

faster than any other part of metropolitan region. The area also sits perilously close to Gulf of Mexico

given wetlands loss at Lake Borgne. The evidence against the residents' claims was thus strong. Its

predominantly black middle class populace was nevertheless more likely to blame post-Katrina

flooding on past engineering decisions that they felt exacerbated any natural problems. More to the

point, residents blamed their home turf's flooding on a "funnel effect" created as storm surge was

pushed into the area via an interconnected series of shipping channels to its south and west. These

included the city's Industrial Canal, which physically separated Eastern New Orleans from older

sections of the city. Winning particular scorn here as a "hurricane highway" was the seldom-used

Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO), which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers closed to traffic in

2009.


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West of the Industrial Canal, the most contentious debate focused on Broadmoor, a National

Register Historic District neighborhood that sits at what locals colloquially call "the bottom of the

bowl;" that is, at the lowest point on the French Quarter side of the Mississippi River (known locally as

the "East Bank") and outside of Eastern New Orleans. According to Colten (2005), Broadmoor

residents had filed more repetitive claims under FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)

than any other section of the New Orleans areas, largely as a result of a series of heavy rainfalls that

began in the 1970s (Colten 2005, 151). Broadmoor residents insisted, however, that as a consequence

of NFIP-forced improvements to its drainage system, problems with regular flooding had been largely

worked out before Katrina, and that their raised-basement, wood frame homes were built to withstand

such flooding better.

The ULI's John McIlwain would hear none of it:

There's a strong possibility that all of this (planning) will fail partly because of theefforts of people in Broadmoor. Rather than pull together to say how do we design acity that we can all live in that's better and safer for everyone, they're simply saying, 'Iwant my neighborhood back, the hell with you ... (Goldberg, 2006, 3).

What McIlwain saw as NIMBYism, however, Broadmoor residents saw as defending a way of

life and a historic neighborhood.

Campanella (2006a) suggested that neither residents of neighborhoods like Broodmoor, nor the

smaller footprint advocates, were ultimately wrong. People who lived in heavily flooded areas were

more likely than residents of unflooded ones to see all sections as under threat--as, curiously enough,

out-of-town advocates of resettlement were. Residents of "dry" areas, by contrast, were more likely to

endorse a limited rebuilding, but they did not unequivocally have science on their side. Variables such

as historic value were not easily quantified either, and not easily balanced against safety or

sustainability goals. There was, in short, probably no way for those involved in the immediate post-

Katrina planning in New Orleans to create an unequivocally rational rebuilding plan.


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This failure to reconcile perspectives by engaging with citizens gave residents of neighborhoods

such as Broadmoor and Eastern New Orleans a way to protect them from conversion to green space.

Racial or socioeconomic issues did not need to enter whatever debate or dialogue they had with

advocates of a smaller footprint. Such seemingly unemotional arguments did not, however, assure

them of receiving any help from local government after the failure of smaller footprint proposals.

Instead, residents were left largely on their own.

After the footprint debate: Civic engagement, mayor disengagement

After the ULI and BNOB proposals failed, evacuees from neighborhoods such as Broadmoor

and Eastern New Orleans were allowed to rebuild. The Nagin administration was lenient with

homeowners, frequently allowing those who had damage assessments of greater than 50 percent to

rebuild. Such assessments would have forced compliance with updated FEMA elevation guidelines,

had any been released. Other than the winking and nodding at damage assessments, however, those

who returned to New Orleans found little help from Nagin's office. His administration failed to engage

with citizens, or provide them much information and assistance in the months to come. Even

previously, when Lambert Plans and UNOP processes continued apace, these had seemingly no

connection to anything the Nagin administration was doing. No objective observer could likely have

answered a legitimate question being asked then, Who is in charge here?

Citizens, with the help of charitable foundations, non-profits and universities, stepped in to fill

the leadership vacuum. In a city with no history of much grass-roots engagement, neighborhood

organizations were seen by many observers as being more active than ever before (Horne and Nee

2006, Nelson, Ehrenfeuct and Laska 2007). The prototype for this apparent new era was the Broadmoor

Improvement Association (BIA), whose membership increased three-fold, to some six-hundred

members after Karina. Soon, the organization completed projects as diverse and complex as a

repopulation survey, an assessment of elementary education needs, and a probe of the city's pumping


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distrustful. Nagin may have underestimated the amount of suspicion that would be generated by the

BNOB process. Even so, as noted by McBride and Parker (2008), he won re-election in 2006 in part as

a result of black distrust of white elites, as opposed to distrust of government per se.

Within months of his reelection, however, Nagin's approval ratings declined among black and

white residents alike (Howell 2007, McBride and Parker 2008). Meanwhile, a survey of neighborhood

group members showed disappointment with city officials and planning efforts to be particularly high,

echoing other surveys. Respondents were not feeling enthusiastic about the performance of city

officials in the recovery effort, with 47.5 percent believing their effort had fallen far short of what it

should have been, and another 35.6 percent believing that they have not done well at all. Clearly,

Nagin and other city officials had lost opportunities for gaining trust and consensus.3

By the end of 2008, it was clear that the better and bigger, yet more sustainable, city that UNOP

participants had been urged to imagine and desire was not going to be a reality. To the contrary, by this

point New Orleans was doing well to get major roads in flooded areas repaired. A few years before, in

discussing the establishment of the city's recovery development office, New Orleans City Council

Member Stacy Head had implored her fellow council members to be as careful as possible. "It's like a

bad margarita," she suggested. "Once it's in the glass, it's hard to go back and fix it" (Author 2006).

Perhaps the statement now fit the entire recovery process?

What seemed clear was that a decentralized system of neighborhood engagement had its limits,

or at least it had limited connection to the policy planning and implementation of local government

administration. Neither, however, had top-down planning or the town hall system of public

consultation worked. What was lacking, it is argued below, was anything to bring disparate interests

and administration toward consensus in the Big Easy's civic mix. There was a disconnect here, one that

appeared to be tied to the city's historic and continuing racial and socioeconomic division.


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Fractured city: A neighborhood networks study

Putnam (2007) suggested that the typical effect of such phenomena in cities with diverse

population is a lower level of engagement. This is true, he suggested, even in more homogenous

sections of areas that are more diverse on the whole. The increase in engagement in some

neighborhoods appeared to contradict his thesis. Even so, months of observation of the recovery

planning process suggested that his overarching ideas about diversity and participation seemed to fit the

reality on the ground in New Orleans in many ways. What was observed was not so much overt

hostility between different racial and socioeconomic groups as a more seemingly benign brand of social

segregation. However, this separation likely had more pernicious effects in contributing to, as well as

reflecting, what Comfort (2006) saw as the city's lack of governance, and what Burns and Thomas

(2006) saw as a lack of an urban regime.

What appeared to helped to explain this social separation was research on the sociological

concepts of homophily and propinquity. The concepts are related in explaining how self-segregation

develops. Homophily refers to a social distance between individuals and groups. According to Kulduff

and Tsai (2003, 52), even small organizations are affected by this, with segregation occurring

according to social variables such as race, gender and ideology. Homophily, however, may also entail

geographic proximity, according to McPherson, Smith-Louvin and Cook (2001). This is closely related

to the concept ofpropinquity, which can include geographic proximity, but may also include any

behavior or work that would give individuals the opportunity to establish ties (Festinger, Schachter and

Back 1950, Hallinan and Williams 1989). What matters most in influencing self-segregation is a sense

of closeness, whether created by geography, a common identity or shared experiences.

In Putnam's work, as well as that of Stone et. al. (2001), the effects of such separation on social

capital or cooperative behavior were studied at the individual level. A social network study seemed

more appropriate, however, to answering the research question here--that is, whether Crescent City


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neighborhood relations were as fractured as suspected. The method presented a means of studying

relationships or ties between individuals or organizations. To gather data for the network study, a

survey was administered through Internet and mail formats from December 2007 to June 2008. There

were eighty respondents in total, representing some sixty-five organizations from all sections of the

city. Fifty group leaders completed a long-form questionnaire with nineteen questions, and another

thirty completed a four-question short form used for confirmation of reported ties.4 Several interrelated

working propositions related to network structure informed the survey design, ones that are

summarized as follows:

Proposition 1: Neighborhood organizations were more likely to work together or cooperate

with fellow neighborhood groups if they were geographically close. At the same time, they were more

likely to work together or cooperate if their members were of similar average socioeconomic status or

racial makeup. Geographic closeness and demographic similarity were also seen as being tied together.

Proposition 2: The effect of shared interests was also likely to have a significant impact on

neighborhood relationships. Flooded areas had more of a shared interested in recovery and rebuilding,

for instance, than dry areas did. Planning meetings had not, however, brought neighborhood groups

and members together with cohorts from largely unaffected areas of town, except in superficial ways.

Evidence from the social network study backed these expectations. Only in rare cases, it

appeared, did neighborhood groups stray far from bordering territory. Respondents from flooded

neighborhoods, meanwhile, did not list groups from largely dry sections as being among those their

organization worked with at least once a month, nor did the reverse occur. This was despite the fact

that "worked with" had been defined as broadly as possible, with simple exchanges of information

about public meetings counting. A network graph was developed from the survey, and is shown in

Figure 1.2, following a mapping of the clusters' geographic location in Figure 1.1. The clusters are

encircled in matching patterns on the map and network graph.


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Figure 1.1 Map via Greater New Orleans Community Data Center/Knowledge Works

Figure 1.2 Produced with: UINet 6 for Windows, NetDraw


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Confounding features: Natural physical and built landmarks, such as bodies of water and

infrastructure, also acted as possible psychological barriers. Two clusters of neighborhood

organizations in two large sections of the Crescent City, for instance, reported no ties to groups

elsewhere, nor were linked to them reported by leaders of other city groups. These clusters were

located in Eastern New Orleans (more particularly its largely black, middle class sections, not including

the largely Vietnamese Village de Lest neighborhood and tiny Venetial Isles neighborhood at the far

eastern edge of Orleans Parish) and the Lower Ninth Ward, which were geographically isolated from

the older city by the Industrial Canal. Neighborhood groups in Algiers, located across the Mississippi

River from the French Quarter (known locally as the "West Bank") also reported no ties to groups in

the rest of the city.

Similar barriers, including cross-town freeways, appeared to enhance separation between

flooded and dry areas across the river. For instance, a large cluster in the north central part of the city,

taking in flooded areas of Gentilly, Lakeview and Mid-City, was tied to Uptown neighborhoods by

only one reported link.5 The flooded area cluster had several ties, however, to a cluster stretching to the

south and east, taking in groups including ones based in the French Quarter and the predominantly

black Treme district (which, as noted below, was claimed by three organizations).

Ties with government: Network analysis methods were better suited for the study of

relationships between groups than the study of ties between these groups and government institutions

and elected officials. No official or administrator could have been expected to recall all groups with

which he or she had worked or cooperated at least once a month. Even so, the literature on civic

engagement and social capital suggested that cross-sectoral ties--between government and community

groups, private organizations and the like--were essential. At the same time, city officials and

administrators were more involved in post-Katrina recovery efforts than private sector actors.


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Consequently, neighborhood groups leaders were asked a series of questions about their ties with local

government.

The study's results were unsurprising. A network graph taken from data on ties between

neighborhood groups and local government demonstrated that these organizations had their strongest

ties with the New Orleans City Council and its members. However, they also listed working almost as

frequently with the City Planning Commission. The relationships are shown in the graph in Figure 1.3

below. The council and CPC are represented as the two large dots toward the center of the graph. Less

central to the network was Mayor Nagin, whose node is located to the left of Blakelys, as well as those

of the council and the CPC. Council members surround the network in a nearly oval pattern, a fact

which mostly demonstrates that individual council members (five are elected by district, and another

two at-large, with one elected in 2007) are typically deemed more important by specific constituencies

than city at large.

Figure 1.3 Produced with: UINet 6 for Windows, NetDraw


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It became apparent during the planning stages of the social network research that the method

would be limited in demonstrating some crucial nuances of intra-city relationships in New Orleans.

Questions were thus added to an original, long-form study to flesh out the data (with a short form sent

later to non-respondents as a means of confirming reported ties), including one dealing with

overlapping boundaries. Most respondents noted that their boundaries overlapped with those of several

other groups.6

Another issue was the loose definition of "neighborhood organization." Officers of a few

groups reported that they thought of their groups as non-profits engaged in community development

and post-Katrina recovery, not neighborhood organizations. Given the fact that established nonprofits

with citywide outreach saw them as such, they were included in the network study anyway. Only the

absence of Beacon of Hope, a group established by residents of the Lakeview neighborhood after

Katrina (identified as "Beacn" on the network graph), changed the network graph's structure, for it had

a major bridging role. With the backing of the area's neighborhood association, this nonprofit had

provided Lakeview homeowners with information and resources for rebuilding, and also organized area

clean-ups and the like. Within three years, it had established outposts in the Lower Ninth Ward and

Gentilly areas. If not for this organization, the Lower Ninth Ward would have been as isolated on the

original network graph as Algiers.

Harnessing Civic Engagement: Policy and Research Recommendations

Given that this is a case study, it would be improper to make generalizations about other

American cities based on the evidence presented in this study. Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of

New Orleans were such massive events, however, that it hardly seems inappropriate to list a few broad

lessons of potential relevance to other cities. These lessons are aimed largely, but not exclusively, at

cities with more diverse and divided populations, or with great socioeconomic disparities. They are

especially worth being heeded by cities that are more likely to face natural disasters, although it must


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be recalled that cities everywhere may be more likely to face crises in future years, given the effects of

global climate change:

Invest in citizen engagement: In the absence of a cooperative, cross-sectoral network in an

urban area, the introduction of a radical, even transformational policy solution such as the reduced

footprint proposal is likely to waste time and civic resources. The importance of land-use management

to urban resilience, however, suggests a need for greater effort at forming such coalitions, one

governments at all levels would be wise to encourage.

Discussions underway in 2008 to form a citywide citizen participation system in New Orleans

thus had the potential to create an organization that could overcome collective action problems posed

by the decentralized nature of the city's neighborhood group activity. The effort did not have any

governmental backing, although it did have funding from national groups, including the Rockefeller

Foundation. It appeared doubtful that the effort would gain legitimacy with neighborhoods, however,

without being backed in some way by local government. It is thus suggested here that federal, state and

local governmental officials should at least consider providing seed funding to such organizations or

creating fiscal incentives for local governments to formally recognize or join forces with them.7

A thoroughgoing effort to bring as many citizens into local land-use decision-making as

possible may sound idealistic, but it could have practical benefits. As Boin and 't Hart (2005)

suggested, it certainly was to the benefit of leaders in crisis situations to engage with critics. Leaders

cannot enact radical reforms, ultimately, without attending to building constituencies in support of

them. Science will not trump the political art of persuasion on its own. Persuasion is tied to leadership,

however, something New Orleans was lacking.

Remember that urban government structure matters: The bold proposal to shrink the city's

footprint would have never won much attention locally if not for Mayor Nagin's creation of the BNOB.

There was no other actor with enough governmental authority in New Orleans to broker among local


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interests on controversial citywide issues, and single-handedly create such a commission. He was,

legally speaking, a strong mayor. He failed, however, to engage with citizens even after those in

flooded areas demonstrated renewed vigor and vibrancy.

Whether there was an alternative to mayoral power here was unclear. The City Council and the

City Planning Commission (CPC) seemed well respected among neighborhood groups, and certainly

had more ties to them than to Nagin. These ties made sense at an intuitive level, however, given

electoral and administrative incentives pushing commission and council members toward involvement

in Helco-like land-use policy networks with neighborhood groups. Two City Council members were at-

large representatives. The legally weak council's funding of the more neighborhood-friendly Lambert

Plans, however, reflected the majority of the council's greater concern with district-level constituencies.

That recovery process' legitimacy was successfully challenged as a result.8

Meanwhile, Stone, et. al. (2001), suggested that while active mayors can be crucial to effective

citywide policymaking, what ultimately matters most is having a strong governing coalition. They did

not, however, address whether the election of an engaged mayor is possible without such a coalition.

What is deserving of more research, then, is not only whether coalitions exist, but how they can be

more easily formed, and how and whether the structuring of local government institutions may hinder

or encourage their formation. Further social network research in a variety of cities could shine a light

on how such coalitions are built.

Seek harmony between governance and citizen empowerment: The majority of urban

policy and resilience specialists whose work was surveyed here stressed the importance of urban

governing coalitions to the creation of more resilient or sustainable cities. Other observers suggested

that more effective governance may come through devolution of power to the neighborhood level.9 In

post-Katrina New Orleans, though, wealthier neighborhoods generally did not suffer as greatly from

the divided status quo as much less fortunate ones. Yet Lewis and Mioch (2005) thought the lower-


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income areas deserved more attention, given the links between poverty and urban resilience. Improved

citywide governance and neighborhood cooperation were likely to benefit these areas more.

It may nevertheless be more helpful to see consider neighborhood group dynamism versus

citywide governance in something other than an either-or fashion. In New Orleans, more long-range

post-Katrina bridges had been built between neighborhoods by the Beacon of Hope organization than

any other group. At the same time, research of intra-city neighborhood ties in other cities could well

show that the geographic separation of neighborhood clusters in the Crescent City is not especially

peculiar--with patterns only, at the least, more exaggerated than what is seen in more demographically

homogenous cities. What may then be more important is empowering lower-income neighborhoods

(including ones more populated by renters, as well as homeowners) via assistance in community

organizing, or looking at alternative means of organization, as through churches and other religious

organizations.

Learn from and harness the power citizen-driven recovery: Comfort suggested a model of

governance that enables urban resilience must not only include all sectors of its population, but also do

so in a socio-technical framework that enables individual and organizational learning (2006, p. 8).

Certainly, the New Orleans recovery experience suggests that planners must engage citizens in

discussing technical and scientific matters in as rational and deliberative a manner as possible. That

being said, it could prove difficult to pull off such deliberation anywhere after future events as

powerful as Katrina, if evacuees are again scattered throughout North America. 10 The experience of

the neighborhood organizations in helping residents find their own way back home, and organizing

evacuated residents via Internet message boards, could be instructive. Leaders from other parts of New

Orleans as well as elsewhere, meanwhile, could learn much from post-Katrina experience of

neighborhoods such as Broadmoor, and from this develop models for organizing neighborhoods in

even the most seemingly dire situations.


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The overarching message of this study and the recommendations above is that city leaders--

including elected officials, administrators and urban planners--must not only engage with citizens and

neighborhood groups but work to increase intra-city ties among them. They must do so or risk

diminishing the chances of affecting future policy change, including change on issues likely to be

increasingly critical importance in coming decades, particularly environmental sustainability.

Certainly, fiscal and intergovernmental issues would probably have slowed New Orleans' recovery,

even with more intra-city ties and cooperation. Still, ideas such as clustering and green space creation

are more likely to take hold if embraced by an engaged and cooperative citizenry, one empowered by

its government and and trusting of it in turn. This should be as true of local as state and federal

government decision makers, ones more likely to be influenced by the sort of national opinion leaders

and pundits who first pressed for a smaller New Orleans after Katrina. Ultimately, however, no

government leaders are as likely to resolve thorny recovery issues after a disaster than those individuals

who choose to return to their neighborhoods, even in places as rough and uncertain as post-Katrina

New Orleans.

Endnotes

1. This talk was apparently fueled by media reportage, at least indirectly, including a Wall StreetJournalstory printed in the days after Katrina about attitudes toward recovery in more affluent sectionsof Uptown. According to the article, one of the city's most powerful white local business leaderssuggested that the city would have to be rebuilt in an entirely different way, and this from ademographic, geographic and political standpoint (Cooper 2005).

2. Other apparent contributors to the BNOB's failure included the involvement of local developer

Joseph Canizaro, a commission member as well as a former ULI chairman. Due to his vocal support ofand close ties to President George W. Bush, Canizaro quickly came to be a lightning rod for criticismof the commission (Horne 2006, Nelson et. al. 2007)

3. The survey was administered via neighborhood group lists provided by a New Orleans urbanplanning and policy nonprofit called City-Works, along with those of the New Orleans PreservationResource Center, a historic preservation group, and the Neighborhoods Planning Network, formedpost-Katrina with the aim of assisting neighborhood groups. Neighborhood message boards were


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added to inquiry lists. The survey was administered from late November 2006 to January 2007, justprior to the final UNOP meetings.

4. The survey was sent only to neighborhood groups, using a working definition that excluded businessimprovement or commercial district associations, strictly mandatory homeowners groups andcondominium associations, citywide nonprofits and community development corporations. Even

excluding these organizations, it was estimated that anywhere from eighty to one hundred activeneighborhood organizations of varying size (many with overlapping boundaries) existed. Survey data,meanwhile, was processed via UCINET, a social network analysis program, and NetDraw, a graphicalprogram. The option to symmetrize data in UCINET was exercised given questions about howparticular answers conflicted with information gathered at various public hearings about formal tiesbetween groups. In many cases, meanwhile, some groups allowed only one leader to speak for anentire executive board. Consequently, one reciprocal tie was counted as a full tie. Most reported tieswere reciprocal, however. At the same time, even when the reciprocity of ties was more ambiguous,there was no variance from expected or recurring patterns.

5. In this case, the major barrier was the Pontchartrain Expressway, which ran between Mid-City and

Uptown. More specifically, this freeway bordered an area which took in an automobile-orientedcommercial district and the private, predominantly black Xavier University, as well as former rail yardsconverted to interweaving thoroughfares. Also in this area was a small, predominantly black andlower-income neighborhood, Gert Town. Only the Northwest Carrollton Neighborhood Organization,based in a smaller, demographically mixed area south of the commercial district and Xavier, and northof Carrollton in Uptown, linked these two large sections of the city. The neighborhood group for GertTown, meanwhile, had no ties to any other neighborhood group in the city, but was instead linked onlyto religious organizations.

6. One of the more thorny cases of overlapping boundaries involved the area surrounding a city-targeted recovery zones on Broad Street, a four-lane, commercial thoroughfare that runs through some

of the citys poorest, predominantly black neighborhoods. Parts of the surrounding area are moremiddle class, including the Faubourg St. John and Mid-City districts. In 2008, neighborhood groupsfrom the latter two areas formed a cooperative nonprofit with groups to the south. Three groupsclaimed to represent large swath of the south-of-Broad areas. One of these, the Esplanade-TremeNeighborhood Association, existed before Katrina. Still, a group formed after the storm, theDowntown Neighborhoods Improvement Association, ended up representing the area on the newumbrella organization's board.

7. Lewis and Mioch (2005) called for central governments to engage more in disaster response andrecovery. Even so, they suggested that the role of local government was more crucial. They furthersuggested that local governments needed to make decisions only after engaging with citizens in the

most inclusive way possible.

8. Nelson, et. al. (2007) recommended that cities would do well to name one designated agency, suchas the CPC, for post-disaster planning processes, given the involvement of groups or stakeholders withcompeting priorities, appeared aimed at just such a separation. The authors suggested that this wouldeliminate duplication by rival agencies or authorities, as faced in post-Katrina New Orleans (2007, 45).Given the fractured nature of the city's political landscape, however, it seemed unlikely that this sort ofcentralization would be a solution in and of itself.


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Documents

New Orleans Recovery Case Study