Katrina at 20 – Snapshots of the City
On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. The storm caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans as the flood protection system failed. Nearly all residents evacuated, not all returned. The recovery was complicated by disparate planning attempts. In 2019 TOPOS published my series on snapshots of the city, slightly edited for this presentation.
New Orleans, the „Crescent City“, the „Sliver by the River“: on August 29th Hurricane Katrina triggered a catastrophic disaster in the city, followed by a dysfunctional response and a flawed recovery. Before Katrina, New Orleans was already scarred by racial inequality and social vulnerability that can be retraced within the urban fabric, indicating who lives in which neighborhood and why. The flood evacuation and resulting nationwide diaspora led to a dramatic decline in the number of residents. Eventually the city reached 90 percent of its pre-Katrina population count, some neighborhoods even reported population growth. Yet the share of African Americans is lower, and the departure of poor and black residents after Katrina has changed the face of the city.
Some of the lessons learned after Katrina include the realization that disasters aren’t „natural“, but rather the conjunction of at-risk settlement patterns, flawed planning, and vulnerability. This recognition also contributed to developing new strategies aimed at strengthening resilience.
The previous imperative of controlling nature is challenged by interdisciplinary and integrated planning approaches with social and environmental orientation. While flood resilience can be enhanced by taking into account the everyday life of residents, it also has an achilles‘ heel: the social vulnerability of the population, related to poverty and lacking equality of opportunity. Planners and designers therefore have the responsibility to develop ethical and adequate solutions for resilient architecture, cities and landscapes – true to the context and based on collaboration and innovation.
Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward
New Orleans was founded 300 years ago on the natural high ground along the Mississippi river. In the 1900s, the swamps between the former urban fringe and Lake Pontchartrain in the north were mechanically drained and urbanized, creating areas that subsided below sea level. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the city’s flood protection system, deeply submerging low-lying areas. The massive scale of destruction of homes became central to the rebuilding efforts in the city after the hurricane. Initial confusion over planning recommendations in combination with the local government’s laissez-faire attitude to recovery were met with strong opposition from citizens and nonprofit organizations.
Residents of areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward struggled to recover and rebuild. It was subject to dramatic levels of destruction due to the breach of the Industrial Canal floodwall. Most individual rebuilding activities remained ad-hoc and without broader coordination into an inclusive and sustainable process. From the Mississippi river northwards, the Lower Ninth Ward dissolved into an irregular pattern of recovery efforts amidst a green sea of vacant properties. The area’s strong local identity disintegrated into a pluralism of new normals of those who returned or those who moved to other neighborhoods or out-of-town. Residents willing to rebuild received assistance from non-profit organizations such as lowernine.org, Make It Right or the Preservation Resource Center.
Recovery after disaster poses a dilemma in many ways. Quickness is essential to facilitate return and promote inclusive and sustainable planning. However, a quick return to normal may also lead to reestablishing past vulnerability. The recovery of the Lower Ninth Ward was hampered by the disconnect between rebuilding plans and programs and the vulnerability of local residents. Vulnerable neighborhoods that were experiencing difficulties before disaster principally require approaches aimed at „building back better“ – to become resilient by reducing vulnerability, key to rebuilding cities after disaster.
Blighted Recovery: The Road Home Program
A catastrophic failure of initiative took place during the response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, due to institutional fragmentation and decision-making across multiple tiers of government. The failed interplay between state and local institutions shaped the character of recovery programs and, as a direct result, hampered rebuilding efforts in hard-hit areas of the city. The limited capacity of African-American citizens to respond to disaster and rebuild their homes was even reinforced by recovery program requirements.
After Katrina, the state of Louisiana proposed an action plan to help homeowners recover from the severe storm impact and the failure of flood protection structures. Louisiana’s Road Home program was developed to provide financial support for rebuilding based on existing property values. Due to federal intervention, the program was changed to include a buyout option to compensate homeowners, particularly those who couldn’t rebuild. Renters weren’t represented in adequate ways and only with regards to private owners of rental properties. Road Home applicants struggled with difficulties related to low property values and an over-reliance on recovery grants due to lacking financial resources. Residents of poor, black neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward were clearly disadvantaged, and their problems with the Road Home program contributed to an above-average number of buyouts and the highest percentage of buyouts citywide.
Many of these buyout lots are categorized as „blighted“ properties. They feature deserted or damaged buildings, are vacant or unkept – all the more problematic in a subtropical climate, where vegetation grows quickly and invites rodents. The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority is responsible for planning strategies aimed at the many properties where owners failed to recover. The Lot Next Door program was developed to enable residents to purchase neighboring, vacant properties. This allowed the stabilization of local rebuilding rates and an increase in value of consolidated properties. Many vacant lots perform badly on the real estate market, and market-based solutions seldom apply. Currently, the aim is to include alternative criteria other than price into the purchasing process to protect owners. The empty lots also find alternative uses and become water gardens or urban farming locations.
Resilient Planning for the Crescent City
The Mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, and her administration oriented their policies on a plan created by actors from civil society, higher education, and business, including volunteers, experts and community members. The „Transition Plan“ outlined what needed to be done in the city in the fields of infrastructure, economic development, and neighborhood stabilization.
It also served to create a sense of trust among the population that the city knows how to respond to future floods. The aim was to redefine the way people in the city live with the water, and not against it. Previous strategies of removing water from public life through floodwalls also deprived the citizenship of any positive environmental qualities that rivers, lakes or ponds offer. Can New Orleans reconcile the idea of „living with water“ with the need for flood risk adaptation or avoidance?
As an umbrella organization for related efforts, the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, founded in 2014, serves to facilitate the cooperation between actors of various sectors in order to promote and implement practices aimed at sustainable water management. One particular measure is included in the updated building code and requires property owners to individually manage the first 1.25 inches of stormwater they incur. This is very much in line with the notion of individual risk management responsibilities as opposed to collective risk protection, a general paradigm shift in policy that is taking place in Europe as well. Another step is to strengthen the city’s institutions in order to further a collaborative atmosphere between departments and support current resilient urban planning efforts.
The formulation of the Urban Water Plan and its principles and visions contributed to winning a 140 million dollar award from the National Disaster Resilience Competition for implementing projects in the city, such as the Mirabeau Water Garden, designed by architects Waggonner & Ball. The intention is to achieve not only flood resilience, but also a broad economic and social impact – by reducing both flood insurance costs and the actual damages resulting from floods. With hundreds of millions of dollars intended for green infrastructure projects in the city during this legislative period, the aim is also to create jobs for the city’s unemployed residents and businesses, especially those with a minority or African-American background.
Shotgun Houses of New Orleans
Historic shotgun houses are a common sight in New Orleans. In the urban „sliver by the river“, located roughly one hundred miles from where the Mississippi enters the Gulf of Mexico, available land was and is a finite resource. Properties were divided into very slim lots with narrow frontage facing the river. This was of decisive importance in the days when the Mississippi was the main means of transportation and characterizes the urban fabric of the city to this day.
When mechanical drainage allowed the development of the swamps along the former urban fringe, the „back-of-town“, African Americans found new places to live. However, their opportunities were severely limited due to racial segregation and legalized discrimination. The only available option for many African Americans were poor neighborhoods or slums, characterized by low quality of residential space, absent amenities, and lacking infrastructure. Against this background, the shotgun house became an affordable solution to the housing demands of citizens with low income or limited access to resources.
Different theories exist regarding the historic origins of shotgun houses, either based on the indigenous population’s way of life before the Europeans arrived, cultural ties to the Caribbean, comparable historic examples in Europe, or local developments that mirror existing types based on circumstances of need, use, climate, context, and available resources. In its most basic configuration, a shotgun house is a one-story dwelling with a ratio of length to width of 10 to 1. This slim proportion perfectly utilizes the long lots in the city with their narrow frontage and deep backyards.
The typical shotgun features a linear arrangement of rooms without a separate corridor. Rooms are accessed one by one through successive doorways. This arrangement led to a common myth: if all doors are open, a shotgun can be fired from the front porch through the house out the back without hitting a wall. Suitable for prefabrication, they typically consist of wood frames covered in wood siding and became particularly popular following the 1890s. Historic shotguns were built raised on stumps, while later models were built slab-on-grade, offering no protection against floods.
Shotgun houses are optimized for a particular way of life that doesn’t require strict privacy when walking through one room to the next. Some are retrofit to include a corridor. Two units combined under one roof become a „double shotgun“. Adding a second story on top produces a „camelback shotgun“. They can feature ornamentation and elaborate woodwork, particularly on their front facades. Handed down within families from one generation to the next, they gained a strong symbolic and cultural meaning for New Orleanians and shape the cityscape to this day.
Given New Orleans‘ persistent cultural image and context, historic preservation is of key importance. Organizations such as the Preservation Resource Center assisted post-disaster rebuilding efforts based on the reuse of existing materials and artifacts. Duany Plater-Zyberk, well known for their „New Urbanism“ approach to architecture and urban design, built contemporary interpretations of historic shotgun houses in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. The Make It Right initiative proposed contemporary design versions that were intended to showcase how modern architecture can contribute to the post-Katrina recovery of the city.
The likelihood is high that shotgun houses will remain a characteristic element of the cityscape of New Orleans. Over time, they have become attractive to a wider audience, captured by the charm this architectural type possesses. In recent years, gentrification created problems for local residents who can’t keep up with rising rents. Currently, social media and tourism driven short-term housing contributes to increases in property values that are difficult to stomach for residents who rely on affordable urban housing. Whether shotgun houses can keep their promise of affordability in the Mississippi metropolis remains to be seen.
Shotgun House, Lower Ninth Ward, Kammerbauer 2007
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