EDINBURGH--Today's Louisiana papers--here's the T-P version--says that a report by the Rockefeller Institute and the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana is repeating the oft-heard complaint about the lack of an overarching plan for the recovery of New Orleans.
BTW, the report, which cost somebody some money, also includes this:
"The recovery of the most damaged communities has been slowed by the uncertainties surrounding federal plans to revise flood-elevation levels (for rebuilding), continuing disputes with insurance companies over damage coverage and the fact that the federal housing aid program is just now getting under way in Louisiana and Mississippi..."
Of course, any reader of the T-P's coverage or listener to WWL radio would know all this, in fact, anybody who lives in or near New Orleans could recite that paragraph in their sleep.
But, back to the lack of a plan. Jim Brandt of the PARC, the man quoted above, is--guess what?--a planner. From the group's website: He received his Masters degree in Community Organization and Planning from Tulane University.
E-mail: jimbrandt@la-par.org
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Mayor Nagin's hands-so-far-off-they're-in-another-parish approach to steering the city through the recovery process. (Some locals have taken to calling him Mayor Na-gone, since he's been close to invisible locally since winning re-election). But large-scale city planning stopped being a panacea for urban problems around the time Jane Jacobs wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." New Orleans had its experience with such efforts. They usually resulted, as in the cases of the I-10 downtown route and the new Armstrong Park, in the destruction of healthy, historic black neighborhoods. Los Angeles has had three attempts at rebuilding downtown, each of them dedicated to repairing the conceptual mistakes of the previous plan, and "I'll meet you downtown" is still not an LA catchphrase.
What planners, including those who wrote this report, set up as the straw man for lack of planning in the NO situation is the "jack o'lantern effect", in which one or two houses on a block are restored or rebuilt, while others around them remain dark and vacant. There are reports already of early returners, working hard to rebuild on blocks where they have no neighbors. But to decry the lack of an overall plan ignores the hard, dedicated, smart work by community groups around the city, neighborhoods that are, with the help of volunteer professional planners, conceiving the futures of their areas. Ultimately, according to the latest theory, these localized plans will be harmonized into one city-wide blueprint for recovery. In the meantime, there's a solution to the jack o'lantern problem that seems easy, at least to me: make sure the "Road Home" program, under which the state is disbursing the late-arriving federal money to support homeowners rebuilding or selling, does not penalize pioneers. Allow people who rebuilt in neighborhoods that ultimately failed to revive to sell their homes back to the state any time in the five years following the flood. That allows folks who put in the sweat and equity not to be punished for their dedication.
Sounds like a plan to me.