posted on: Monday, November 28, 2005

The New York Times reported that Katrina had succeeded in areas where the federal government and city administrators couldn’t, that it had destroyed the majority of the low-income public housing stock of the City of New Orleans, 7,500 dwelling units, though only 5,300 had been occupied even prior to the Hurricane. Known in his prior life for the administration of the St. Louis housing authority that resulted in the depopulation and eventual demolition of Pruitt-Igoe and other public housing eyesores, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson was cited as “pledging to spend more than $1.8 billion to rebuild government and private housing in the Gulf region ravaged by the hurricane.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/national/nationalspecial/22public.html).

But the Washington Post’s Michael Powell reported that public housing administrators from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where 2,000 public housing units were destroyed, reported a different story: “But the federal government, which expects to spend close to $2 billion on temporary trailers, has not offered a dime to rebuild public housing. A spokeswoman with the Department of Housing and Urban Development said the agency's budget could remain just as tight next year.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/24/AR2005112400796.html?sub=AR).

Whose story is to be believed? We’ll take the Mississippians, whose take on the Bush Administration’s HUD seems more believable, given Jackson’s history and his pronouncements of the likely depopulation of New Orleans’ public housing. The federal government and the governor of Mississippi, former Republican Party chairman Haley Barbour, has invited the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) to conduct design charrettes on rebuilding these communities (http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/10/gentrifying_disaster.html), but you can be sure that plans based on idyllic communities infused with the architectural and design ideas of Andres Duany such as Seaside (where lots sell for $1million and homes routinely for $3 million) and Disney’s Celebration in Florida, favorites of both the Clinton and Bush Administrations and major philanthropic funders, won’t counteract Jackson’s premonition that the rebuilt New Orleans will be much less black ("New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again,” http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1027/p01s02-ussc.html) or Congressman Richard Baker’s famous proclamation: “"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1011-20.htm).

Among CNU’s more enthusiastic foundation funders have been the Packard, MacArthur, and Surdna Foundations, among others, and the “new urbanism” oriented Seaside Institute has had strong support from Robert Wood Johnson and the J.M. Kaplan Foundations. Although convened by Governor Barbour, the Biloxi charrette was funded apparently by the Knight Foundation, part of the foundation’s second $1 million grant in Katrina relief, devoted to strategic planning for the rebuilding effort including the Mississippi charrette (http://www.knightfdn.org/default.asp?story=/news%5Fat%5Fknight/releases/2005/2005%5F09%5F19%5Fplanning.html, also http://www.radioopensource.org/rebuilding-the-mississippi-coast/). CNU’s executive director, former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, intends to seek foundation money for a New Orleans CNU charrette (http://www.newurbannews.com/KatrinaInsideOct05.html). There’s no doubt that the Knight Foundation and the head of the Mississippi Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal, Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, are aiming for a well-planned community recovery, but they have to be wary of rather than entranced by Duany’s team of “architects on steroids” (http://www.sunherald.com/mld/thesunherald/12928921.htm).

Paul Weyrich, the CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and founding president of the Heritage Foundation, has declared Duany’s New Urbanism as the conservative approach to the revitalization of inner city neighborhoods (http://www.aim.org/guest_column/A3900_0_6_0_C/, also http://www.worldmag.com/weyrich/weyrich.cfm?id=18480). In NCRP’s earlier commentary on the Administration’s response to the long term reconstruction of the devastated Gulf Coast region, we warned that the catastrophe could be used by the right wing as the Petri dish for all sorts of conservative policy hallucinogens. Nonprofits and foundations should be careful not to fall prey to calls for design charrettes and New Urbanism designs as camouflage for the destruction of thousands of low- and moderate-income housing and the gentrification of vast swaths of inner city New Orleans, Biloxi, and Gulfstream. Be assured that there won’t be much government-subsidized public housing replacement in the new communities designed by the New Urbanists hailed by Weyrich and Barbour.