Will 'Green' Building Be the Future of New Orleans?

This article is reprinted from the American Prospect.

Back in November 2005, barely three months after Hurricane Katrina, the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute presented its recommendations for rebuilding a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. One recommendation called for shrinking the city footprint, envisioning new, protected green space in areas deemed unsuitable for rebuilding. With emotions still raw, a city wracked by poverty and racism lashed out at what it perceived as another slap in the face. The public soundly rejected the idea, and so ultimately did Mayor Ray Nagin, who was re-elected a few months later.

"They presented to the public the plan, with giant green dots that said future park land," says Jennifer Zell, a graduate student in landscape architecture at Louisiana State University. "People thought, 'They are going to bulldoze this whole place and turn it into swampland.' People wanted to rebuild." But despite this setback, Zell believes that a strategy for sustainable development is one of the things that will save the city.

There's a green cast to virtually every plan to rebuild New Orleans, and an army of planners, affordable housing groups, environmentalists, and government officials hopes to make it happen. Several of these organizations, including Enterprise and Global Green USA, have partnered on various efforts.

But given the political infighting between the state of Louisiana and city of New Orleans, the slow pace of federal housing assistance and insurance settlements, and overall planning fatigue, the rallying cry for green is a little hard to hear -- even for those who are otherwise receptive. Says John Knott, a sustainable developer and president of the Noisette Co. in South Carolina, of rebuilding in New Orleans, "If people can't meet basic needs of housing and jobs, it's hard to get them to think about tomorrow."

Quite so. It's more than a little ironic that a diffuse army of planners is seeing New Orleans as an opportunity to promote sustainable development, at a time when more than two-thirds of the city's onetime residents are more concerned about having an affordable roof over their heads -- one that will not blow away in the next big storm. To most locals, "sustainable" has more to do with making sure the levees hold than with energy-efficient buildings or a new urbanism.

Affordable New Orleans

Pre-Katrina New Orleans was already a kind of new urbanist city for the working poor. It had relatively high density, affordable prices, one of the nation's best ratios of income to housing costs, and an above-average rate of homeownership among African Americans, as well as fine parks and a decent system of public transportation -- the key elements of the new-urban formula.

Indeed, as the nation witnessed the tragedy of people trapped in the flooding city, one big reason why more residents could not get out was that nearly 35 percent of black households owned no cars, and relied instead on buses and trolleys.

Post-Katrina, tens of thousands of residents want to rebuild flood-damaged homes that are not fit for habitation but that could be reclaimed. The federal government has allocated $10.4 billion in block grants to Louisiana but the money has been slow getting to people because of red tape and control over purse strings.

At every level, the government has been bogged down in its own bureaucracy, while mold slowly ruins tens of thousands of homes that might be saved, and homeowners live in government-provided trailers parked in the front yards of their rotting houses. Only a fraction of flood-damaged homes have been repaired and re-occupied, fully a year and a half after Katrina hit.

So while New Orleans could be a model of green redevelopment, it remains a swamp of mold and frustrated hopes.