Jones Lang LaSalle

>PLACE NOLA 01 12 06
PRESERVATION ROW
Anna Holtzman

The Ninth Ward, September 2005.The entire Ninth Ward “is caked in something,” says Tulane University’s dean of architecture Reed Kroloff, speaking with The Slatin Report from New Orleans. “It looks like mud-it may be toxic.” The same could be said for the political debate now raging about what should be done with this and other neighborhoods severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The issues at play are obscured by a murky mixture of too little information and tensions that run generations deep.

("The mud smells like human feces," wrote 15-year-old Jack Potter in his journal during a late-December visit to the Crescent City with his family's New England church.)

Of the New Orleans districts most ravaged by the floods, planners contest that many of them were never environmentally safe for habitation to begin with. But using the damage as an opportunity to wipe these neighborhoods off the slate is no simple matter. Like the Ninth Ward, many of these areas were occupied by the poor and black, and a number of residents feel that a plot to eliminate their homes is part of a longstanding tradition of political mistreatment. “Historically, [residents of the Ninth Ward] have gotten the short end of the stick,” says Kroloff, quickly amending his statement: “The stick was used to beat them about the head.”


Does salvage make sense?

Compounding the problem is the fact that large numbers of renters and homeowners from low-income areas remain scattered out of state, uninformed and voiceless during the decision-making process that will affect the fate of their homes. Several interviewees complained of the media’s failure to report on this aspect of the situation. “FEMA has been deplorable," says one knowledgeable source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, "They’ve recorded all the locations of people [who are currently residing out of state], but they won’t release the information-not even to tell the families where their family members are. Our state has been negotiating with FEMA to get access to the information and contact these people, but FEMA is hiding behind Homeland Security and personal privacy.”

Meanwhile, wealthier areas that have been equally hurt by flooding, such as Lakeview, are already being rebuilt-not by the city, but by residents who have the financial resources to do so on their own. As a result, services such as water and electricity are returning here more quickly than in the Ninth Ward, where far fewer residents have been able to return.

Allowing such unregulated, random rebuilding is a mistake, declares Bill Hudnut, a senior fellow of the Urban Land Institute who was part of the ULI’s visiting advisory panel to New Orleans last November. “Without sequential rebuilding, there will be pandemonium and helter-skelter development, and the city will be dominated by blight,” he told The Slatin Report. The ULI’s recommendations to shrink New Orleans’ footprint and to begin rebuilding with areas that sustained the least damage first received heated criticism from communities like the Ninth Ward. Charmaine Marchand, State Representative of District 99, comprising the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward, warns, “There are only so many dollars to repair the city with, and [if the ULI’s recommendations are taken], they’ll all be used up on [wealthier] areas.” Hudnut counters, “I think it’s a doomsday scenario people are painting. We didn’t say that nothing should be rebuilt [in the severely damaged areas]-just that it should be phased in.”

Remaining photos courtesy of Jack Potter

Will this house ever be a home?As for the ULI’s other recommendation, architect and planner Allen Eskew, of New Orleans firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, says it's on the right track. “Anyone who’s a savvy planner knows that New Orleans’ footprint should be reduced. The ULI was just the first to represent this graphically.” However, while Hudnut painted an idealistic vision for a condensed and reconfigured New Orleans with “more integrated mixed-income and mixed-race neighborhoods,” Eskew pointed out that the tight-knit communities in places like the Ninth Ward-where some houses go back five to six generations in ownership-will inevitably be fragmented if they are geographically uprooted.

So far, Mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission-which releases its plans for rebuilding today-is touting a strategy that attempts to appease everyone: Give homeowners more time (12 months) to assess their own damages before the city moves in and takes action. Yet dissenters say this would ultimately be a disservice to homeowners in heavily damaged areas, who could put time and money into their houses only to have their entire neighborhood condemned as unsalvageable at the year’s end.

Meanwhile, a significant number of buildings cannot be left alone for 12 months-homes that sit stranded in the middle of the street, obstructing traffic, and those deemed to be in imminent danger of collapse. When bulldozers appeared in the Ninth Ward earlier this month-ostensibly to remove such safety hazards-grassroots groups such as the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund obtained a temporary restraining order preventing the city from entering the neighborhood and tearing anything down. The problem, asserts Marchand, is that the city is not using consistent methods to assess home damage, and that some of the homes they’ve tagged for removal may, in fact, be salvageable. “I live in the heaviest hit area,” she says, adding that, while she currently sleeps at a temporary residence in Baton Rouge, she has already gutted her Ninth Ward home after she and her neighbors were allowed back in on December 1. When inspectors arrived to assess her neighborhood and place red stickers on houses deemed irreparable, she says, “They didn’t even enter the homes. We have incorrect assessments being done. We can’t arbitrarily assume that a house should be demolished.” Certainly there are homes in the Ninth Ward that are safety risks, she conceded. But even in cases where homes have drifted off their foundations, “we need to give people a chance to see if they can be lifted and put back on their pilings-I have seen this happen.”

Heeding the word.

The legislator also points out that she and her neighbors have had little over a month to return to and assess their own properties, a shorter period than for other parts of the city have had. “There needs to be progress,” she concluded, “but you can’t usurp people’s rights.”

Tulane’s Kroloff, on the other hand, does not believe that the red-tagged homes can be salvaged. He points out that FEMA, not the city, is tagging the homes-and that from what he's seen, those homes "are beyond repair. Many are just large piles of sloping lumber.” He adds, “The Lower Ninth Ward is destroyed. A number of buildings could be salvaged, but it’s a small minority.”
Saving homes brings its own challenges. Even if some of the homes can be salvaged, asked Eskew, “Do you let those families repair them? Do you bring services back to a neighborhood that has spotty housing? This is the most critical question for the city."

House fight.

Then Eskew makes an unequivocal declaration: “There are areas that should not be rebuilt.” These are districts, he says, that were developed first as an “innocent mistake” in the 1890s and 1900s, when pumping technology was invented, and less innocently in the 1960s and 70s, “when there was no environmental movement around to stop developers.”

The hardest hit areas are the Ninth Ward, the mostly-white area of Lakeview, and the black middle-class neighborhood of New Orleans East, which was built on swampland in the 1950s and 60s. “Any planning exercise would show,” Eskew says, “that [New Orleans East] is so at risk that to repopulate it would be to follow mistake after mistake.”

Eskew feels differently about the Ninth Ward. “I don’t think that it’s one of the neighborhoods most at risk. Seven or eight flood wall and levee breaks caused the problem there.” He notes that, if executed, the levee bill President Bush signed in late December would mitigate the environmental problems in the Ninth Ward.

Barging in.

In the meantime, with no cohesive redevelopment strategy yet in practice, various groups on the ground are acting on their own. Grassroots housing advocacy organization ACORN, for example, is running a program to gut homes in low-income neighborhoods, including the Ninth Ward. ACORN’s New Orleans head organizer Steve Bradbury says that they hope to have gutted 1,000 to 2,000 homes by the end of March.

But the biggest problem in New Orleans right now, Bradbury told The Slatin Report, is that “the local and federal government should be taking greater responsibility for people receiving the clearest and most factual information possible-and they’re not.”
Marchand agrees: “The city needs to first find out who’s coming back before tearing anything down.”